“Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.”
—GERMAINE GREER
Never one to romanticize marriage, I viewed mine as the spoils of war. On June 30, 1979, after three years of struggling for Marty’s divorce to be finalized, we were formally married in New York.
We had a wonderful wedding in Garrison, but even on that night, differences permeated our union. We would always love each other, but our expression of that love began to change, to grow complicated. Ours was not to be anyone’s traditional definition of happily ever after. We had our joint empires and our two homes before we were married. We had no plans to move to another location, or buy a new house, or begin having children.
I knew our time was limited and that I was not going to grow old with Marty. The Rubicon had been crossed, and with that came a nagging sense of despair. The battle to be together was replaced over the years by many others, but that was the first, and the dearest, and it was over.
WHAT NOW? I was not the only woman struggling to answer that question; it seemed to be in the air. Now that abortion was legal and women empowered, how would society change? The search for answers brought about a heightened public interest in how abortion functioned in women’s lives. A New York Post investigation10 reported that 20 percent of New York women had had an abortion since its legalization in the state almost ten years earlier. Soon after, the Supreme Court ruled that teenage girls need not obtain parental consent in order to have an abortion.11 Choices and other clinics continued to be publicly lauded for pioneering a new women’s health movement. Advocates for women’s rights were trying to articulate the path from legalized abortion to a changed society, one in which the expression of female sexuality was truly free from the traditional bonds of reproduction.
The pro-choice movement’s prominence in mainstream media and public consciousness was paralleled by the growth of the anti-choice movement, members of which could increasingly be seen demonstrating outside abortion clinics across the country. But the glow of legalization disallowed the idea that there could be a viable political challenge to Roe at this early point. Many of my pro-choice colleagues thought the possibility of a return to back alleys was inconceivable. It was hard to take the antis seriously. When Ellie Smeal of the National Organization for Women (NOW) called together pro- and anti-choice contingents for a dialogue in 1979, an anti-choice group held up jars of pickled fetuses and prevented productive discourse. Their oversimplified battle cry, “Don’t kill your baby!” seemed almost too easy to defeat, and emboldened by our relatively recent victory, we allowed ourselves to take a well-deserved, collective deep breath.
But we would have to learn that in this war, with this issue, the combatants never have much time to breathe. I was soon forced to thrust my way daily through a throng of protesters who gathered at the entrance of Choices. I knew that our side was in danger of falling prey to the most fundamental strategic failure: underestimating the opposition. The antis were not going away.
Unfortunately, they began proving me right on a massive political scale. In 1979 the American Life League was formed by Roman Catholics Judy and Paul Brown. The ultimate abortion abolitionists, members of this group believed that the procedure was unacceptable even in the case of rape or when a woman’s life was endangered. A year later former Catholic seminarian Joseph Scheidler founded the Pro-Life Action League and began to organize abortion clinic invasions. The National Right to Life Committee busily laid the philosophical foundation of the modern right-to-life movement by connecting abortion to euthanasia and assisted suicide, while fundamentalist anti-abortionists produced a Nuremberg-style “hit list” of pro-choice providers to be targeted for harassment or worse.
Anti-choice sentiment blossomed more broadly with the founding and growth of popular televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, a hugely influential evangelical lobbying organization with an adamant pro-life agenda. Republicans had always taken a firm position in favor of a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but democrats were also affected by this social and political shift to the right. Jimmy Carter, the first evangelical Christian to become president, famously forsook his party’s pro-choice plank when he defended his support for the Hyde Amendment with the statement “Life is unfair”—a lack of commitment to abortion rights that democratic politicians would continue to exhibit, even though the party’s official pro-choice stance didn’t change.
The possibility that Congress could favor a ban on abortion became more difficult for the pro-choice movement to dismiss. Representative Romano Mazzoli proposed the Paramount Amendment, a “Human Life” bill that would circumvent the long process of passing a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion by having Congress vote that human life began at conception. With its passage, Congress could trump science and religious differences by co-opting the ultimate authority to define when life begins, then moving aggressively to protect that life by outlawing abortions.
