Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion From the Back Alley to the Boardroom.

Abortion as a Mother's Act

— 115 — Never one to romanticize marriage, I viewed mine as the spoils of war. on June 30, 1979, after three years of struggling for Marty’s divorce to be finalized, we were formally married in New York. We had a wonderful wedding in Garrison, but even on that night, differences permeated our union. We would always love each other, but our expression of that love began to change, to grow complicated. ours was not to be anyone’s traditional definition of happily ever after. We had our joint empires and our two homes before we were married. We had no plans to move to another location, or buy a new house, or begin having children. I knew our time was limited and that I was not going to grow old with Marty. The Rubicon had been crossed, and with that came a nagging sense of despair. The battle to be together was replaced over the years by many others, but that was the first, and the dearest, and it was over. Abortion as a Mother’s Act “Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. ” — GERMAINE GREER — 116 — what now? I was not the only woman struggling to answer that question; it seemed to be in the air. Now that abortion was legal and women empowered, how would society change? The search for answers brought about a heightened public interest in how abortion functioned in women’s lives. A New York Post investigation10 reported that 20 percent of New York women had had an abortion since its legalization in the state almost ten years earlier. Soon after, the Supreme Court ruled that teenage girls need not obtain parental consent in order to have an abortion.11 Choices and other clinics continued to be publicly lauded for pioneering a new women’s health movement. Advocates for women’s rights were trying to articulate the path from legalized abortion to a changed society, one in which the expression of female sexuality was truly free from the traditional bonds of reproduction. The pro-choice movement’s prominence in mainstream media and public consciousness was paralleled by the growth of the anti-choice movement, members of which could increasingly be seen demonstrating outside abortion clinics across the country. But the glow of legalization disallowed the idea that there could be a viable political challenge to Roe at this early point. Many of my pro-choice colleagues thought the possibility of a return to back alleys was inconceivable. It was hard to take the antis seriously. When Ellie Smeal of the National organization for Women (NoW) called together pro- and anti-choice contingents for a dialogue in 1979, an anti-choice group held up jars of pickled fetuses and prevented productive discourse. Their oversimplified battle cry, “Don’t kill your baby!” seemed almost too easy to defeat, and emboldened by our relatively recent victory, we allowed ourselves to take a well-deserved, collective deep breath. But we would have to learn that in this war, with this issue, the combatants never have much time to breathe. I was soon — 117 — forced to thrust my way daily through a throng of protesters who gathered at the entrance of Choices. I knew that our side was in danger of falling prey to the most fundamental strategic failure: underestimating the opposition. The antis were not going away. Unfortunately, they began proving me right on a massive political scale. In 1979 the American Life League was formed by Roman Catholics Judy and Paul Brown. The ultimate abortion abolitionists, members of this group believed that the procedure was unacceptable even in the case of rape or when a woman’s life was endangered. A year later former Catholic seminarian Joseph Scheidler founded the Pro-Life Action League and began to organize abortion clinic invasions. The National Right to Life Committee busily laid the philosophical foundation of the modern right-to-life movement by connecting abortion to euthanasia and assisted suicide, while fundamentalist anti-abortionists produced a Nuremberg -style “hit list” of pro-choice providers to be targeted for harassment or worse. Anti-choice sentiment blossomed more broadly with the founding and growth of popular televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, a hugely influential evangelical lobbying organization with an adamant pro-life agenda. Republicans had always taken a firm position in favor of a constitutional amendment banning abortion...