Intimate Wars

by Merle Hoffman

  And in this regard things were moving along well. In February I returned to Russia to sign the Protocol of Intent with my partners: the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital and the Department of Marine Transport of the Ministry of Transport. Choices East would be built in the Moscow facility first, and then instituted in eighteen other hospitals.

  I took great care in having the legal documents drawn up because the law, like everything else in Russia, seemed to change almost daily. Of particular importance was the division of control. We agreed that both the American and Russian sides would hold equal shares in the venture, sharing in both the potential success and risk of the project. Needless to say, it took many phone calls and faxes to produce the detailed legal documents necessary to form the company.

  At the end of my February trip, with much fanfare and press attention, we signed the Protocol of Intent that would lead to our agreement. On my return in the summer, we would finalize and sign the formal documents. Then the real work of setting up the clinic could begin.

  In June, my first working day in Moscow was to be spent at the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital. I immediately noticed changes. Our cars were met at the gate by armed guards. The head of the hospital, Dr. Osipov, seemed nervous and distant, his behavior erratic at our meetings. When I questioned my Russian aides about this, they informed me that he had been involved in a business venture that had soured, and had been the victim of an attack that left him in a coma for three months. I began to feel concerned that whatever his motivations, Osipov did not seem willing to move forward on the terms we had agreed upon.

  My heart turned cold when he demanded 51 percent of the company. I certainly had never agreed to this. To accomplish anything for women in Russia I needed equal control of the project. Forty-nine percent would render me powerless to control the health care Choices East provided, and would allow my Russian partners to make use of my status, name, and the investments I had arranged. They knew my motivation was not financial gain; the possibility of the clinic making a profit was minimal, and my goal was only to make it self-supporting. I caucused with my aides, who believed that this was a negotiating strategy, political theater designed to gain a controlling share, and that in the end he would sign.

  I was on a deadline. I had scheduled a press conference to announce the signing of the agreement; forty international journalists planned to attend. I would have to cancel it. I gave Osipov my ultimatum: by noon the next day he would have to agree to the terms laid out in February, or the deal was off. He looked at me arrogantly and said, “If you are so concerned about saving women’s lives, what’s one percent to you?”

  The next day at noon, I asked Osipov for his decision. His answer, “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” hit me like a body blow. So much work undone, so many hopes dashed. I stood up, shook his hand, wished him well, and walked out of the room. Osipov’s aides were amazed. If Osipov was surprised he seemed to hide it well.

  The press conference was canceled, but I did give private interviews. The reporter from Izvestia was dismayed. “What will Russian women do now?” she asked me. “How long will they have to wait?” We discussed organizing a grassroots feminist movement. She cautioned me that Russian women would be difficult to mobilize on the issue of women’s rights, but that if we could appeal to them to mobilize for the benefit of their children, we would have a better chance. I mused over the irony of women once again reinforcing the traditional role, being there for others and not for themselves. When they tried to be, the results were often fatal. I met with a young American woman who had been working on setting up the first battered women’s shelter in Russia. The day she opened the hotline they received four hundred calls. But in the last year, two of the volunteers had been murdered by their husbands.

  The visionary in me embraced the pragmatist. I felt disappointed, but not destroyed. I knew I had done the right thing, and that it was not a failure. I had planted seeds in a very dry environment. It was not the right time, but that time would come.

  BACK AT CHOICES, I looked into the eyes of the women I served and saw the faces of Russian women, their eyes questioning, hopeful. “How long will women have to wait?”

  A conversation I’d had in the hotel leaped into my memory. Svetlana, a dark-eyed Russian journalist, had been writing a newspaper piece about my visit. We were discussing Stalin’s criminalization of abortion when she put down her pen and said quietly, “You know, there was some good in what Stalin did. If he had not criminalized abortion, I would not be here.”

  My mind went to a television debate during which I had been asked, “What would you do if your mother aborted you?” It was the ultimate existential question, the one that plagued so many anti-choice activists, their empathy singularly focused, crushed between self-preservation and hypothetical non-existence.

  But there was another hypothetical question to ask: What if Svetlana’s mother had had an illegal abortion and perished in the process? That one did not cross her mind. She was giving voice to the assumption that the control of reproduction should be in the hands of the state. She could not see that the State viewed women and their bodies as commodities, property that each state appropriates for its own purpose. They are used as a means of production and a way for the state to exert control over its people.

  The comparative history of abortion is actually the history of power relations between states and their female populations. The geopolitical and economic goals of any regime are heavily articulated in its population policy. When Stalin made abortion illegal, allowing Svetlana to be born was not the agenda; the agenda was to populate Russia with soldiers to counteract Hitler’s rising militarism. Meanwhile, Aryan women in Nazi Germany who were thought to have aborted their fetuses could be punished with the death penalty, while those deemed “hereditarily ill” were permitted to have abortions.