The bill didn’t pass, but the idea that such an amendment was even up for discussion infuriated me. A sperm and egg were to equal a person at the moment of conception? A fertilized egg—whether or not it was “alive”—would have the same rights as I would? How could a fetus ever take on the responsibilities of personhood? But I was not in the land of reality among the antis. Logical arguments were met with arrogant dismissal by these true believers. Life was life; fertilized eggs were people who had to be protected, and damn the women whose bodies housed them.
It was a power struggle, pure and simple, the same struggle that continues to this day: Who holds the power to decide whether a fetus should come to term? Who has the power to decide whether a woman should give birth, how many children she should have, what constitutes a “good” mother?
Ironically, the New Right and Moral Majority were as in touch with the fact that abortion empowers women as women’s rights activists. The antis clearly understood that to keep women in the traditional roles of wife and mother—and thus prevent wholesale societal upheaval—they had to remove a woman’s power to choose.
And so the American right-to-life movement, with the help of “pro-family” activists like Phyllis Schlafly, Christian fundamentalist preachers, and right-wing politicians, unabashedly touted the Bible-rooted construct of the “good woman” as a selfless mother above all else. They encouraged women to take their place in the “natural order” of the world—a hierarchy with god at the top, then men, then women, whose duty it was to have children. Terminating pregnancy was an assault on the very will of god. Fetuses were people and abortionists were killing them. The language of the debate was growing ever more heated and violent, and it was only a matter of time before actions would begin living up to the rhetoric.
In 1979, in what was said to be the first terrorist attack against an abortion clinic in the US, a firebomb destroyed Bill Baird’s abortion clinic in Hempstead, Long Island. Of all the providers I’d met through NAAF, I was closest to Bill, and the news that his clinic had been bombed was incredibly upsetting. A man seen picketing the week before had walked into the clinic, screamed that everyone would burn in hell, poured gasoline across the lobby, and lit it with a torch. Thanks to Bill’s careful preparation for such an attack, the only person injured had been the bomber. He was caught by the clinic’s staff and sentenced to two years in a mental institution.
The case was viewed as tragic, but ultimately seen as an aberration—after all, how could “right to life” believers be capable of killing people? The claim was made that anyone who would commit such an act must be mentally ill, but time would reveal anti-abortion violence to be a serious existential threat.
I felt the severity of this war beginning to hit very close to home. In response to the escalating anti-abortion tension, I held an open house at Choices, inviting local politicians and interested parties to help me spread awareness about the city’s newly declared Abortion Rights Week. I became a regular representative of the pro-choice position on radio and television programs covering abortion. As the issue became hotter, diplomatic discussions morphed into gladiatorial games, and before long I was routinely pitted against antis in heated debates.
MEANWHILE I BEGAN paying careful attention to the band of dedicated protesters who regularly picketed Choices. They were out there rain or shine. Every Saturday a priest and a group of his parishioners, mainly older women, bore signs, rosaries, and pictures of aborted fetuses to influence the young women who hurried past them into the clinic.
There was one woman in particular who hardly ever missed a Saturday. One morning I watched her as she stood just outside the clinic doors at her usual post.
She stopped a young black woman, touching her shoulder, her voice insisting, “There is another way. Choose life, let your baby live. Don’t murder your own child!” The girl, shaken and frightened, pulled away and walked quickly into Choices to resolve her already difficult decision.
A man and a woman approached the doors. This time the faithful protester stood squarely in front of them, eyes blazing, fingers furiously working her rosary. “Your baby must live. How can you murder your own child?”
“Get out of my way, lady! I have a nine-year-old at home who drives me crazy. You want to take her?”
They brushed her aside. She moved on to tug at another woman’s sleeve, physically trying to prevent her from entering the clinic. It was time to intervene. A Choices staff member dialed 911. A young Irish cop showed up and informed the woman that she was not to physically harass patients, that her expression of political and religious passions were limited by law.
The cop turned to the protester. “You should see them the way I have, the kids who no one wants . . . burned, scalded with boiling water, thrown out of windows.”
But that reality never touched this protester or the millions like her, the people who, in turning toward the rights of fetuses, turned against the mothers who carried them.
