“A life beset with danger is always the best school for acquiring a brave spirit.”
—JOHANNES MÜLLER, HINDRANCES OF LIFE (1909)
Miss Hoffman,” he said, “how many abortions did your facility do last year?” I was debating Jerry Falwell in Detroit in 1983 on national television.
“Reverend, I believe we did nine thousand abortions,” I told him proudly. To my thinking this high number was a measure of the excellence of our work. Like any medical practice, any business, the more people who come to you, the better your services are assumed to be.
But to Falwell’s ears it was a measure of mass murder.
“When you meet your maker with the blood of nine thousand babies on your hands, what will you say? How will you justify that?”
“Reverend, when I meet her, I will be very proud, because I fought and struggled for women’s rights.”
“Her? Her? Are you saying god is a woman?”
“No, Reverend,” I said. “God is beyond gender.”
A woman in the audience rose, obviously distraught, her voice shaking. She relayed her own experience with abortion: the guilt still with her, the doctor’s coldness, how “they”—the abortion doctors—would not let her see her child. She extended her hand, pointed an accusing finger at me, and declared, “You are nothing but a Hitler to me.”
Her words shot out at me like bullets. It was useless to attempt to respond to this angry woman. Caught in the same battle all women were fighting, drowning in her own society-inflicted guilt, she was only repeating the popular anti-choice rhetoric of the day.
By the mid-eighties we were firmly in the midst of a backlash against the calls for equality of the seventies. Women struggled to find their place among men who had not accepted the ideas put forward by feminism, entering the workforce in droves while deflecting the cry for “family values” that screamed at them from newspapers, the streets, inside their homes.
Men raged at women for having reneged on the traditional expectation that their primary role should be that of nurturer and total support system. They raged against women’s expressions of sexuality, their recently acquired right to choose, and the continuing and escalating feminist demands for power and participation in society. Most of all, they raged against the radical new world order that female power represented.
This rage reared its head in casual conversations and was present in images of women in the media. It was as ubiquitous in the workplace as it was in the home. Often, it took the form of physical violence. Humiliations faced us each morning as we scanned the media reports. A 1987 New York Times article reported that there were six million battered women in the United States that year;14 experts estimated that a woman was battered every fifteen seconds. The constant threat of violence served to reinforce and institutionalize men’s physical and societal dominance over women.
Of course legal abortion, a symbol of the penultimate right of women to have power over their bodies and reproductive lives, became the natural public focus of this backlash against feminism. As Susan Faludi wrote, it was a “counterassault on women’s rights . . . an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories the feminist movement did manage to win for women.”15 Deeply frustrated by their inability to get Human Life legislation passed, fundamentalist zealots bent on removing this civil right decided to take matters into their own hands.
Their aggression toward abortion clinics and providers first manifested through increasingly violent language. The word “choice” was positioned against “life,” diminishing the one and empowering the other so that “pro-choice” came to mean pro-death, pro-murder. As the angry rhetoric of the anti-choice movement intensified, I noticed a growing tendency to liken abortion to the Holocaust, to compare the private moral decisions of individual women to the wholesale slaughter of Jews during the Second World War. An abortion clinic in Westchester was labeled “Auschwitz on the Hudson,” and anti-abortion protesters raised placards with Nazi insignias in front of clinics across the country. Pseudoscientific books were written detailing Nazi experiments in concentration camps and their supposed similarities to procedures in abortion clinics, and the specter of Hitler’s death camps abounded in terminology like “Abortoriums” and “Child Killing Centers.” This analogy between Jews and fetuses was an effective way to humanize fetuses, casting them as victims deserving of civil rights.
Comparisons between fetuses and black slaves achieved the same end. The first time I heard the Civil War analogy used to describe the abortion struggle was in 1983 when I debated Nellie Gray, an anti-abortion leader who coordinated the annual January 22 March for Life on Washington. An early attempt at finding “common ground” failed miserably when I suggested we work together to reduce the need for abortion by educating women on birth control and making it more available. During a break in our taping, she said, “You know, this is just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery.” I smiled in recognition until I realized that she was positioning me as Douglas. “We’ll stop our attacks and talk about birth control when you put down your knives and stop the killing,” she told me.
Pro-lifers played fast and loose with demonizing metaphors, and put themselves on the side of angels when it suited their strategic purposes. Even as they compared the atrocities of the Holocaust to abortion, they accused Jews and lesbians of running the abortion industry for “blood money.” They publicly equated abortion with the United States’ history of slavery, but told African American patients outside of Choices that they were desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. They stopped at nothing.
The incendiary atmosphere the leaders of the anti-choice movement created around the abortion issue was fuel for religious fervor among their followers. Cardinal John J. O’Connor, the archbishop of New York and a leading voice in the anti-abortion movement, riled his disciples with Mother Teresa’s assertion that “the greatest enemy to world peace is abortion.” Reproductive freedom and women’s lives were now not merely synonymous with murder, but a threat to world peace. If fetuses were being murdered, then the women choosing abortion were committing genocide against their own race. Every woman became a murderess, or potential one.
Women trying to exert control over their own bodies were working in league with the devil against the sacred Christian hierarchy. One speaker famously stated at an anti-choice rally, “Ask my son who’s boss and he’ll say Mommy. Ask my wife who’s boss and she’ll tell you it’s me. My wife submits to me because I submit to god.” Antis projected their fears of powerlessness and social disorder onto the fetus, becoming its “saviors.” And of course, a savior stops at nothing when it comes to eliminating the enemy.
