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

My Beginnings

My Beginnings “To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel. . . . It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish. ” —ELIZABETH CADY STANToN, “THE SoLITUDE oF SELF” — 15 — Ihave always loved the smell of lilacs. They make me think of love and revolution. I was six years old when my parents took me on the Staten Island Ferry to meet my aunt Natasha and uncle Vuluga. We stayed for lunch, and as my parents sat smoking and talking with Vuluga, Natasha took me conspiratorially out into her small garden. She was quite old, with silver hair and light blue eyes. The soft edges of her accent caressed me as she proudly showed me the lilac trees in her garden, telling me she’d had them as a child in Russia. Even then I was transfixed by the story of her life. In the late eighteen hundreds Natasha and Vuluga were part of the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), best known for multiple attempts and ultimately the successful assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. They were caught, tried for treason, and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for life. Somehow, they managed to escape. They made their way across miles of snow-covered Siberian steppes, crossing — 16 — Eastern and Western Europe and finally the ocean to settle in Staten Island, New York. The family talked about Natasha and Vuluga in hushed tones of respect and awe. Audacious and courageous, they had put their lives on the line for their ideals. Before we left, Natasha gave me a sprig of purple flowers from her tree. I clutched it in my small hands on the way home, desperately trying to pick up its magical scent through the overpowering smell of the Hudson River. Natasha and Vuluga remained fixed in my memory. My relatives were warriors for a cause, but they also fought their own intimate war against cultural expectations. Never married, they lived together by choice at a time when alliances such as those were considered far outside the pale. And in confronting a common enemy, their love was strengthened and deepened. my mother’s parents were first cousins. They came from a long line of Russian radicals, musicians, and rabbis. The knowledge of their consanguinity was a cherished family albatross around all of our necks. Explaining to others and to ourselves why so many of us were extraordinarily talented, we would laughingly point to our “incestuous grandparents” as the organizing principle. The uniqueness of my mother’s family was a standard of being for me. Iconoclastic, intellectual , artistic, and temperamental, their lives put most other people’s in soft focus. My paternal relatives were no less romantic. It was 1879 when my nineteen-year-old great-grandmother Blume Hoffman plucked up her courage, left her abusive husband in Lithuania, and with three children in tow, moved to London. Her siblings went further, emigrating to the United States to join an uncle who was well established in Leavenworth, Kan- — 17 — sas. Blume’s brother Dave struck gold in Alaska and begged her to come to the United States, but she had used up her courage and was terrified of crossing the Atlantic. Her son, my grandfather Sam, decided that he would try his luck, and in his early teens he worked his way onto a steamer to the United States, eventually making his fortune in industry. Wearing diamond studs and cuff links, Sam courted my grandmother Kate, rewarding her beauty by throwing bags of money onto her kitchen table. But I never knew my grandfather when he had money—only after he’d lost it, playing the horses. His nickname for me was “Citation,” after the famous Triple Crown winner, because I was always running about. He would sit at home, bitter and depressed, refusing to work because he considered paid employment beneath him. He is unsmiling and uncomfortable in the photos I have kept, like a deposed king mourning his lost empires. i was born in philadelphia in 1946, on the cusp of what would always be known as the “baby boom” generation. I shared a bedroom with my parents in a two-room apartment...