The indefatigability of the antis has always impressed me. I cannot dismiss the passion, persistence, and power of the members of their movement. Many of the anti-choice women I have encountered over the years have been intelligent, serious activists. Many have made sacrifices to continue their activism. In light of their belief that fetuses are babies and abortionists are killing them—abortion is murder—their actions and activities are understandable. What person of conscience would not fight against the wholesale slaughter of innocents? They want to convince the world of the righteousness of their position, and they see themselves as warriors in a transcendent battle.
That is exactly how I have always felt.
On some very basic level, I understand those antis who protest outside Choices. And I respect them for acting on their beliefs—even if I will do everything in my power, and put my life on the line, to ensure that they are defeated.
IN 1980 the anti-choice movement elected one of their own to the White House to inspire, encourage, and solidify their position. With Ronald Reagan’s election there was a collective joy in the air, an expression of unity and expectation among conservatives not unlike the early days of Obama’s presidency. Reagan was outspokenly allied with the Moral Majority.
A year later, another Human Life amendment was introduced: the Hatch amendment, an attempt to overturn Roe as a federal protection and send the power to legislate abortion back to the states. With Reagan in office and a Republican majority in the Senate, the amendment posed a real threat to reproductive freedom.
I wrote a letter to Senator Hatch outlining why I was opposed. “Any federal ‘human life’ legislation that throws control of these issues back to the states is tantamount to a states’ rights ‘emancipation proclamation,’ giving the states the power to decide who should be free and who should not,” I wrote. “Freedom and liberty should have no boundaries. No woman should have to travel from one state to another to seek adequate medical care.... There is only one State—the United States—and its history and constitution cannot be prostituted.”
Although the Hatch amendment did not pass, “choice,” a word made dirty in the mouths of Reagan and his Moral Majority talking heads, was being attacked from all sides. As usual, the poor and those with the least access to the medical system were the first casualties. The billion dollar over-the-counter birth control industry began running misleading ads for sponges and spermicides, implying that these products were just as effective as the Pill and other prescription birth control. The companies advertised lower costs and greater ease of use without the risk of any side effects.12 It was an egregious case of false advertising. Every day at Choices women and young girls waiting to have their abortions would earnestly insist, “But I did use something!” Poor women who could not access doctors as easily to receive prescription birth control were quick to buy these inexpensive sponges and spermicides. Many women were also turning to over-the-counter contraceptives because of heightened public concern about the side effects of the pill and IUDs.
I lodged complaints with members of Congress and went to work publicly accusing the drug companies of forcing women to play Russian roulette with their birth control. The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Women Wise, and the Los Angeles Times published my concerns, and I had high hopes when the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a report stating that the labeling of over-the-counter products was misleading and dangerous. A bill stipulating that every over-the-counter device would have to carry labels describing how effective they were was introduced in Congress.
It didn’t pass, of course; it seemed Congress wasn’t keen on regulating the drug companies. Still, the defeat was baffling. Better birth control meant fewer abortions—why couldn’t Republicans see that? No matter how much people disagreed about abortion, everyone should have been able to agree on the urgent need for accurate labeling and promotion of all devices that could keep women from getting pregnant against their wishes.
It was clear that with Reagan’s election we had entered a new social era. Women’s issues were losing popularity, while family values, American supremacy, and a unified expression of the American dream had taken center stage in public consciousness. The pro-choice movement was losing ground, and Reagan was leading the attack.
I had to find a way to fight back with something more potent than my articles and letters. In the months since my first television appearances I’d honed my natural talent for going head to head with formidable opponents. I was fascinated by the preachers on the Sunday morning shows—Jimmy Swaggart, the Church of Truth, Jerry Falwell—and I practiced debating by talking back to the television. Marty would go crazy and demand that I “turn that shit off,” but I loved listening to their theatrics, especially Swaggart’s. His preaching was so musical, so sensual, especially when he started speaking in tongues. I was interested in what these shows could teach me about “the enemy,” but there were also points of congruence. I could relate to the preachers’ overriding desire to be good, to be worthy, and I agreed with their attacks on consumerism and materialism. In fact, I even concurred with some of their diagnoses of societal problems; it was the etiology and the treatment that was at issue.
