Intimate Wars (26 page)

I was not surprised to hear this. The zeitgeist was definitely changing; there was a palpable, inescapable sense of resistance in the air. When
Thelma and Louise
hit the theaters, women saw themselves in the two friends who transgressed every barrier and protected each other to the death. Women identified with the characters' sense of personalized justice rather than lawfully bound definitions of right and wrong. You rape me or my friend, I kill you. You mess with my freedom, I leave you. And, ultimately, you try to kill me, I kill myself, because death is superior to your laws around me.

I thought of the antis marching in front of my clinic, threatening my staff with bombs, seemingly unstoppable forces who believed they were doing god's work. It was maddening to be unarmed, defenseless, while the antis openly spoke of murdering our forces, then acted on their word. We activists had all been taught that pacifism was generically feminist, that gains could be made through patience and careful, legal steps forward. Yet for every woman served by Choices and Choices Mental Health Center, unknown numbers were suffering violence. I could hold summits, teach my staff self-defense, and publish dozens of editorials in
On the Issues
, but, as Elie Wiesel said, “One man with a machine gun can kill a thousand sages.”

I knew that things had changed when I was handed a button that read “I'm Pro-Choice and I shoot back” at an abortion providers conference in Washington, DC. Six years before, when the danger had involved only invasions, harassment, and bombings, the buttons and bumper stickers read “I'm Pro-Choice and I vote.”

Doctors hadn't signed up for this. When they first began to perform abortions they were viewed as progressives, or mavericks. Now they were living in a constant state of post-traumatic stress. Any attack on another provider struck fear and terror in them, which is exactly what the antis wanted. One physician in Nevada had built a million-dollar clinic outfitted with strategic military defense protection and six .357 magnums. He called it Fort Abortion. The late Dr. William Harrison of Arkansas bravely announced, “I have chosen to ride this tiger unquietly, raking its side with verbal spurs, swinging my hat and whooping like a cowboy.” No matter how they chose to handle their plight, doctors had been forced to join the battle.

The gun was on the wall; were we nearing the right time to use it? In order to minimize my vulnerability, I purchased a twenty-gauge, pump-action Mossberg shotgun at a small shop on Garrison's Main Street to keep at home for self-protection. I shot at tin cans in the woods behind my home to practice my aim, and before long my neighbor noticed the noise and called the police. A
Daily News
journalist got wind of my purchase from the police blotter and wrote under the headline “Make Her Day”: “If you've noticed the Right-to-Life crowds thinning in front of Choices Women's Medical Center in Queens, maybe it's because the abortion clinic's president, Merle Hoffman, just purchased a shotgun.” There was a negative reaction from some of my feminist colleagues, especially my
On the Issues
editor Beverly Lowy, who was aghast. “Gloria Steinem will be very upset,” she told me. A feminist with a gun? It was politically incorrect.

 

THE RELENTLESS PRESSURE was compounded by the first patient death at Choices, a thirty-six-year-old Haitian woman who died of an amniotic embolism, a rare but almost always
fatal phenomenon that is unforeseeable and unpreventable. Her name was Alerte Desanges.

Even though everything that could have been done to save her had been done, and even though there was no way to prevent or to identify the possibility of the event even occurring, I had a tremendously difficult time with this fatality.

I took many trail rides on Hollywould, my beautiful Arabian horse, trying to come to terms with the reality of her death—and the challenge of having my face and Choices smeared all over television, radio, and print media. These catastophic events happened everywhere, but this one happened at Choices, and that made all the difference. I was forced to make an excuse for something that was impossible to make an excuse for. Since I was not a medical doctor, I was dependent on my physicians' expertise—but as the CEO of Choices, I was ultimately responsible for what happened there.

Dr. David Gluck, who had performed the abortion, had previously had his license suspended because he'd been writing illegal prescriptions to fund his gambling habit. He was an excellent doctor, though, and an ally wholly committed to women's reproductive freedom. Marty's recognition of this and his willingness to hire and supervise Dr. Gluck at Choices during the five years of his probation had saved his career. Now, his past indiscretions complicated the otherwise straightforward incident of Desanges's death, giving the press the chance to question the medical standards at Choices and our employment of Dr. Gluck.

I told reporters that it was in the American character to give people a chance at redemption, hoping that word might strike a chord. But the media was hungry for stories about abortions gone wrong, ready to cast abortion doctors—never referred to as physicians—as the pariahs of medicine.
Well-run, safe clinics like Choices were lumped together with “bargain butchers” who took advantage of poor women or undocumented immigrants who felt they couldn't turn to a licensed facility for services. When the trial of Abu Hayat, the “Butcher of Avenue A” who botched the abortion of an eight-month-old fetus, leaving the woman hemorrhaging and her daughter with only one arm, hit the press, anti-choice groups used the opportunity to call again for a law declaring the fetus a person with constitutional rights. The pro-choice movement stayed quiet on the issue, hesitating to comment lest they dig themselves even deeper into the hole the press had put them in. We could not defend Hayat—what he did was unconscionable—but we had to make it clear that safe providers existed, too. The department of health was largely responsible for the hypocrisy and politicization of the issue; licensed facilities were held to extremely rigid standards, yet unlicensed facilities were not held to task when they “illegally” (according to a New York State law that was never enforced) performed second trimester abortions, leading to dangerous situations in which doctors were performing twenty-four-week abortions in their own offices.

 

WELL-PUBLICIZED botched abortions brought second- and late-term abortion procedures, which are more physically and psychologically trying for both patients and doctors than first-term procedures, under public scrutiny. Indeed, when Choices had gone “up” in gestation in the mid-eighties by offering second-term abortions, even I found the process to be emotionally difficult. The results of choice were not diffused and amorphous, but observable and definable.

