Intimate Wars (22 page)

In the early nineties New York was plagued by a series of race-related crimes. The media played up the racial aspect of each incident, but they burned in my mind as examples of the sexism that soaked our society. One could not be separated from the other. Yusuf Hawkins, a young black man, was shot dead by police in the white part of town; his death was blamed on Gina Feliciano, a young white woman whose “crime” was daring to break out of her white ethnic ghetto and invite blacks to her home. Another young woman was blamed for her boyfriend's act of setting a fire in a nightclub that killed eighty-seven people. Racism and sexism were present in equal measures in both cases, but the sexism went unreported.

Then came the explosive internationally reported and analyzed Central Park jogger case. From the first reports of the young, white investment banker raped, sodomized, beaten, gagged, and left for dead in Central Park by a group of young black and Latino males, people expressed outrage and astonishment at the randomness and brutality of the attack.

The trial of the five young defendants accused of her rape and attempted murder became a lightning rod for a city already suffering the wounds and anxieties of ongoing racial tensions. The rape was played up to promote paranoia and backlash against men of color. This case was quickly followed
by that of Carol Stuart in Boston, who was eventually found to have been murdered by her supposedly well-adjusted, white middle-class husband while pregnant—but only after dozens of black men had been rounded up and wrongly investigated.

In the midst of all the hyperbole and race-baiting, there remained the reality of one young woman whose life had been brutally altered, another who had been murdered, and thousands of others who lived in fear of increasingly horrific sexual violence.

As I wrote in an editorial published in
Amsterdam News
, “Rape is a great equalizer; it has no color and no class.” It makes all women sisters, just like unwanted pregnancies do. Indeed, according to trial transcripts, when the Central Park jogger screamed out in pain and panic she was told, “Shut up, bitch.” Not white bitch, not black bitch, not rich bitch: just bitch. The same week as the Central Park attack, there were twenty-eight other rapes or attempted rapes in New York City, nearly all of which were ignored by the media. These women were raped, attacked, and murdered simply because they were women.

Sexuality itself, as it was named, defined, sold, and com-modified in American culture, diminished women and left them vulnerable to violence. The famous black comedian and political commentator, Dick Gregory, began an address he gave at an Ivy League university by asking his audience, “What do you call a black nuclear physicist?” The answer: “A nigger.” It was the same with women. Whatever our race, class, education, age, nationality, and so on, to some people, we were all cunts.

 

MY PUBLIC PERSONA made Choices a popular target for anti-choice publicity stunts. In June 1990 Brooklyn's Bishop Daily announced to the press that he would lead a prayer vigil outside
Choices. “If one is doing the Lord's work, why do you need a press release?” I asked the
Daily News
. He recited the Hail Mary more than 150 times in front of Choices with one thousand demonstrators, but on the day of their protest, none of our scheduled one hundred abortions were canceled.

While Daily gathered his followers to pray on their beads outside my clinic, I was helping to run what I deemed a sort of underground railroad. Women from states with restrictive abortion laws were traveling to New York to have their procedures—just like my first patient who had traveled to my clinic from New Jersey so many years before. I lowered the fees for out-of-state clients and welcomed them to my clinic.

Business was booming. In the early days, when Choices served two to five patients per week, I understood very quickly what women needed from an abortion provider: immediacy of access, affordability, confidentiality, safety, compassion, and dignity. The system I had developed to address all of those needs—creating the ancillary services of the counselors, and leaving the physicians to do the technical work—had proven successful. We grew exponentially until we were seeing over five hundred patients for abortions per week. With my staff of 115 I was basically running a midsize hospital. At our height we performed almost twenty thousand abortions per year, over one hundred per day, making us one of the largest abortion facilities in the United States.

Nearly 97 percent of the abortions were done in the first trimester at a cost of $300. Later term abortions, because of their increased risk, were priced higher. Almost all of the New York clinics charged the same fees. The only price wars were waged by unscrupulous physicians who preyed on illegal immigrant women, charging them unconscionably higher rates, knowing they were afraid to go to a licensed facility for fear of having their status revealed. Abortion, unlike other medical procedures,
did not go up in price with inflation. Even so, Choices started to become very profitable. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I made my first million dollars.

I was generous with salaries, including my own and Marty's (who functioned as the medical director), but most of the profits went back into the clinic. I frequently offered new services at Choices and always did my best to subsidize poor women's care. We were famous for never turning a patient away. At least once or twice per week I would get a call from the front desk or a counselor starting with the words, “I have this patient . . .” The power to be able to help them gave me a great deal of pleasure—but I could only have that power if I had the money to service it.

I was the only woman owner of a licensed abortion facility in New York, yet my feminist peers often made me feel as though I was doing something wrong. Many in the movement felt a real activist should be struggling financially, or at least be working for a nonprofit. How, they wondered, could I be a radical feminist
and
a successful entrepreneur? I was “making money off the movement” (which could be said of every abortion provider), even more than most because I was not one of the doctors performing the abortions, but the person who hired them. Male abortion doctors faced less opprobrium, anyway; the fact that they were making money off abortions did not tarnish them the way it tarnished me. I was a woman, a feminist, a radical, a writer, a publisher, and an activist, and I was making a hell of a lot of money. Something wasn't right.

My relationship with money has always been nuanced and complicated. I have felt its deprivation, earned a lot of it, saved it, given it away, risked it, been on the verge of bankruptcy twice, invested it well, and spent it unwisely. I have been envied for it, abused for it, and used for it. Money has
given me many types of power. With it I have been able to run my clinic the way I want it to be run, create new programs, and hire talented staff. I have been able to travel and move in worlds I would not otherwise have had the chance to enter.