I went to see Swaggart in person once when he appeared at Madison Square Garden. A religious Jew who sat near me told me he had begun to see the light after listening to him preach. Swaggart didn’t manage to “save” me, but I learned something about myself that day. I had a message as well, and it was time to begin my odyssey to spread it.
Early in 1981 I began to travel the country on a debate circuit to share my perceptions of Reagan with others who were also out in the cold. With the help of my public relations agent I arranged my own tour, traveling from the small towns in the Midwest, to the wine counties of Southern California, to industrial, forbidding Detroit, and home to Philadelphia to bring my messages regarding women, abortion, pluralism, and civil rights to any place willing to put me on the air or give me a debate. At that time I was one of the very few pro-choice activists debating the leaders of the anti-choice movement: Joe Riley, Jeanne Head, Reverend Dan Fore, Beverly LaRossa, and Kathy Quinn, among others.
I had recently conducted a two-year study at Choices in conjunction with HIP and Adelphi University, in which my patients were asked to give their reasons for having abortions. Fifty-three percent said financial reasons were the most important factor, up thirteen percentage points from a similar study done the previous year.
I called the study “Abortionomics” and publicized it widely. I wanted these findings to hit home with worshipers of Reagan, that champion of the unborn who was clearly swelling the ranks of the aborted with his economic policies. The study showed that under the influence of the Reaganomics cult, which preached and reinforced individualism, careerism, and material benefit, women were choosing mortgage payments and second cars over second babies. Women may not have seen any connection between their choice of abortion and the economic policies that led them to it, but the specter of the “Welfare Queen” planted dread in the hearts of many who might otherwise have chosen to have more children. Reagan had successfully managed to address issues of personal pain with a fluency of script that enabled people to believe that their problems were a result of misplaced “liberal values” instead of a symptom of general social and political decline.
The New York Times published a letter I wrote in 1984 when a seventeen-year-old student in Pennsylvania chose to have her baby and was dismissed from the National Honor Society as a consequence. Had she had an abortion, she would have been able to remain in the society. “What a set of circumstances in a country which gives lip service to the concept that it is a good thing for women to have children, yet punishes some of them so severely when they choose to do so,” I wrote. “The time is long past for women to stop being victimized by a society whose double messages place them in the position of always being wrong. One wonders, too, about the male involved in this pregnancy. Will he be allowed his ‘honors’?”
My study also revealed a powerful contradiction: the majority of women who came to the clinic for the purpose of having an abortion did not consider themselves to be pro-choice. They had never imagined themselves in a position where they would decide to have an abortion, an act they considered morally reprehensible even as they waited their turns to be called into the operating rooms. Many shunned the pro-choice movement and distanced themselves from other women who had gone through the same thing. Colleagues told me of women who picketed their clinics, came inside for abortions, then went right back to the picket lines.
As long as women judged themselves by Reagan’s vision of a “good mother,” they would also judge one another. It was a defense mechanism, a way to protect themselves against the shame and guilt they had internalized. In a heightened state of self-preservation they created a wall between individual experience and collective understanding. Many politely shook their heads when I asked them to sign petitions, come to rallies, or participate in meetings. Some women, faced with the challenge of being harassed on their way into the clinic, became briefly politicized as a way to express their anger, but few actively joined the pro-choice movement. After their abortions, most women just wanted to leave it all behind.
Yet despite this desire for distance, women demonstrated a quiet solidarity with the cause through the simple act of having them. They referred their friends and family to Choices for abortions and came back to the clinic every time they needed counseling or care. Women were silently, undeniably connected to each other by the necessity of making reproductive choices. Every woman who chose abortion took part in an ongoing struggle toward a “reluctant epiphany,” a realization that not politics, but necessity drives women’s choices—and thus, there is an inherent morality in having the power to choose.
There were some women who did have the courage to vocalize their experiences and take action, however small. I remember one woman in particular who I met on my debate tour that year. She had been a prostitute on welfare, using sex to get by after her second marriage. She said she was forty, but she looked much older. As we walked through the quiet campus where I was scheduled to speak that day, she told me that her abortions had been an expected occupational hazard. Now she sat on several boards of directors, a pillar of her community. Listening to her, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. So many activists are made, not born, radicalized by life, not theory.