But for whom, exactly, were they fighting? Few but the most religiously fanatical would wage a hot war in the name of a group of cells. No, this war was being fought against women, not for fetuses, and they had found an ingenious way of disguising that truth: they began calling it a baby and emphasizing the developments that made it recognizable as human. At eight weeks the fetus’s heartbeat could be detected; at twelve, it could bend its thumb; at fourteen, it could breathe amniotic fluid.
Photos of fetuses, however, didn’t make for effective propaganda; they weren’t cute enough, human enough. Because humans seem to be hardwired to respond to animals that have certain facial characteristics—big eyes, round heads, and short snouts—antis began comparing fetuses to helpless animals. Nat Hentoff, writing in the Village Voice, asked his readers to imagine the fetus as a baby seal, assuming that all the protective feelings one would naturally get while viewing an adorable white pup being clubbed to death could be transferred to a fetus floating in its mother’s womb.
This drive to encourage a reflexive empathy with the fetus was expressed perfectly at a right-to-life conference I attended with Bill Baird, where an Australian priest described to a hushed audience the ten-day fast he had conducted in a public square to “get in touch with the helplessness and defenselessness of the fetus.” A slide show began. It showed a funeral, a small casket, hundreds of marchers each carrying one rose, tears, speeches, an interment. “Mary Elizabeth,” a four-month fetus supposedly rescued from a garbage can and posthumously named and celebrated, appeared on the screen with the caption, “Victim of the abortion holocaust.” Moving through the crowd, I saw fetuses floating in bottles of formaldehyde. Everyone seemed to be wearing mother-of-pearl pins on their lapels. Looking closer, I saw it was their logo: tiny fetal feet, on sale for three dollars.
The concept of the fetus as independent from the mother reached its apotheosis in Bernard Nathanson’s 1984 film Silent Scream, which supposedly showed a fetus withdrawing in fear during a second trimester abortion procedure. The patient, however, was absent; the film never showed anything but the fetus in utero, its mother’s womb looking like some subterranean ecosystem. You might have thought the woman didn’t exist at all.
Unable to make their choices in a vacuum, women were forced to endure the psychological, and often physical, trauma of entering a public war with the antis and a private war with their own bodies. The more symbolic and legal independence the fetus gained, the less agency women had over their own reproductive choices.
Human Life Amendments, while never passed, were still frequently brought to the table, and judicial concern for fetal welfare and rights began to escalate. Court cases addressing policies in which employers selectively barred pregnant women—or even women who were not pregnant, but of childbearing age—from specific jobs because of a “threat to the fetus” became increasingly common. In a ruling for one company, the court stated that “an unborn child’s exposure to lead creates a substantial health risk involving the danger of permanent harm.”
What about permanent harm to the mother? In one Washington, DC, case, a pregnant woman dying of cancer was advised by George Washington University Hospital administrators to undergo a cesarean section against her wishes. A local judge ordered the operation to be performed because he felt there was a slight chance of saving the fetus, and the woman was going to die anyway. What would the difference be if she died a few weeks earlier? The cesarean was performed, the woman died, the fetus died, and the operation was listed as a “contributing factor” to her death on her death certificate.
In another well-publicized battle over fetal rights, Nancy Klein, seventeen weeks pregnant, had remained in a coma for two months after a tragic automobile accident. Told by physicians that his wife’s life was at risk more and more with each day that the pregnancy developed within her, her husband ordered an abortion. Two right-to-life attorneys, one of whom attempted to become “Baby Klein’s” guardian, filed legal brief after legal brief to prevent the life-saving abortion for Nancy. In a radio debate with one of the attorneys, John Broderick, I asked him what he would do if it were his wife’s life that hung in the balance. “A baby is a baby is a baby,” he said. I have a photo of Bill Baird and me in front of the Suffolk County Court House, the two of us the lone pro-choice demonstrators at the trial.
The rise of fetal rights placed a woman’s job, social standing, economic security, and her very life at risk. Right-to-lifers claimed to act in the name of “innocents,” for the sake of their human rights, by the order of god. But I viewed fetal rights as a smoke screen, an opaque barrier, an intellectual and imaginative device to control women’s lives and reproductive choices. The fetus had become a weapon that could be used against women to reinforce the status quo.
VIOLENCE IS A LANGUAGE, and the antis were becoming more and more articulate. At the encouragement of their leaders the antis began taking their crusade to our clinics, where they could be physically confrontational. Joseph Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League—the “Green Berets of the Pro-Life Movement”—published a book on how to harass and intimidate abortion providers and clinic patients entitled Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion. He quickly became the leader of the activist wing of the anti-abortion movement, bragging that the rate of abortion complications went up when there were demonstrators in front of clinics.
Nineteen eighty-five alone saw approximately 150 attacks against abortion clinics and family planning providers. The newspapers seemed to report a new attack every day. A woman in Brooklyn was violently thrown against the wall of a clinic by an off-duty police officer screaming, “In the name of Jesus, do you know what they are doing inside there?” An eighteen-year-old perpetrator of what were called the “Christmas bombings” against a clinic in Pensacola, Florida, called the blasts a “gift to Jesus on his birthday.” In Huntsville, Alabama, a Catholic priest threw red paint into a clinic waiting room and injured two staff members, while “sidewalk counselors” thrust photos of dismembered fetuses in women’s faces and screamed that they were “murdering their children.” A gunshot shattered the living-room window of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the man who wrote the Courts’ majority decision legalizing abortion.