The only second-trimester procedure offered at the time was the saline abortion, in which saline was injected into the uterine cavity to kill the fetus, after which labor was induced.
Due to medical considerations, saline abortions could not be performed until the woman was sixteen or seventeen weeks pregnant. Aside from the fact that a woman who was twelve weeks pregnant (the cut off for first trimester abortions) had to go through the trauma of waiting five weeks to have an abortion, when she entered the hospital to expel the fetus she faced another special kind of hell: abortion patients were placed in the maternity ward of the hospital next to mothers who were giving birth, and many became the targets of antiabortion sentiments.

Wanting their patients to avoid that experience, gynecologists eventually developed dilation and evacuation (D and E), a technique where the fetus was dismembered within the woman's uterus and removed. D and E's were much safer and psychologically easier on the patient since they could be performed at any point after twelve weeks and did not require the woman to go through a delivery. But the procedure was difficult for the doctor and staff performing it—and difficult for the public to stomach. As debates about fetal pain entered the public discussion, some physicians began routinely injecting and killing the fetus with digoxin prior to the abortion itself, eliminating the possibility that the fetus might experience pain.

Graphic descriptions of the procedure, as well as misconceptions about how and why it was performed, added to the stigmatization of providers. These late-term procedures were done only under rare circumstances in which the mother's life or health were at risk or it was determined to be a safer procedure by the physician. But antis focused on the difficult, traumatic procedure itself rather than on the fact that it was only performed when medically necessary. Learning that in some critical late-term cases the fetus was partially dismembered, and the skull crushed, outside the birth canal—a
procedure called intact dilation and extraction (IDE)—antis renamed the procedure “partial birth abortion,” using physiological geography to further advance their claim that the procedure was no different from murder.

The 1996 case of Amy Grossberg and Brian C. Peterson, Jr., two high school sweethearts charged with intentionally killing their newborn son and abandoning him in a dumpster, was publicly twisted by the antis into a parable with a pro-life moral. Arguing that the Peterson-Grossberg neonaticide was merely an extension of a late-term abortion was a particularly insidious style of political spin, similar to the arguments that fetuses were analogous to Jews during the Holocaust or blacks during slavery. And like “aboritoriums,” “abortion mills,” and “Hitlers,” “partial birth abortions” became a hot-button term used to manipulate the truth about the hows and whys of abortion in the eyes of the public.

Ron Fitzsimmons, the founding executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (NCAP), publicly said that he'd lied in 1995 when he told Ted Koppel on
Nightline
that there were only five hundred “partial birth abortions” in the United States each year, stating the number was actually over five thousand. He implied that all abortion providers had agreed to be deliberately dishonest about how often IDEs were performed on patients. As Frank Rich wrote in the
New York Times
, Fitzsimmons was not himself a provider, he was a lobbyist, and the “shocking” revelation of the number of IDEs performed each year was already common knowledge. But the damage had been done, and anti-abortion activists reacted with glee, publicizing Fitzsimmons's lie as if they'd uncovered a conspiracy.

I was furious. He was a hired gun who had shot himself and the pro-choice movement in the foot, and I didn't want him to get away with it. NCAP had played a very important
role for providers since its inception in 1990 and I had worked closely with them to develop their organizational philosophy. It was a coalition of smaller, independent providers that acted as a balance to NAF, which was heavily loaded with Planned Parenthood leaders and interests. Planned Parenthood was quite different from the smaller facilities and clinics, and it had access to political power and money for nonprofit activities that allowed it to become a fierce competitor of smaller, but equally important, doctors' offices and abortion clinics. Fitzsimmons had sabotaged the reputation of a very important vehicle for women's choice. The reaction of many of the women of NCAP mirrored the “stand by your man” persona of political wives who supported their philandering or criminally involved husbands. But I pulled out of the organization, recalling a $10,000 grant I had given them. I thought he should have fallen on his sword, at least—and if he wouldn't, someone else should have helped him to do it.

Perhaps the worst effect of Fitzimmons's debacle was its political impact. Some pro-choice leaders were willing to publicly oppose IDEs as a way to appease the antis. After a
New York Times
article on the issue broke, the House revisited and approved the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act by an even larger veto-proof majority than it had the previous year. It gave some normally pro-choice, progressive Democratic senators reason to vote for legislation that placed women's right to choose in increasing jeopardy.

The antis had found a way to incorporate their agenda into the democratic platform, and they were being given free openings. More pro-life Democrats began demanding equal access to the Democratic platform and powerful committee positions, and in the name of the “big tent,” the Democrats handed it over. They nominated Dr. Henry Foster, Jr., a moderate physician who publicly stated that he “abhorred abortion,”
for the position of surgeon general, and even invited Harold Ford, Jr., an anti-choice House representative from Tennessee, to give the keynote speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

The antis had effectively transcended the bifurcation of the Right and Left on the issue of abortion. Combining the “right to life” with other progressive causes, antis could find a home wherever they were on the political spectrum. Many people who described themselves as politically pro-choice began to feel the need to say, “I don't like abortion, but.. .” while political leaders regularly followed President Clinton's adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

As a pro-choice president Clinton did deserve credit for his two vetoes of the “partial birth” abortion bills, but his willingness to cater to the Blue Dog Democrats, and increasingly the Republicans, was becoming a political problem. At the UN Population and Development Conference in Cairo Vice President Al Gore, bending to pressure from the Catholic Church and its fundamentalist allies, assured the attendees at the conference that “the United States has not sought, does not seek, and will not seek an international right to abortion.” He cemented the US government's position that reproductive freedom was not a transcendent human or civil right, but merely a local privilege that could be granted, limited, or denied according to national customs and laws. This may have been situational diplomatic maneuvering, but it read as gender-specific noblesse oblige.