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

The Russian Front

— 176 — By the late 1980s I’d had my hand in almost every theater of the war for reproductive rights, including legal, political, medical, academic, media, activist, and personal spheres. As Reagan’s conservative reign came to an end, I felt the need to get involved in yet another: electoral politics, one of the most important battlegrounds in our struggle. This arena was all about compromise and strategy; it was time for me to get pragmatic. As a leader of the pro-choice movement I’d had the chance to see the political scene firsthand. Many politicians who had started their careers as allies with high personal standards were forced to make compromises to stay in the game. Marty would politick at dinners and meetings, and back at home he’d tell me what he really thought of those bastards, warning me to “trust no one,” a lesson I was learning quite well on my own. Though I’d decided not to go into politics myself, I understood the importance of working with politicians. I was constantly attending fundraisers and meeting with proThe Russian Front “As a woman I have no country. . . . As a woman my country is the whole world. ” —VIRGINIA WooLF — 177 — choice supporters, pushing my agenda with my hand always ready to sign a check. often the best I could do was whatever it took to get the least bad candidate elected and the needed bills vetoed or passed. At one elegant Upper East Side fundraiser I met oregon senator Bob Packwood, an early and ardent player in the abortion rights struggle, a staunch and able ally of the pro-choice forces on the Republican side of the Senate. our connection was so immediate that I solicited and received a piece from him for On the Issues, after which he called me to request a meeting at a New York City hotel. We discussed the existential nature of power, the causes for which we’d be willing to die, those for which we would be willing to send others to die. He seemed to be genuinely moved by the responsibilities of his office and the loneliness of power. Even with the intensity of our conversation and the compliments he interspersed throughout our time together, I did not expect his embrace and attempted French kiss in the middle of Park Avenue as I hailed a cab. of course I did not believe that men who did good deeds in the public arena were necessarily good boys in private. Packwood’s sexual come-on was just that; the fact that it was more an adolescent groping than a sophisticated seduction was, to me, more of an annoyance than a threat. But as the world later found out, Packwood had been sexually harassing women on his staff since at least 1975. He was eventually forced to resign from office under threat of expulsion. A piece in the New York Times described the fire against him by women’s groups as being fueled by a sense of betrayal. Was Packwood’s early support of abortion rights, it asks, a true expression of avant-garde Republican liberalism, or a form of political opportunism? Without Packwood’s influence the pro-choice position — 178 — would have had less representation in the Senate, and I was willing to overlook his indiscretion with me for the sake of my greater cause. Working in the sphere of politics meant interacting with very strange bedfellows; however, I wasn’t sorry when he was caught. As the leader of the PCC, I had political agency, too. Abortion was especially hot the year of the 1989 New York City mayoral race due to the passage of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a Supreme Court ruling allowing states the right to limit access to abortions. New York was still the “abortion capital of the nation,” and the issue was being watched carefully for its impact on this election. The PCC used our high profile to make abortion one of the defining issues of the race. Before the primaries we sent out a questionnaire to the candidates, both Republicans and Democrats, detailing the nuances of a truly pro-choice position and asking them where they fell on the spectrum. We used their answers to rate them on a scale of one to ten. The race was a heated one, with Edward Koch defending his seat in the primaries against Manhattan...