Other terrorist-style intimidation methods were even more sinister: a clinic counselor returning home one evening found her cat decapitated. A man drove his war surplus vehicle directly into a clinic, destroying two waiting rooms. Anti-abortionists noted license plate numbers of patients’ cars at clinics, used police connections to get their names and phone numbers, and called them in the middle of the night to harass them with a recording of a childish voice crying, “Mommy, mommy, why did you kill me?” This tactic was particularly used against teenagers.
On ABC’s Nightline, Cal Thomas, spokesperson for the Moral Majority, approved the violence against clinics, which he said would “stir a national debate on abortion.” He claimed that the violence was against “bricks and stones”—not people. By denying that the continuous and escalating violence against women’s health care centers across the country involved planned and coordinated acts of terrorism, the conservative media, the FBI, and the Reagan Administration callously disregarded women’s constitutional rights and fed the fanatical zeal of the terrorists.
God’s word was the theory, and bombing clinics and harassing women and doctors was the practice. What we in the pro-choice movement called terrorism, they called battle tactics. Were those who tried to assassinate Hitler and bomb Auschwitz terrorists? Anti-choicers were like today’s “freedom fighters” who saw themselves as knights of a higher cause, made even more intense when the cause was a lost one. The womb had become a true battlefield, and we were all soldiers, willing or not.
Each time there was word of another clinic bombing or invasion, each time someone called me Hitler, each day when I walked into Choices past screaming antis and pink plastic fetuses, I travelled further into the trenches. One Monday, a day when many women were there for pre- and post-natal care, Choices received a bomb threat. The male caller allotted us less than fifteen minutes to leave the premises before we’d all be blown up. The call turned out to be a hoax, but that didn’t alter the horror we all felt.
I arranged for my staff to work with the Brooklyn Martial Arts Center to learn self-defense. The first thing that was taught was how to scream—an exercise that had to be repeated many times, since women were unused to speaking up and speaking out. My secretary attended a course with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to learn how to correctly open my mail so that she could avoid damage from a letter bomb. I got used to checking the bottom of my car for bombs and taking different routes to the clinic, looking over my shoulder the whole way.
AMID THE TURMOIL of my days at Choices, my life was changed irrevocably by another kind of opposing force. I received a piece of paper that would hang over the next seven years of my life like the sword of Damocles. It was a subpoena from the Deputy Attorney General for Medicaid Fraud Control announcing that I was being investigated.
HIP’s law firm Stroock, Stroock, and Lavan advised me to hire Thomas Puccio, the attorney who defended Claus Von Bulow when he was accused of attempting to murder his wife. This was comparable to using an elephant to swat a fly, and only made the civil servants of the Health Department more incensed.
It took three years before I even learned exactly why they were investigating me, what they considered fraudulent in my practice. Feeling like Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, I almost went crazy going over and over every act of my professional career at Choices, trying to figure out what exactly could be construed as a felony.
Those years were a special kind of hell. It felt as though I had a terminal disease that would go into remission and rear up again unexpectedly. I never knew when another subpoena would come, when the prosecutors would want another piece of information. At one point there were two grand juries sitting on me and interviewing my employees about the most minute details of my professional life. The boundaries I’d so carefully fostered no longer existed; I was a potential felon, and my employees now held a silent and palpable power over me that I could not even articulate. I had to maintain the image of normalcy—give directives, meet with them, act as if none of it was happening. I could not even allow an unguarded glance to betray me, because if I gave the impression of communicating with them about their testimony, I would be accused of obstructing justice, yet another felony.
Eventually the prosecutor had a meeting with my attorneys and I finally learned the reason for the investigation. Because we were a licensed facility, I saw patients who could not have anesthesia during their procedures because Medicaid didn’t cover it. I felt it was unfair that women with private insurance or cash could have greater care and comfort during their procedure than women who were poor, so I decided to offer anesthesia to Medicaid patients for fifty dollars (or whatever they could afford)—much less than it actually cost, but it defrayed the loss a bit. I had patients sign a form outlining the fact that this was not part of their Medicaid coverage and if they chose they could pay what they could afford out of pocket. I finally learned that the Medicaid regulations did not allow providers to charge any out-of-pocket expenses at all to Medicaid recipients; this was considered Medicaid fraud, a felony.
Marty offered to “take the rap” for me, but they wanted me. I told very few people, so he and I were left to ourselves to handle our anxiety. Out of frustration we would attack each other, blame one another for something for which no blame could be placed. We came home from our long days as weary warriors, no energy left over to comfort or actively support each other. Marty began having difficulty concentrating as he grew older. Things started to go badly for him politically within the HIP system. Those in power had to know about the indictment proceedings, because his vulnerability would be theirs. If the wife of the chairman of the Medical Group Council of HIP was indicted for Medicaid fraud, HIP would have to eliminate him; he endangered their own political survival. And of course, Choices would be finished.
IF THERE WAS a possibility of no future, I would throw myself boldly into the present. I embodied Primo Levi’s words, “The aims of life are the best defense against death.”
I woke at daybreak most mornings to prepare for actions, do radio interviews, or go in to defend my clinic against anti-choice demonstrations. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with what I saw as the passivity of the pro-choice forces. The antis were a passionate, at times dangerous, radical force; the pro-choice movement was reasoned, conscious, political—reserved. That had to change. We’d had some rallies and marches, we’d published articles and made statements, but we were continually on the defensive, and such strategies were usually created pell-mell, quickly, without deep strategic thought or discussion. We were being attacked, and I felt we were just standing there taking it, hoping our problems would right themselves or be reasoned away.