Money has given me the power to support political campaigns and donate to worthy causes. In the nineties I spent half a million dollars every year publishing
On the Issues
and started a 501(c)3 called the Diana Foundation so that I could donate to feminist groups and individual radicals that had no access to institutional funds.
²¹
I donated to the campaigns of pro-choice politicians like Schumer and Hevesi, and of course paid for political actions put on by the PCC.

But at times that ability has almost seemed like a one-sided pleasure. It was a brutal education in reality for me to see how so many friends and allies slipped or dropped precipitously away when I almost went bankrupt. Many women were passively resentful of my money. I would go to dinner with friends, and they would apologize for picking a restaurant that was not “one I was used to,” although I was as comfortable eating at a diner as I was in an expensive restaurant. It became difficult to know for sure whether people connected to me in true friendship or because of my money. But eventually I came to feel comfortable with this part of my self-presentation. Just as the scandal of my love affair left its residue on me, made me who I am, the distinction of being a wealthy feminist became part of my persona.

 

IN THE 1980S I noticed an influx of Russian émigrés coming to me for abortion services. The immigration policies of the Soviet Union had eased, and masses of Russians were finding their way to New York City. Abortion was the major form of birth control in the Soviet Union, and many of the women had had ten or twenty before coming to Choices. For these
women, the issue of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women's rights versus fetal life.

I'd been to the Soviet Union once, in 1983, with Marty and a group of his colleagues. A friend who was familiar with the culture begged me to take a suitcase full of contraceptives: pills, diaphragms, condoms. My concerns about arbitrarily distributing hormonal medication and diaphragms that would not be fitted by physicians were laughed off. “They need anything and everything they can get.” After learning that the two most popular forms of birth control were douching with lemon juice and jumping on cardboard boxes when periods were late, I stuffed my bags full.

At the time Russia was still a communist country. It was impossible to escape the feelings of state control and oppression. We would get on a bus and no one would smile or meet our gaze; the energy of the place was stifling. I could not stay in a situation where I knew that every word I spoke was being listened to or taped. We left three days early to go to Norway.

The Soviet Union's power to astound confronted me again when a thirty-five-year-old Russian woman came to Choices for her thirty-sixth abortion. The patient expressed relief at the supportive and positive aspects of the clinic as opposed to the brutal conditions with which she was familiar, but seemed quite resigned to having as many abortions as necessary. Like many Russian women, she was violently opposed to using birth control. Most Russian gynecologists promoted the idea that the pill caused cancer, and preached the virtues of repeat abortions. Of course, the fact that many of them subsidized their three-dollar-a-month salaries by doing abortions in women's homes might well have had an influence on their thinking.

The only contraceptive devices locally produced were condoms. These were so poorly made that they were called
“galoshes,” and few men consented to using them. In Russia the obstetric wards were empty of patients, and one out of three women who sought second trimester abortions in hospitals died from complications. My patients told me story after story of lives blighted by sterility, sexually transmitted diseases, and domestic violence. One woman confided that the brutality of the state maternity wards was Russia's most effective means of family planning. The lack of choice resulted in an alarming number of abortions performed both legally and illegally in Russia. It was impossible to get an accurate number, but it was estimated that between five and 18 million abortions were performed annually as compared to 1.6 million in the United States.

I could not turn away from this situation. In 1992, Joy Silver, the Choices marketing director, arranged for two Russian feminists from
I and We Magazine
who had heard about my facility to visit me. My philosophy of informed medical consumerism astonished them. In Russia, you got whatever treatment was being offered at the moment. If they had a stock of old-fashioned spiral IUDs, that's what was dispensed. If they had high dose estrogen pills, that's what was prescribed, regardless of any individual contraindications or preferences.

When they got home they faxed me an official invitation to lead a team of physicians and counselors from Choices to go to Moscow for an educational exchange. We would be meeting with gynecologists from state-subsidized Teaching Hospital Number 53 to demonstrate state-of-the-art women's health care. Three months later I was on my way to Russia with nine of my staff.

 

MY HOSTS HAD ARRANGED for us to stay in a prerevolution-ary mansion that functioned as a government artist colony where pensioned writers and old artists retired. Marty came
along as part of my entourage of Choices staff, a role that infuriated him. He became even more upset when I asked to have my own room; I had a lot of pressure to deal with—giving speeches, meeting international press. I tried to explain this, but Marty perceived it as a public embarrassment in front of the Choices staff, especially the male doctors. Here we were as husband and wife and I was asking for my own room, a public declaration that he did not have sexual access to me. He was sullen and cold, even threatening. “I made you, I can break you,” he told me more than once. But I insisted, and we slept in separate rooms.

Resolving to brush off his anger and focus on my mission, I dove into the first day of meetings and interviews. Most of the women I spoke with seemed to be insulated from feminist thought and the feminist movement as we knew it in the United States. They referred to me as Miss or Mrs. Hoffman, and one of my staff corrected them and wrote out “Ms.” “But isn't she married?” they asked. I explained that yes, I was married, but that it was not necessary that my marital status be public. They loved that!

There was no word for “counseling” in the Russian system, because they didn't perceive a need for it. Abortion was not only the status quo, but the only choice the majority of women had to control their fertility. There was no organized opposition on religious or moral grounds (although there was a growing American right-to-life presence in Moscow), and women regarded their multiple abortions pragmatically, as a way of “getting cleaned out.” I wondered whether bringing to Russia the concepts of choice and responsibility, the need for women to think deeply about birth control and abortion, the need even for counseling prior to abortion, would contribute to an anti-abortion groundswell. Would I inadvertently be introducing anxiety or guilt to an already overburdened and
oppressed female population? After all, the slogan of many pro-choice activists in the US—“Abortion on demand and without apology”—was a reality in Russia. But because there were no other choices, abortion had little to do with freedom and privacy and much to do with oppression and coercion.