Intimate Wars (6 page)

I was always somewhat removed from the collective reality. After the Kent State massacre, Queens College students were conducting sit-ins, protesting from the tops of buildings, and cutting classes to demonstrate. In my Psychology of Personality class, which was held in a large theater-like room, a student boldly walked up to the professor while he was lecturing. Taking the microphone from his hands—“liberating” it, as he declared—he began to order the rest of us to march out of class, to act! Trembling with excited rage, he pointed outside, where students had created a cemetery on the lawn with four stones signifying the students who had been murdered.

Our professor told the class that we could all leave to act on our principles, but we must also understand that principles had consequences; no one who left would receive a grade for the year's course.

There was a pause, and then a great commotion ensued as everyone stood and headed to the door. They filed outside until I was the only one left seated in the room. I believed
the professor when he told us there were consequences to actions, and I made the calculation that going to graduate school was more important than joining the group at that moment. I was wrong—I could have joined and lost nothing. The grades for that semester were calculated on a pass/fail system that term, and everyone was given a pass.

The incident left me disgusted with the lack of authenticity of the political activism at Queens, especially after the murders of those students. Rather than holding them accountable for their act, the college administration reinforced the notion that politics was theater—you could engage in it and lose nothing. Only in the United States was radical political action diminished this way. French intellectual history values the consecrated heretic. In the Soviet Union, writers who were viewed as threats to state authority were sent to the gulag. But at Queens College, you could cut classes all you wanted, call it politics, and cruise through your final grade.

The experience taught me the danger of expecting support from people who did not expect to lose anything by their engagement with radical politics but loved to act as if they did. Even then I knew that it is really only when one can get past one's own fear and situationally transcend self-interest that one can gain courage to take risks and perhaps make a difference.

I did get a whiff of real activism—feminist activism—while I was at Queens. Anaïs Nin visited the campus and read to a group of literature and psychology students from her diary. I recall a small, elegant woman with long gray hair tied tightly in a bun, porcelain skin, and bright blue eyes, an icon of a bygone era. Later, Florynce Kennedy spoke about lesbianism and abortion, giving the class one of her famous lines: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I was amazed and impressed by her bold language and her strong
anti-establishment critique. It was thrilling to hear that kind of unbound language from the podium. Her brand of intellectual engagement was far more compelling to me than empty sit-ins ever were.

 

THE EXTERNAL POLITICAL WORLD soon began to affect life at Marty's office, too. In November 1970 the
New York Times
reported that “a dramatic liberalization of public attitudes and practices regarding abortions appears to be sweeping the country.” The Title X Family Planning program, designed to provide women with access to contraceptive services, supplies, and information, was enacted in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. By 1971 over half the people questioned in opinion polls favored legalizing abortion. Thanks in part to the work of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), lawyers who had previously emphasized the effect of unconstitutionally vague language on medical practitioners began to argue on behalf of women's right to decide when to have a child. Organizations that had been working to reform abortion laws changed their goals, strategies, and often their names to reflect the new movement for repeal of all state abortion statutes.

A referendum in the state of Washington repealed that state's abortion laws, and three more states, including New York, followed suit. In February 1971 the American Bar Association officially supported a woman's right to choose abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and in December that year the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in
Roe v. Wade
.

In the two and a half years between July 1970, when New York's new abortion law took effect, and January 1973, when the Supreme Court's
Roe
decision legalized the procedure everywhere, 350,000 women came to New York for an abortion,
including 19,000 Floridians; 30,000 each from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois; and thousands more from Canada. By the end of 1971, 61 percent of the abortions performed in New York were on out-of-state residents.
¹

In the New York medical world, this political and social sea change brought about a flurry of activity among health clinics and private practices that wanted to help meet the new demands for abortions. Referral networks were set up all over the country by the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH), one of the first and largest New York abortion clinics; the Clergy Consultation Center; and representatives of Eastern Women's Center to help women travel to New York to receive services. Cars and limos were sent to meet and greet patients at the airports. Eastern and CRASH “doing” up to three hundred patients a day was not unusual. New York City was soon declared the abortion capital of the nation.

Like others, Marty and his colleague, Dr. Leo Orris, saw the change in New York's abortion law as a historic opportunity. They were both founding physicians of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP), the first not-for-profit HMO founded to provide low-cost comprehensive health services on the East Coast. HIP had twenty-eight medical groups throughout the city, and Marty and Dr. Orris felt strongly that as the major health care provider in New York, HIP should be at the forefront in providing abortions.

They approached the HIP board of directors with a proposal for adding abortion services for patients, but some members of the board—which included union representatives, teachers, politicians, and clergy—were morally and religiously uncomfortable with the radical changes wrought by abortion becoming legal.

The HIP board's solution was to give Marty and Orris permission
to create a separate medical office to deliver abortion services to HIP subscribers. HIP doctors in all five boroughs would refer patients who wanted abortions to this new clinic, which would be responsible for hiring the doctors and running the operations. The board was satisfied because HIP was not officially offering abortion services, and those in favor of providing them were satisfied because there was an official HIP referral source to which they could send their patients.

Marty and Orris decided to invest $12,000 each and form a professional partnership. In 1971, on the heels of legalization, they opened Flushing Women's Medical Center, one of the first ambulatory abortion facilities in New York.