Feminists had to create a collective J’Accuse. Any individual woman who stands up against a powerful man must shed her “good girl” mentality to match his aggression. Real resistance, like great social change, doesn’t happen just because people get angry. Anger is not enough. We had to say no to the system, no to the historical definitions of “female,” and no to the historical oppression of our class. It was time for feminists to match the anger of the antis with our own righteous rage.
In 1985 I volunteered to lead a pro-choice march and rally to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of Roe. Members of NARAL and NOW had been talking about marching down Thirty-Fourth Street to the right-to-life headquarters, but no one wanted to lead it. It was dangerous to be so high profile; the rash of threats and bombings had left people afraid to come out.
I was afraid, too, but I knew facing my fear was the only way to practice and display courage.
I dressed carefully the morning of January 22. I knew that the cameras were going to be on me. I wore an Italian trench coat that looked like something out of the late thirties in Berlin. With civil rights attorney William Kunstler standing protectively at my side, I took my place on the platform, raised my bullhorn, and made a great rousing speech to the couple hundred people who had bravely come out for the march.
We rallied and marched with passion that day, but anti-choicers had also marched—Nellie Gray led seventy thousand of them in Washington on her annual March for Life. It was obvious that there was a necessity for progressive women and men to work together in coalition. If I could unite the factions of the pro-choice community, emphasize our shared goals and minimize our differences, I could channel our collective energy to pose a formidable challenge to the antis and their political allies. I put out a call for members, sending letters, placing ads, and calling people personally to tell them that it was important that we all meet to strategize and come up with a plan. The enthusiastic response I received led to the founding of the New York Pro-Choice Coalition (PCC), the first umbrella organization of pro-choice individuals, politicians, nonprofits, activists, providers, and organizations committed to ensuring legal, safe abortion in New York.16 Our mission statement held that we would fully utilize the talents and input of organizations and individuals to ensure the continued existence of reproductive freedom for all women.
This was, of course, easier said than done. I found myself once again the leader of a group of people with very different ideas about how things should be run and how our goals should be accomplished. We agreed that it was necessary to come up with a new strategy to combat the language, symbols, and actions of the antis. The question was, could we agree on the tactics?
One of our first internal debates revolved around how to publicly counter the imagery used by the pro-lifers. We had to find a psychological match for those shameless bloody fetuses, contrasted with the “cute” pairs of fetal feet. The possibility of using the iconic image of Gerri Santoro—she bled to death as a result of a botched self-abortion in 1964—lying dead in a pool of blood was brought up, but quickly put aside for fear it would be seen as just another exploitative media image. The use of multiethnic and multigenerational women’s faces was also discussed as a variation of NARAL’s theme, “We are your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your friends,” but it was felt that this was too timid a response.
Finally, I suggested we use the simple image of the wire coat hanger, which represented all of the awful homegrown abortion remedies: poison, lye, throwing oneself down the stairs, putting a knife in one’s stomach. It addressed the severity of the issue without stooping to graphic shock tactics. Many thought it was too negative, and some representatives of Planned Parenthood worried that it might turn off funders. Others thought that young people would not know what it meant. Since we were unable to reach a consensus, I went ahead and used the hanger as a symbol myself. It went on to become a ubiquitous symbol of reproductive rights and a powerful visual cue that reached younger women.
The lack of minority representation within the PCC was another subject of many heated discussions. We broadly publicized our meetings and were totally open to new membership, but few women of color joined us. This meant that when women of color did attend, they were often put in the uncomfortable position of speaking for their entire racial group.
Another source of tension within the PCC was more personally directed at me. I’d founded the coalition on the strength of my will and ideas, and I was the natural leader for practical reasons as well: thanks to Choices, I was able to spend a great deal of money supporting the coalition’s political actions—and many of the activists on an individual basis, too. Some saw this as contradictory; I was radical on the streets, but I had the financial resources to assist in the necessary day-to-day needs of street politics: having expensive props made, paying for printing costs, phone bills, transportation, and publicity. People were grateful for my generosity, but there was always some degree of resentment. Rhonda Copelon, a fellow activist who would become a lifelong friend and supporter, once called me a mixed bag.
Others—socialists, in particular—were sensitive to the notion of me or anyone being the acknowledged leader of the coalition. I recall one telling occurrence that took place during an action in front of the New York City Planned Parenthood: when the police asked, “Who is the leader here?” I had to carefully reply, “I can speak for the group.” I was able to understand everyone’s need for recognition and participation.
These tensions were the predictable result of forming a coalition, but they never came close to overpowering the success of PCC as an organization. Working together, certain of our common goal, the coalition proved itself to be one of the most formidable opponents of the anti-choice movement. Over the next few years feminists across the country were beginning to recognize that all kinds of silences had to be broken. Wide media coverage of rallies, marches, and awareness weeks—on both sides of the war—placed the abortion debate more prominently in the public spotlight than ever.
Every January tens of thousands of antis marched on Washington, vowing to overturn Roe v. Wade. Reagan offered his support with statements like “Together we will insure that the resources of government are not used to promote or perform abortions.”17 The PCC and other pro-choice organizations answered them with meticulously organized rallies of our own that meshed performance, battle, and theater. In one of our first actions, the PCC participated in the nationwide commemoration of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade with local demonstrations in ninety-seven cities. Women lobbied to defend and broaden the right to choose abortion and birth control; some delivered coat hangers to right-wing legislators.18
Our New York contingent was five hundred strong, and together we chanted:
Not the Church,
Not the State,
Women must decide our fate.