  The battlefields are different, but the war is always the same. For women in sexist, authoritarian societies, the issue of abortion can pose no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life. There is only the harsh reality that sex rarely comes without anxiety and that the price one often pays for it is high and dangerous.

  Romania offered abortion on request until concern over the decline in fertility instigated a change in policy in 1966, severely limiting access to abortion and calling for incentives to childbearing such as birth premiums and tax reductions; the country then legalized them again with the rise of abandoned babies and maternal mortality. Abortion laws enforced by military dictatorships in Chile mandate that women can be jailed for up to five years if they are caught. In China, abortion is considered an important tool for limiting population growth. The legality of abortion in the United States is a wedge issue that flip-flops according to the party in power. And in Russia, women are still being forced to turn to abortion as the primary form of birth control because the state refuses to prioritize their needs.

  It is not only the size of population that is subject to control, but the kind; not only the quantity, but the quality. In all of these calculations, women are the losers. True reproductive freedom for women is never under consideration. And so women make the choices they have to make. We navigate the distance and tension between the collectively defined good of society and the good as we individually define it in the context of our own lives. Choice is not a static concept; it expands and contracts depending upon the nature of the regime or the society in which we live.

  A Hindu Indian woman, eighteen weeks pregnant, came into Choices with her husband and two young sons, seeking an abortion. She’d had amniocentesis to insure that there were no fetal abnormalities, and found there was nothing wrong with her fetus. Why, then, was she here? What was her reason for wanting this abortion? “It’s a girl,” she told me. “I can’t have a girl. Girls are liabilities.”

  I thought of the fetus within her and the primal birth defect it carried. I looked at her two sons, holding on to her with unyielding, demanding hands. I felt rage that it was m
y gender that was the least wanted, and despair over the reality that within this act was a total denigration, denial, and devaluation of the female principle, the female self. I so much wanted to say: “No. STOP! You should not.” Not “you cannot,” but “you should not.”

  Yet even as I raged against her choice, I understood why she had to make it. She had left India, but India was where she lived in her heart and her head. Attitudes about abortion are situational, historic, and geographic. The decision to make what in her mind was the only rational and intelligent choice resulted in an ambivalent type of freedom. A freedom that said that in order for a woman to have more than a minimal chance at survival and actualization she must deny and negate her own gender.

  But it is for this very fundamental civil right of reproductive freedom that I have put my life on the line many times. Without it, we will never have a world where being female is not considered a birth defect, where women do not have to have thirty-six abortions or be forbidden from having one.

  How long will women have to wait?

  We will have to wait as long as it takes to bring about women’s equality. We will have to wait for people of conscience to create a society where choice truly exists—not one where economic deprivation, racism, sexism, or despair dictates the outcome of pregnancies.

  MY THOUGHTS OFTEN turned to philosophy after the experiences I had in Russia. For years, Phyllis Chesler, Letty Cot-tin Pogrebin, E. M. Broner, and other politically active Jewish women had gathered a group of feminists together for Feminist Seders, during which they took on the roles traditionally assigned to men and retold the ancient tale of Jewish slavery and redemption. The group was growing, and Phyllis invited me to join. When it came to Judaism of any denomination, I always felt a bit removed; most of these women were far more articulate in everything Jewish then I was. I enjoyed being with them, but I always felt like an observer.

  But when the Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, I felt myself inexplicably drawn to it. I had been keeping up with the politics, challenges, and questions that had riddled this particular project since its inception over ten years before. How to bridge the distance between memories that remain personalized and mutable, and those which become collectively reified? How to portray the Holocaust as something “outside history” as Elie Wiesel described it, a pathology apart from and outside of any known human parameter but at the same time quintessentially human? In this time of intense secularization coupled with new kinds of spiritual journeys, the Holocaust had become an experience of Jewishness that everyone could relate to.

  I had first been introduced to Wiesel as part of my studies in graduate school. His need to tell of the unbelievable evil of the camps, and his burning desire to help prevent the Holocaust’s reoccurrence while insuring that the world would not forget its victims drove him to write, and drew me to him. I was transported by his novels and analytic work, which all spoke of his inner journey, his continual search for meaning and god in a world filled with evil and despair. He had a commitment to the moral dimension in life, to the moral answers.

  When Mother Teresa, speaking on abortion, said, “We have created a mentality of violence—massive, manipulated, propagandized movements that have brought about more than a million and a half unborn deaths every year,” Elie Wiesel didn’t agree. The violence he was concerned about was the violence of the abortion debate itself. After reading that he had to think more about abortion and had refused to take a side, I decided that I had to meet with him and discuss it. He agreed to have a dialogue with me for On the Issues.

  I got off the elevator on the twenty-sixth floor of his New York apartment building, and when I turned left, the first thing I saw was an open door revealing a room with shelves and shelves of books. A small, smiling, intense man waited there for me. I took his hand, met his eyes, and began our conversation.