On a trip to Todos Santos, California, I was to be the keynote speaker at a professional women’s conference. These women were hungry for inspiration. They came to their activism the hard way, not on college campuses or in consciousness-raising groups, but through marriages. Most of them were divorced. When I finished my talk, a woman got up and began, “I’ve never told anyone about it, but five years ago I got pregnant and I had an abortion . . .” With that, she had joined the movement. She’d found her voice and reached out to her sisters.
That was what I lived for, the small awakenings and profound beginnings. And I finally had enough psychological distance to recognize the phenomenon and call myself a feminist.
I RETURNED TO NEW YORK that summer for a nationally televised debate with a prominent anti-choice leader. I was anxious and tremendously concerned that I should win. I understood that one could never really convert the other side. Debates merely served to rearticulate the issues on an ever higher and more conscious level so that those already converted became disciples.
My debate was taped on a Friday. I had taken a pregnancy test that morning, leaving my urine at Choices. My period was a couple of weeks late, and I was worried. I was always so careful, almost obsessive, but no method of birth control is perfect.
As the debate progressed, I experienced an odd sort of splitting off. I responded to the gibes and questions of my opponent, all the while thinking that I could be pregnant. I felt removed enough to appreciate the irony of the situation, a battle being waged on multiple tracks. I was performing politically for the cameras and debating emotionally with myself. My opponent asked me how I could call myself a feminist and support abortion rights when half the fetuses being aborted were female. It was not a new argument. None of it was, but this time it made me think of my mother. My mother, with dreams deferred and denied.
In the closing argument I made a passionate plea for the importance of women’s lives, for remembering that the abortion “issue” was ultimately about that. Thousands of individual stories, thousands of different reasons, all culminating in one shared ambiguous reality—a reality I was beginning to enter.
I finished the taping and asked to use the studio phone to call my office. The assistant stood next to me, engaging me in conversation; I was talking, laughing. Then I got on the phone, spoke to my secretary, and found out that the pregnancy test was positive. It took my breath away.
Sweating profusely, I wondered whether I had stained the outfit I was wearing for the debate. I called a cab, flattened my back against the seat, and took slow, deep breaths, trying to keep from feeling suffocated. The idea of abortion was a valve, an opening, a way to breathe. There was no question of whether I would have one. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, I held my stomach and said aloud, “Sorry little one, it’s just not time.”
My diary entry from that night reads, “For one night I am a mother.” I don’t remember whether or not I slept. I only remember my exhaustion and an overriding sense of inevitability. The next morning I dressed carefully in a red-and-white suit. What does one wear to an abortion? There are no traditional costumes like those for funerals or weddings. There is no ritual from one generation of women to another to look to as a guide. There are only functional considerations; you wear something that comes on and off quickly and easily.
At Choices, the steps of the familiar process played out in surreal reversal. The blood tests, the images of the sonogram, the table, the stirrups—they were all for me. Marty stood at the head of the table and held my hand while Dr. Mohammed performed the abortion. Now I was joined to the common experience of my sex. But as I lay on the table I had stood beside to support so many others, I felt irrevocably alone. The hands that touched and caressed my hair felt as if they moved through a dark porous divide that separated me from everything that I knew or had been before. As I spread my legs like all my sisters, I thought of the child whose time was not now. Strange how I thought of the fetus as female, as if that shared gender gave me a more special connection.
Yet despite that connection—the recognition of the fetus’s potential to become my child—I knew that I could not allow this pregnancy to come to term. My sense of self, my sense of time, the flow of my movement toward goals that I had created had been interrupted the moment my test came back positive. The fetus was an invader, a separate force growing inside me, demanding and creating potentially unalterable realities. I couldn’t let my life become someone else’s.
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that each individual operates by the “law of self-preservation,” the instinctive tendency we have to survive at all costs. The Catholic Church’s just war doctrine accepts the taking of human life if one’s life or that of another is directly threatened, in keeping with Aquinas’s “natural law.”13 Does the fetus not impede a woman’s tendency to maintain her own existence? Is it not an unjust aggressor, threatening the survival of the mother? Is not a woman’s choice of abortion an act of self-defense? With my choice I was fighting for the right of all women to define abortion as an act of love: love for the family one already has, and just as important, love for oneself. I was fighting to reclaim abortion as a mother’s act. It was an act of solidarity as significant as any other I had committed.