Not only a mother,
Not only a wife
A woman’s life is a human life.
Gay, straight, black, white
Abortion is a woman’s right!
“Women should be able to have abortions without the threat of dying by bombing or terrorist attack,” I told Newsday that afternoon.
Each action required dozens of meetings and hours of planning. There were dates, venues, and speakers to work out, each element carefully orchestrated to make the maximum impact. I often took on the role of emcee and gave the opening speech.
I began our 1986 rally in Bryant Park by asking for a moment of silence for all the women who had laid down their lives for the right to choose. I asked those who had had an abortion or knew someone who had to raise their hands, and as each hand raised it was as if we were being validated again and again. Some shot up boldly, others came up more slowly—but each one was a triumph of will.
Time for me was measured by planning, actions, and political events. There were no babies’ birthdays to celebrate; my husband’s birthdays were more of a reminder of his mortality and my potential loss than anything else; and I was so totally immersed in the work that January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, began to take on as much, and sometimes more, significance as March 6, my own birthday. I felt as if I had been born for this moment in history, that the dreams of my girlhood had finally come to life, and my work was a continual affirmation of that.
MY WORK WITH the PCC led to some of my deepest friendships. I met Phyllis Chesler at a demonstration for Mary Beth Whitehead in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1987. Whitehead was fighting to gain custody over a baby she’d contractually arranged to carry to term for a wealthy woman, making her the baby’s surrogate mother. The court conducted a “best interest of the child” analysis to determine which woman had the right to raise the child, putting definitions of motherhood in the spotlight. When I learned that Whitehead had been declared an “unfit mother” for giving her daughter pots and pans to play with instead of stuffed animals, I decided to go down to the courthouse for her trial.
Phyllis had convened a group of women to rally for Whitehead’s right to keep her daughter. Watching her give a passionate speech in front of an empty crib, I was immediately drawn to her fierce support of Whitehead. I introduced myself to her after the speech and told her I wanted to cover her cause for my magazine.
She thanked me and asked me to get her a cold drink from inside.
The next day I shocked her by sending her a thousand-dollar check to support her work. I knew that she was considered brilliant and controversial—she had written the feminist classic Women and Madness—and I also knew that she saw herself as a prophet and a revolutionary, and was comfortable working alone. We had much in common.
We slowly became friends. We both wanted and craved action, and being romantics with vivid imaginations, we began to make plans for creating a feminist world. Once we placed an ad in the Village Voice recruiting feminist warriors: THE FEMINIST GOVERNMENT NEEDS YOU! We envisioned a kind of feminist guardian angel brigade that would patrol the streets of New York City insuring the safety of women, stopping domestic violence and sexual harassment, and defending patients at abortion clinics. We received only two responses, so that dream had to be put on hold.
Phyllis was also unusual in the world of the radical feminist leadership in that she was a single mother choosing to bring her son Ariel up to be an active part of her political life. I remember her defining rape for him at my kitchen table when he was just nine years old. She took him with us to some pro-choice rallies, and he later worked at Choices for a couple of summers. We all occasionally spent time at Kate Millett’s farm during her famous celebrations of the Japanese festival Obon, sharing her wonderful feminist arcadia.
Andrea Dworkin was another dedicated feminist with whom I became friends through my work as a pro-choice leader and publisher of the magazine. She, too, cast a very large shadow. Andrea was always soft-spoken, smiling through her small talk until she came to her reality—then she became a fiery herald of truth.
I was always impressed by her work against rape and pornography, especially her ability to put theory into practice, as in 1983 when she and Catharine MacKinnon were hired by the Minneapolis city government to draft an antipornog-raphy civil rights ordinance (which would define pornography as a civil rights violation and allow those harmed by the industry to sue for damages) as an amendment to the City of Minneapolis civil rights ordinance.
In a sense she was the Robespierre of the movement. This analogy came to life when Andrea reacted to A Book of Women’s Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486, which Carol Downer had written with Rebecca Chalker detailing ways that women could sabotage potential anti-abortion laws, one of which was to claim that they had been raped. Andrea felt very strongly that if women were to fake rapes as a tactic in the struggle to access legal abortion, it would denude and diminish her work fighting rape and violence against women. She called Downer a traitor to the movement and told me over the phone that if she had the power, she would have her executed. I asked whether she would like a guillotine to be put up in the town square for this purpose and she found the idea quite pleasing.
AS MY CIRCLE OF FRIENDS broadened and my professional reputation grew, I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with some of the most brilliant and unique political and literary women of the time: Petra Kelly, Florynce Kennedy, Kate Millett, Erica Jong, and so many others. I wanted our life-altering conversations and ideas to reach past our meetings, our speeches, and even our publications. On the Issues was a success as far as radical non-mainstream feminist publications can be called successful—at its height we had twenty thousand subscribers nationally and internationally—but I wanted to reach more people, to be on the cutting edge. With the right medium we could spark public dialogue on subjects that were too often passed over in the mainstream media. And the way to reach mass audiences was not through print magazines; it was on television.
In 1986, I decided to create, coproduce, and host a feminist talk show I called MH: On the Issues. It was a series of ten thirty-minute cable shows syndicated to eleven million homes: the first feminist show on television.