  “When abortion was debated in 1977 in the Knesset in Israel, the anti-abortionists articulated the feeling that abortion was annihilating the Jewish people, that there were no “unwanted” Jewish children, and how can we, after the Holocaust, slaughter Jewish children in the womb? What do you think of this?” I asked him.

  “Fanatics are all the same. These are fanatics. I am against fanatics everywhere. I don’t understand these words: Abortionist, anti-abortionist. Those who give women the right of choice he or she [sic] is an abortionist? What kind of articulation is that?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but there is a feeling that women who choose abortions are not active moral agents. That women’s reproductive capacities and women’s lives are secondary to political ideology or religious morality.”

  “I don’t like generalizations. Some people feel that they need abortion. For them this is their morality. Other people say that for moral reasons they are against abortion. I don’t like simplistic definitions.”

  “You have said that you are uncomfortable with the violence of the abortion debate, but when Cardinal John J. O’Connor first came to New York, he held a press conference in which he stated that legal abortion was the ‘second Holocaust.’ How do you feel about abortion being likened to the genocidal slaughter of the Jews?”

  “I am uncomfortable with the language of this debate. I resent the violence of the language, the words that they use, like Holocaust—no it is not a Holocaust. It is blasphemy to reduce a tragedy of such monumental proportions to this human tragedy, and abortion is a human tragedy. What should be done is to give back the human proportion to the abortion issue, and when we see it as such we may be able to have much more understanding for the woman who chooses it.”

  I thought for a moment. “Women who choose abortion are consistently labeled killers, and I personally have been compared to Hitler and called a great murderer.”

  “A woman who feels she cannot go on, and with pain and despair she decides that she has to give up her child, is this woman a killer?” he mused. “Look, you cannot let these words hurt you. You have to be strong not to pay any attention because those who do that—call you a Hitler and relate it to the Holocaust—prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was.”

  The Loaded Gun

  “If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you must use it by the third act.”

  —ANTON CHEKHOV

  Dr. David Gunn was shot three times in the back by pro-lifer Michael Griffin as he was ariving at a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic in March of 1993. Griffin yelled, “Don’t kill any more babies!” before gunning the doctor down as he stepped out of his car. He was the first provider to be killed in the war against abortion. When I heard that the National Coalition of Abortion Providers was arranging a memorial service in his honor, I knew I had to be there.

  Pensacola was enemy territory. There had been a rash of clinic bombings there, and the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement was particularly active in the area. I was used to living in a war zone, but I was still surprised when Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, got on the plane with me and told me that Paul Hill, a notorious anti-abortion activist, had been sighted at the hotel we were to stay in with two unknown aides. An anonymous threat had been made the night before on television by a man whose face was covered by a large, blue dot; we could expect a mass murder, he predicted, something so big that it would surprise both sides, something like Hebron or Beirut. John Burt, one of my old television debating opponents, was quoted on the Pensacola evening news to the effect that he would be getting out of town because the spectacle of two to three hundred abortionists in one place was too much of an incentive for mass murder. He would put himself out of the way of temptation.

  Word soon came down that the FBI had intercepted someone in a car loaded with a cache of weapons, headed for the hotel. Agents in Houston had arrested a local antiabortion activist, Daniel Ware, on weapons charges. At his arraignment, evidence was presented to show that Ware had traveled to Pensacola armed with explosives (as well as three guns, one a .357 Magnum, and about five hundred rounds of ammunition) with
the stated intention of staging a suicide attack on the abortion providers gathered there.

  The morning of the memorial a special meeting was called to discuss defensive strategy. It was agreed that a decision not to go would be respected. Many people were frightened, but no one stayed away. We boarded buses outside our hotel alongside armed police, FBI agents, and members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The reality of driving to a memorial service for a murdered gynecologist in a procession interspersed with motorcycle cops and police cars was one of the more haunting experiences of my life.

  The service was held in an amphitheater opposite the clinic. Given the sunny Florida weather, I found it odd that Smeal was wearing a turtleneck sweater with a long, dark blue raincoat. Only after a few minutes of looking at her carefully and noticing that she appeared rather boxy did it occur to me that she was wearing a bulletproof vest. She was not the only one; two male physicians were outfitted with vests, but they were making no secret of it. One walked within twenty feet of a lone picketer holding a sign that read “The wage of sin is death” and “Abortion is murder.” As everyone watched, the doctor pounded his chest, screaming, “Why don’t you just do it! Come and get me! You don’t have the guts.” During this display of righteous passion and provocation, Smeal and I stood next to each other scanning the windows that faced the stage, looking for the butts of rifles.

  Upon my return to New York, I learned that Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, an anti-abortion activist, had been convicted of attempted murder in Wichita, Kansas, after she admitted to shooting—though not fatally—Dr. George Tiller, one of the few physicians in the US who specialized in therapeutic late term abortions. Tiller was a friend of mine, and for many years I referred women to his clinic for these difficult procedures. He always wore a bulletproof vest, and drove to work in an armored car. He survived that attack, but he would not be so lucky in 2009.