After my abortion, as I slowly awoke from the anesthesia, I became conscious of immense and overwhelming feelings: non-specific, non-directed. Love, relief—then sadness.
A few days later, walking down the hallway in Choices, I heard loud, wrenching sobs coming from the recovery room. A woman was waking from anesthesia and crying for her mother. I went to her bed, lowered the side rails, and gently tried to soothe her. As I bent down to her face she whispered in a halting Russian accent, “You’re the only one I have now, I’m all alone. You’ve saved my life by being here.” I held the woman close, enormously moved, savoring our connection. There was no good or bad, no issue of choice. There was nothing more than the pure energy of survival, and women doing what they had been doing for centuries throughout history, what they will do forever.
MARTY AND I didn’t talk much about my abortion. He was never one to feel comfortable articulating his feelings, but I know he must have had a deep reaction. Oh, how silence can palpate, how distance between self and other can be stretched, distorted, choked with expectations not met. I had learned very early on how to deal with invisibility in my relationship with my father. Marty’s silence left me in the same place.
Years later he told me that if I had become pregnant during our affair, he would have immediately left his wife to marry me. I was shocked when I heard that. Although I knew that pregnancy was often used as a tool in relationships, it never occurred to me to use it in ours.
The distance between Marty and me after the abortion had become characteristic of our relationship. In our early days together there had been no question of who was the teacher and who was the pupil. But now I’d passed him by on multiple levels, and my progress became one more obstacle to intimacy between us. Our competition with each other was like a blood sport, and our relationship thinned a little each time a cut was made. He was still proud of me, but the pride was mixed with envy of my youth, my public prominence, and my future. Once, when we were lying in bed together, he turned to me with that loving look, now shaded with sadness, and asked whether we could declare a cease-fire. I gently touched his cheek, whispering my assent.
After the crescendo of our wedding, we had fallen into a comfortably numbing routine. Garrison had become a kind of beautiful green prison. We would eat dinner together and then go to our corners, his in the den, where he smoked his pipe, and mine in the bedroom where I retreated to read. Or I’d take solitary walks on the Appalachian Trail while Marty puttered about or watched a game. I hated the sounds of those games. I remembered them coming from my father’s den, the constant screams of the crowd over some ball.
And then there were the politics of sleep. Marty always said that bed was only for sleeping or fucking, but for me it was a womb, a final port of safety, a place where I could be most free, both in body and mind. I loved to take to my bed to read, write, talk on the phone for hours with friends, letting sleep come naturally when it may. But no matter the stress of the day or the passion of the night, Marty went to bed at exactly eleven thirty, right after the news. I couldn’t talk with him, read, or even move for fear of disturbing him. Eventually, I had to move out of our bedroom.
When we traveled, our marriage felt like a continuation of the excitement of our affair. Abroad, we could be ourselves, with no expectations from others. We went on cruises to Alaska, safaris in Africa, visited beautiful hidden spas in the winter wonderlands of Scandinavia. Marty took me back to the Carlton Hotel in France, and this time we shared a suite overlooking the Mediterranean with my little dog Noodles. I sunned on the beach at Cannes without a bra, feeling totally comfortable with Marty by my side. He loved to show me off, and I reveled in his admiration. And yet, I remember watching the students lazily camped out on the beach in Cannes as I walked along the tree-lined avenues, wishing myself with them, envying their freedom. I had the feeling that my marriage was a garment that never quite fit. I was always attempting to move quickly, to stretch, to turn, to run, and even sometimes to dance—a Dionysian dance, one of release and forgetting—but that was impossible.
I tried to find ways to bridge the distance between us. Once, I came home on a Saturday to Garrison from a particularly intense meeting at Brooklyn Law School where Shere Hite had spoken. I was filled with philosophy and the danger of the ideas we had discussed. It was summer, and Marty was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I wanted to talk to him about the meeting, but he could not engage on any level except a sarcastic one. He wouldn’t even turn off the faucet so he could hear what I had to say. I gave up and went outside to set the table, my head spinning from the tension of my competing realities.
