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

Abortionomics

— 88 — Iremember the moment I became political. It was a rainy Sunday morning, 1976, and I’d allowed myself to stay in bed a little longer than usual. Monotonic radio voices intruded on my sleep . . . something about Henry Hyde and abortion. I sat up in bed, all ears. Republican Congressman Henry Hyde had succeeded in passing legislation that would effectively remove the right to abortion for women on Medicaid. “If we can’t save them all, we can at least save some,” Hyde declared, referring to the pregnancies of black, Hispanic, and all politically and socially disenfranchised women who would now be unable to afford abortions. They were Hyde’s first strategic target, the opening salvo in his war against women. Because of their collective powerlessness and political vulnerability they made for an especially easy kill. Hearing that news, my stomach clenched as I thought about the circumstances that brought many of my patients to the clinic, and the systemic inequalities that placed adequate Abortionomics “The representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from the point of view which is theirs and which they confuse with the absolute truth. ” —SIMoNE DE BEAUVoIR — 89 — health care out of reach for so many. Those women from whom Henry Hyde would callously cut off abortion rights were people I worked with every day. Many were unemployed, many had several children, most were poor and had nowhere to turn for help. My growing awareness that women’s reproductive freedom was precarious—that the passage of Roe was also the beginning of a war designed to have it reversed—was transformed into a sense of urgency and purpose that morning . I instinctively knew that my life had changed, that the five years I’d spent providing abortion services had led me to this moment. I recognized that if I wanted to truly advocate for women I’d have to reach out beyond the world of the clinic to the broader, more demanding and dangerous one of political activism. My immediate impulse was to speak. If people would only see and understand the truth, they would do something to stop it! Ironically enough, my first action was to go through the halls of Queens College, knocking on classroom doors to ask whether I could address the class and hand out leaflets. Surprised professors invited me in and allowed me to distribute my pamphlet on the effects of the Medicaid ruling: how discriminatory it was, how it singled out poor women, minorities, and the young. “My name is Merle Hoffman and I am here to talk to you about a crisis in reproductive care,” I told the students once their professors stepped aside to let me speak. “We must do something at once—poor women are being discriminated against, poor women will die!” Uncomfortable silence. The students listened attentively, but there was hardly a response, much less the passionate outcry I’d hoped my news would elicit. Finally, a woman spoke up. “But we will always be able to get abortions. We can fly to London or Puerto Rico,” she said to nods all around. — 90 — of course. I was speaking to white, middle-class college students . They had their ways of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy if it happened to them, and they didn’t care to worry about those with fewer resources.5 I encountered a similar attitude when I spoke to the women ’s group at a local Queens synagogue. They self-identified as women’s libbers who had made the choice of getting married , giving up their careers, and staying home with their babies. They had the money to fly to those abortion havens if rights were cut off in the US. No coat hangers, bottles, or back alleys for them. I left, discouraged by their passivity and lack of empathy. In The Feminine Mystique, which helped to spark second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan outlined her view that the freedom to become a fully engaged person is personal and achieving a gender-neutral society with no barriers to women’s selffulfillment is political. Her analysis did not go far enough to embrace issues of race and class. This disconnect became increasingly evident as I witnessed the demographic of my patients change after the Hyde Amendment was passed in 1976. In the beginning there had been a great deal of racial and class...