 

MARTY'S NEW PROJECT became the focus of our evening talks. He wanted to find a way to get me involved in Flushing Women's. I had proved myself a skilled assistant, and it was obvious I could be instrumental in creating the clinic. As I had fallen in love with Marty's stories, he was also engaged with my developing narrative. “Young, ambitious classical musician leaves art behind and finds herself a healer and medical pioneer,” he said teasingly. He wanted to make me into a star. Just as importantly, the clinic would provide a way for us to keep working together, to have our own world separate from the one he had to share with his wife and family. He told me it would be our project, our space to build and to share.

Marty's vision for our future was exciting, and I loved the idea of continuing to work with him in a more permanent fashion. But the project was appealing on another level as well: indeed, working at the doctor's office had become an outlet for my inchoate drives, an unexpected answer to my long search for meaning.

Marty was a family physician. At that time specialization
had not balkanized medicine, and you could have one doctor for the majority of medical issues that would arise throughout your life. As his assistant I was part of that intimate world by proxy. I was the “nurse,” the person with whom patients made their appointments, who called with their lab results, and who gave them their prescriptions. They shared their frustrations with me as I weighed them or wrote their symptoms down in their charts. I reduced their anxiety and softened the edges of their office visits. Patients' joys and tragedies, births and deaths, were played out in the office, and I was an integral part of these milestones. I was part of their healing process, and the affiliative medical power I began to gain suited me.

When Marty officially asked me to join him in helping him run Flushing Women's, I didn't have to think twice. It was the spring of 1971, I was twenty-five years old, and abortion had been legal in New York State for almost one year. It would be another two before the Supreme Court would legalize abortion nationally in
Roe v. Wade
. I would get to keep working with Marty and be on the front lines of an exciting, pioneering new era of medicine. Having left my childhood behind, and longing for a great stage to act upon, I was ready to throw myself into creating new worlds. Now was the time—this was
my
hour.

—OLIVE SCHREINER, WOMAN AND LABOR, 1911

 

 

 

 

 

B
efore the legalization of abortion, before the battles, before the word became flesh and translated into thousands and thousands of women lining up for services, abortion had a particular place in hell. The word was whispered, a shared secret knowledge among women, a lurking, beckoning danger approached through necessity. The act was relegated to “back alleys,” performed by hacks posing as doctors, well-meaning friends or relatives, and often by women themselves, alone in their bedrooms with their hangers or knitting needles. A small number of fortunate women had access to one of the few “doctors of conscience” and escaped the ordeal unscathed.
²
Whether the procedure ended successfully or in tragedy, illegal abortion was kept in the shadows.

Until it wasn't. In the early seventies what was once only whispered about was now cocktail party conversation, a political discussion point, and the subject of constant media attention.
³

Radical feminists like the Redstockings helped thrust it into the public eye by holding a speak-out on abortion in New York City. For the first time, women defied law and custom to publicly share stories about their criminal abortions. Some even spoke with paper bags over their heads. “We are the ones that have had the abortions.... This is why we're here tonight.... We are the only experts,” said a women testifying in 1969.

New organizations, alliances, and coalitions seemed to be forming almost daily to fight for and against it. Soon the issue morphed into a political football, a birth control problem, a population control necessity. Abortion inspired a made-for-television movie, pro-choice art exhibits, concerts, T-shirts, and poetry readings.

Before abortion became legal on a national scale, clinics were the outposts of feminist politics, their workers grassroots missionaries who believed that the decision to have an abortion was a question of moral agency, an assertion that the power of the state must stop at one's skin. Several underground feminist abortion providers opened for business with the goal of catapulting their theories into action by offering clean, safe, affordable abortions. Clinics such as the famous Jane Collective and the Feminist Women's Health Center in Los Angeles were run and owned by groups of women activated by the knowledge that illegal abortion providers left women (especially poor women) vulnerable to death and butchery.

Feminism was in the air, and I finally noticed it on the periphery of my consciousness. It was in great part thanks to the ideals and dedication of these feminist activists that abortion was legalized and Flushing Women's was able to open in the first place. But our clinic was not founded on feminist
theory or activism. In fact, I started my work in the world of abortion from a very non-theoretical place.

 

MARTY WAS PROMOTED to medical director of the small HIP group in Queens with whom Flushing Women's would share offices, so the responsibility of running the new abortion clinic fell to me almost immediately. The fact that I had almost no idea what I was doing didn't stop me from diving in headfirst to embrace the challenge. I organized the appointments, created the charts, designed the logo and stationery, and hired the staff.

I remember the first patient I counseled. She had come to us from New Jersey because abortion was still illegal in that state. She came without her husband, but she had a supportive friend whose face betrayed a well of empathetic anxiety.

I was nervous. In this, as in all of my other tasks at the clinic, no one had trained me. What could I say to her? What would she say to me? All my psychology courses flooded into my brain . . . theories, theories, and more theories.

This woman was terrified. She was pregnant and did not want to be. Coming here had required an enormous amount of courage, and now she was in my hands. I was to guide her way. I was to be her bridge, her midwife into the realms of power and responsibility that are so much a part of the abortion decision.