Guests we invited offered a bit of relief from what I often experienced as a deadening sameness. One evening Barry Feinstein, one of New York’s most politically influential labor leaders (who was later revealed to have embezzled union funds), came to our house for dinner. My experience as president of NAAF and the success of my debate tour had led me to consider entering electoral politics, and I asked him his opinion on whether I should throw my hat in the proverbial ring. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he answered. “How do you think you could do anything in politics? You are a woman from Westchester who gives great parties.”
Another time Harold Fisher, then the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), floated in my indoor pool in his black glasses, pontificating on the nature of realpolitik. I sat at the pool’s edge and argued my stance on an abortion bill that had been brought to the state senate. When I asked for his help and support, he dismissively replied, “There are no issues—only elections.”
I turned to animals to ease some of the loneliness and boredom I felt at home. I would respond to pleas on the radio from the local shelters: “If someone calls in the next two hours, you can save this cat’s or dog’s life.” Many of my companion animals came into my life that way.
On one of my long walks I became friendly with a neighbor who lived at the bottom of the mountain. She had a riding stable and led horse and pony treks on the Appalachian Trail. I began going for rides with her as often as possible, but I soon grew tired of having to live by my neighbor’s schedule. It wasn’t long before I felt the desire to create my own equestrian world. I cleared two acres of rocky, mountainous land, built an eight-stall barn, and filled it with horses.
The barn became my private space. I approached riding with the same discipline that had kept me at the piano playing obsessively, and I would practice the delicate, difficult moves of dressage in the indoor ring for hours. I rode alone on the paths behind my land, writing speeches in my head. I loved jumping most of all; there is something extraordinary about flying on a two-thousand-pound animal—the degree of trust it involves, the courage of both horse and rider, the complete fusion of two bodies and minds at that one moment of suspension. With my horses there was no need for translation, no fear of misunderstandings. Our communication was clear and direct, with no detours through ego.
I WAS ALWAYS CAPABLE of hiding my inner turmoil from professional colleagues and political allies, conscious of projecting an image of impenetrable grace and power. I had become a feminist in solitude, separated from the movement and the writers of my time. This had its benefits: my perceptions were less contaminated by theory or polemics. But I was ready to strengthen my connection to other feminists, to join and help direct the feminist movement. Almost in defiance of the hermetic lifestyle I led with Marty and his difficulty in communicating with me intellectually, I decided to embark on a new project that would place me at the center of the network of feminists who I perceived were shaping the politics of the times.
We were still in the early years of legalization, and despite Reagan’s war on abortion, feminists had enough sway to influence the way the issue was handled in the media and reach out to those who’d been victimized by the guilt and judgment that characterized those years. After years of writing pamphlets, educational materials, and newspaper articles, I felt that the most effective way to communicate my personal and political ideas and catalyze a network of others who shared my values would be through a print publication that could be distributed to patients and mailed to pro-choice constituents and fellow feminists.
I started by publishing an eight-page Choices newsletter. I opened the first issue with the Euripides quotation “Woman is woman’s natural ally” and wrote of my experience founding Choices and the catalytic inspiration of my patients. I purchased large mailing lists of health providers, women’s groups, student health centers—any organization I thought would be interested—and sent out thirty thousand free copies of the newsletter.
It wasn’t long before letters began pouring in. People wrote to me about the topics we covered, thanked me for publishing the newsletter, and even sent checks with their requests for more issues. Carolyn Handel, a cousin of mine who had worked in advertising and sales with the magazine High Times, suggested I take advantage of the groundswell and publish a real magazine with subscriptions and advertising. Not knowing anything about publishing, I did what came naturally: I jumped in headfirst and learned as I went. Carolyn started selling ads and promoting the vision, I recruited more writers, we published quarterly, and before I knew it, On the Issues magazine was alive and growing.