I interviewed Bella Abzug, Bill Baird, Carol Bellamy, Susie Orbach, Elizabeth Holtzman, and NOW NY chapter president Jennifer Brown. I celebrated my fortieth birthday on the air with Deborah Perry—a self-described feminist witch—who blew bubbles for me and gave me two presents: a small candle from Gloria Steinem’s fiftieth birthday cake, and a large multicolored candle in the shape of a vagina.
Betty Friedan, on the other hand, was known as a kind of sacred monster—some called her the “mother of the women’s movement”—and she had a reputation for being difficult at best. On the date of her guest appearance the cab that we sent for her was late, prompting her to call from her apartment screaming that we were all a bunch of idiots and she had no time for this. She finally capitulated and we all waited with baited breath for her to arrive at the studio. One young assistant, so very excited to meet her, held a dogeared copy of The Feminine Mystique on her lap ready to be autographed.
In walked Betty muttering and bellowing, “Let’s get this fucking thing started—I can only stay for twenty minutes.” She rushed past that young girl without even noticing her.
Throughout the interview Betty was in a state of high anxiety, glancing at her watch and fidgeting, until finally she interrupted a question I was posing to say, “I’m very sorry, but I must leave now.” She got up from her chair, dragging her microphone behind her, and stormed out of the studio while the cameras kept rolling. I continued with the show, having another ten minutes to fill.
FOR SOME WOMEN feminism is a way of seeing the world more clearly, of taking off the glasses that society, culture, and geography have placed upon you. The best of them had an “aristocracy of the soul” because of their work and their vision for women’s freedom, and even though this did not always translate into altered behavior, I made allowances for them most of the time, as I am sure they felt they made allowances for me. I was attracted to thinkers who were able to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to leap the distance from radical writings to the soapbox to the streets. We were feminists engaged in a just war sharing the privilege of a critical consciousness, and we knew we had to support each other’s missions and lend one another our strengths.
This truth bolstered my political and professional life, but the knowledge that I could lose my business for Medicaid fraud, which I hid from almost all of my friends, never ceased to haunt me during those years. My possible indictment still felt like an impending death sentence, a terrible secret I had to keep. I remember sitting in my office and looking at my political posters, saying a kind of private goodbye.
Unlike Marty, who could find release and forgetting in sleep, I was tortured with anxiety at night. I realized that just as he had his defense mechanisms, I would have to develop mine.
In the midst of my crisis I was fortunate to meet Mahin Hassibi, a well-known child psychiatrist. I was immediately attracted to this small black-haired Iranian woman. I soon found she was the most well read of any person I had ever known and the only one who had ever completed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and all of Proust, both in French and English.
Hers was a political experience of a very different kind: she had participated in the Iranian Revolution, as an activist in the streets and as a doctor treating other activists who had their heads broken open by the Shah’s goons. A close friend of hers had set herself on fire in Tehran to protest women’s status in that country.19 The power struggle between the Americans and the Iranians over the years meant that she, too, was a pariah of sorts in American society. She was harassed in Metropolitan Hospital, where she was the assistant director of child psychiatry, by being called “Khomeini’s daughter.” Over time she became a true soul mate, a woman who was always there to talk and help center me. We would have hours of philosophical conversations that gave me a kind of pleasure that nothing else could and distracted me from my troubles at the clinic.
After seven years, many thousands of dollars, and much psychological trauma, a legal way out was found to finally satisfy the prosecutors without having Choices ruined or myself indicted. Because the infraction had happened while Choices was still operating as Flushing Women’s Medical Center, Dr. Leo Orris (who had been part owner then) agreed to help us plead guilty in this case under our old name. And since Flushing Women’s Medical Center no longer technically existed as such, Choices as it now existed was saved from destruction.
The end of my nightmare was reported in an article published on the front page of the New York Law Journal on December 28, 1988: “A Queens abortion clinic pleaded guilty yesterday in state court to illegally overcharging 400 Medicaid patients and paid $50,000 in restitution.” A relatively small price to pay in the end; the hardest part was to accept this verdict as the last word. Clearly, it wasn’t.
I was sued again soon afterward by a pro-life doctor, Cordelia Beverly, in what turned out to be a major commercial free speech case. Choices had been publishing and freely distributing calendars celebrating reproductive rights since 1980. In 1988 we illustrated the month of June with a picture taken at the Third Regional Conference of Women in Medicine that depicted Dr. Cordelia Beverly posing with Dr. Lena Edwards, an award-winning physician, both in attendance there. The inclusion of Dr. Beverly’s picture was meant to be an honor, but she felt we had put her life at risk by publicly associating her with an abortion clinic. She held that Choices had illegally used her image as an advertisement.
By vote of 3–1 the court affirmed partial summary judgment on Dr. Beverly’s claim under Civil Rights Law 51. The case, which centered on whether my giving out free calendars nationally was advertising or education, made the front page of the Law Journal. After that I was very careful to get appropriate consent before I printed anyone’s photos, especially if it pertained to Choices.
DEALING WITH THESE ANXIETIES and obstacles made me more sensitive than ever to the discrimination and pain that marked so many of my patient’s lives. The little girls and adolescents with wide eyes expressing what could not be spoken still got to me the most. I wanted to protect them, to give them their own defense mechanisms that would enable them to move through these difficult years without becoming casualties of the sexual culture. Parental consent was a hot topic at the time, thanks to Reagan’s attempt to pass a law that would require federally funded programs to notify parents when their children requested services. When I first opened my clinic I supported parental consent, thinking it best to have the support of a committed adult when making such a hard decision. But the 1988 case of Becky Bell, an Indiana teenager who died as a result of an illegal abortion she had sought rather than tell her parents she was pregnant, showed what could go wrong if minors were prohibited from making their own choices.