Subsequent editions covered the symbols and rallies of the pro-choice movement, the fundamental tenets of Patient Power, and the important work of pro-choice organizations like NAF. Feminist projects, workshops, and meetings were announced and promoted in every issue. No topic was off limits: I included articles on obstacles faced by women of color, systemic inequalities that affected gays and lesbians, international women’s rights, and animal rights. Articles were contributed by pro-choice activists, prominent feminists, providers, doctors, and even patients who had a message they wanted to share. The magazine gave me a long-sought-after intellectual peer group. It stimulated my thinking, functioned as an educational tool, and provided a forum for philosophical discussions. It was exactly what I needed.
Exhilarated by the success of On the Issues, wanting my ideas to reach even more people, I wrote, co-produced, and directed a thirty-minute film titled Abortion: A Different Light, which aired on several cable channels and reached eleven million homes. I structured the film as a group of interviews, a collection of stories related to abortion. Pro-choice leaders and Choices staff told moving stories of their experiences with the issue. Marty described his experiences on the “Midnight Express” and spoke about the struggles doctors faced in helping women who were hospitalized for attempting self-abortions, and Bill Baird described the firebombing of his clinic. I included a few clips from my debates and interviewed Lawrence Lader, longtime abortion rights advocate, Sarah Weddington, the lawyer for the plaintiff in Roe, and others.
The stories these providers and politicians told were illuminating, but I thought the true beauty of my film lay in the interviews with patients about their personal experiences. Their voices served as a form of resistance to the public’s obsessive focus on the fetus, a way to recenter the issue of reproductive rights in the reality of women’s lives, where it belonged.
The most striking of these voices was that of one of my first patients, Helen Cole, a Catholic who had been against abortion until that moment came when she knew she had to have one. When I approached her to ask if she would participate in the film, she told me it would be very difficult for her to talk about her abortion. Then she met my gaze. “I want to be in your film,” she said. “It will be my gift to you and the movement.” The memory of her courage and generosity will always be with me.
IN 1982, I spoke to a large audience at a NOW meeting in Rockland County:
Tonight when I use the words “anti-abortion” I want you to put in their place “anti-women.” For whoever would drive women to butchers again, whoever would deprive them of freedom and liberty in the name of god, law, or politics—is most surely their enemy. We must never forget that beyond the words, the fanaticism, the debates, the discussions, there are grown women who must not be sacrificed on the altars of unanswered and unanswerable questions of when life begins and who and when and if it should be protected. We must never allow women to be manipulated and pressured by political struggles between the church and state or fall victims of a religious holy war. For underlying all opposition to abortion, all attempts at restrictive legislation, is a vocal and virulent minority who are attempting to impose their own personal belief of the immorality of abortion on all of us.
. . . There is only one absolute truth in regard to abortion and that is that it must remain a matter of personal decision and private conscience. Liberty and freedom to choose, like breathing, eating, walking, and loving, are rights granted to us by a higher authority than Senators Hatch, Helms, or Hyde!
In the ten years since the creation of Flushing Women’s, the clinic had gone from serving five patients per week to becoming a nationally recognized model of a successful women’s health care facility. I decided to throw a “Revolutionary Ball,” a costume party to celebrate Choices’ tenth anniversary. It would be held at the St. Regis Hotel, and I would invite all the political players who had been involved from the start. Everyone was required to dress as their revolutionary hero.
The event was covered in Page Six of the Post, with the humorous headline, “Labor Big Shots Frolic In Fancy Costumes.” The great fun of having a political costume ball allowed otherwise serious heavyweights to play. Marty went as George Washington, in silk hose and a ruffled shirt. President of the Sanitation Union Ed Ostrowski was Thomas Jefferson, Jack Bigel was Lafayette, and Harold Fisher, the ex-MTA chief, came as Henry George, the nineteenth-century economist who pushed for a onetime land tax. Others came costumed as George Sand, Madame Roland, and Martha Washington. I was Fanny Wright, with a high white wig and a wide crinoline gown.
That night, I was completely in my element. So much had happened in the last decade. I’d helped pioneer and define an entirely new world. Traveling the country, debating on television, delivering my message to crowds of women, I was more myself than I had ever been. I felt a sense of completeness, happiness in the knowledge that my entire being was in use, as if every part of me was active and interactive. The light of the passion for my work kept the struggles of my marriage in the shadows.