When I was asked to give the first family planning and birth control talk (called “What Will Mama Say?”) to the Girl Scouts of the USA chapter in New York City, I was excited to have the opportunity to reach girls before they were faced with such a life-altering choice. I was amazed at how ignorant the girls were about their bodies and sex. They were so open and trusting, sharing with us their questions and fears. One girl revealed that she’d been sexually abused by a relative. Another asked the question, “Can you get pregnant from kissing?” Later the PCC sponsored a well-advertised Teen Speakout on Choice, at which I hosted a panel of experts who could answer the teenagers’ questions about their reproductive rights: whether they wanted to have an abortion, keep the baby, or give it up for adoption.
The Creedmoor Mental Health Players, a group of talented staff from Creedmoor State Hospital, heard about my program with the Girl Scouts and asked if I’d be interested in collaborating with them to hold a workshop series at Rikers Island Prison. As we talked with the male and female inmates on subjects like battered women, rape, alcoholism, depression, and sexual issues, I found that I had a connection to the prisoners. I was interested in women who were in prison for crossing boundaries, women who killed their abusers, or women behind bars for political reasons.
Meanwhile I noticed another underserved, shamed group that was being overlooked and discriminated against when it came to health care. Lesbians tended to visit their gynecologists much less frequently then heterosexual women, unwilling because of the medical assumption of heterosexuality. They were given medical forms questioning their use of birth control, their “marital status,” and so on; there was absolutely no conception of the need for sex education and health care directed toward women without men.
I made sure that my staff knew how to be sensitive to the needs of lesbians so that Choices would be a safe space for them to seek care. But the obstacles homosexuals faced extended far beyond the boundaries of the clinic, so when I heard about the story of Karen Thompson, a lesbian whose lover, Sharon Kowalski, was in a car accident that left her a quadriplegic and unable to speak, I knew I had to help publicize it. Because Sharon’s parents refused to recognize the fact that their daughter was a lesbian, they barred Karen from visiting Sharon’s treatment facility. Karen was traveling the country, trying to set up interviews and give speeches to enlist support for what had become her crusade. She was fighting for the rights of all LGBT individuals. When I broke her story in On the Issues in 1987, Karen hadn’t seen her partner in two years.
Gay men were dealing with a new health crisis around this time. I had covered AIDS in the first issue of my magazine in 1982 when it was an inchoate threat; by 1986, it was exploding like the abortion issue had ten years before. And like abortion, it was controversial, dangerous, and profound. AIDS had become the gay man’s unwanted pregnancy. For the first time since penicillin eliminated the fear of venereal disease, men were facing potentially life-threatening results from sex, an issue with which women had always had to grapple.
When I visited the AIDS ward at San Francisco General, I saw that the disease had galvanized the gay community and changed the conventional avenues of medical treatment. I thought of my beginnings at Choices in the early seventies, before abortion had been legalized nationally, when we still dealt with all the shame, guilt, fear, and stigma. I remembered how the community of women had reached out—how they referred, educated, counseled, and supported women seeking abortions. In the case of AIDS, where medical technology had not been able to develop a definitive test to diagnose, let alone treat the disease, physicians so used to playing god had to face the reality of limited answers. Now, as then, the medical community had out of necessity stepped aside for love, for another definition of healing. This was Patient Power.
Pregnant teens, women in prison, lesbians, gays—they were all pariahs, and they were all suffering, even dying, from the resulting guilt and shame that status produced. Shame was used as a defense by some to not seek services, and by others to block out possible help from the outside. And as with abortion, situations branded as transgressive or even illegal prevented many people from forming connections and political coalitions to address their rights. Many cast-outs experienced a kind of existential disgust that caused them to deny or ignore their reality. But the battle cry of the AIDS movement—that Silence=Death—said it all.
IN THE LATE 1980S, another front opened in the war against women. In 1986 Randall Terry had founded Operation Rescue, an organization whose initial tactics involved peaceful sit-in demonstrations at abortion clinics inspired by the civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. King in the 1960s. But soon Terry and his protesters progressed to more violent tactics, shutting down a clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Operation Rescue sprang to prominence as a national organization during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, where hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, capturing national attention. By then they had adopted a slogan to fit the times: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” That year, Reagan gave a speech to more than fifty thousand pro-life supporters gathered in Washington to mourn fifteen years of Roe v. Wade. “We’re told about a woman’s right to control her own body, but doesn’t an unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” he asked.
In April of 1988, Operation Rescue summoned its ranks to New York City to begin what they called “a righteous, peaceful uprising of god-fearing people across the country that will ‘inspire’ politicians to correct man’s law, and make child-killing illegal again.... If we don’t end this holocaust very soon, the judgment of god is going to fall on this nation.” Hundreds came to New York with the intention of gathering in large numbers to blockade abortion clinics across New York City over the course of several days. Their goal was to get favorable media coverage and project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion while preventing women from exercising their reproductive rights.
I led the PCC on the offensive. We declared a Reproductive Freedom Week that would kick off with a march and rally on Friday, April 29, the day before Operation Rescue arrived in New York City. Approximately fifteen hundred people participated in our march, the largest pro-choice event in New York in ten years. Leading the way, I walked up to the right-to-life office clutching a “Support Operation Rescue” placard in my hands. I held it up to the crowd and tore it to pieces, declaring my action a symbol of how women were going fight back against the terrorists in Operation Rescue.
Marches were always an important public statement of support. They gave people who otherwise would not get involved an opportunity to get into the streets and show their support for choice. Women could bring their mothers, daughters, and friends to bond over the issues in the exhilarating, almost celebratory atmosphere created by thousands of people coming together for a common cause. But it was the persistent, grueling, day-to-day activism that was necessary to resist the conservative and oppressive forces of the Right. We had to make sure a band of soldiers was present at every clinic, every day, to physically ensure that women’s rights weren’t blocked by the antis.
The PCC meeting space turned into a war room. We began by writing and distributing a pamphlet called “The Battle to Defend Abortion Clinics,” the only strategic military pamphlet of the pro-choice movement. It detailed the politics of the battle and included concrete tactical suggestions for organizing against planned and unplanned pro-life demonstrations and actions. The week before Operation Rescue’s demonstration we held a training session on how to protect and defend the clinics. People living near the hotels where Operation Rescue activists planned to stay were leafleted and encouraged to give Operation Rescue a “fitting welcome.”
For the next week we organized clinic watches and phone trees, dispatching people to the sights Operation Rescue was targeting. We secretly followed Operation Rescue members to find out which clinic they would target next, communicating the information to each other using walkie-talkies. Emergency announcements were made on a radio station (WBAI), giving the location of the facility being attacked and calling on people to come and defend it. Despite our efforts, Operation Rescue succeeded in closing facilities three out of the four days it staged blockades.
So began a long year of defending abortion rights against Operation Rescue.
Many of my mornings in 1988 began at dawn, when the lights of the city mingled with the sunrise. On one such morning I waited with other pro-choice warriors in front of the Carter Hotel, where the troops of Operation Rescue were gathering to begin their terror tactics against a local abortion clinic. Someone handed me a token for the subway, and before I knew it I was swept underground. Then we were running down Twenty-Third Street next to Randall Terry and his cohorts, determined to beat them to the clinic so we could keep those doors open. Terry and I locked eyes and gave each other a nonverbal acknowledgement of our competition as we raced each other down the street.
We did manage to get to those doors, but Terry controlled all the outside traffic. No one could enter or leave, and seeing patients that day was impossible. But by 11 a.m. we were still there, refusing to surrender the clinic to Operation Rescue. Surrounded by their voices singing “Amazing Grace,” we chanted, “Not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate,” and “Operation Rescue your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die!” I can say them in my sleep even now.
Another day, I was called to assist Eastern Women’s Center in the middle of an attack by Operation Rescue. The antis were lying on the floor forming a “Kryptonite Block,” a madly creative device that allowed a group of protesters to attach themselves to specially designed bicycle locks that defied police attempts to free them. By the time I arrived at the clinic, five Operation Rescue participants had been in the same positions, leg to neck to ankle to thigh, for approximately three hours; it would be at least another two before the police could dismantle them. One Catholic priest, attached to five women, was sitting with his neck chained like a dog, screaming to the women in the waiting room, “Go home, go home. There’ll be no baby killing here today. You will not be killing your babies this Saturday.”
They held their biggest action yet on our turf on January 15, 1989. Defying a federal judge’s orders to stop blocking clinic entrances, eight hundred Operation Rescue members were arrested during protests at abortion clinics in New York, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. Demonstrators chained themselves together and to fences in front of the clinics, halted elevators, triggered fire alarms, and lay in front of police buses attempting to carry them away. They began their demonstration just as the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal that would have made the fetus a constitutional person with rights and privileges. New York City, the abortion capital of the United States, was to be the place where their national revolution would begin.
In reaction, I arranged for the PCC to hold a “back alley” press conference in an alley between Broadway and Lafayette Streets in Manhattan to emphasize what women would face if the antis were successful in making abortions illegal. I held up my hanger and declared, “As I stand here in this alley among this garbage, this graffiti, this filth and debris, I know that I am possibly standing in and looking at my future—the future of millions of American women.... Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. What it will do is send women by the hundreds of thousands into alleys just like this one. When that time comes there will be not enough alleys, not enough hospital emergency rooms, and not enough coffins to hold them.”
WE FEMINISTS were encouraging the formation of new coalitions and inspiring others to act, or at least think about action. We never let an attack go unanswered, a clinic undefended. But what I wanted was for the entire pro-choice silent majority of the country to stand up and say, women’s rights are human rights! We will not allow any of these terrorists to stop our mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends from being able to exercise their moral and constitutional rights. I wanted mass mobilization. A girl can dream, can’t she?
This frustration was occupying my mind when an Operation Rescue activist asked, “Where are your troops, Hoffman?” on yet another rainy, cold morning of protesting.
I turned to face my questioner. Middle-aged, white, male, polyester suit, fetal feet button—in all, a good soldier of the Lord.
“Where are your troops?”
I looked past him to our small band of about fifty feminist activists, chanting and intense; beyond the five hundred or so kneeling, praying “rescuers”; past the police, the press, the passersby, and thought about his question. Where were my troops? We appeared sadly outnumbered. Compared to the antis, we always were.
The small, two-story abortion clinic under attack was situated between Third and Lexington Avenues. As the drama unfolded, business went on as usual. Dogs got walked, some people shopped, some stopped to chat, others rushed on to work, all going about their daily routines as if a war were not happening in front of them. My questioner had verbalized one of my private intellectual dialogues. But it was really not so private after all. The question of just where the feminist movement was now, where the feminist movement was going, whether the feminist movement was alive or dead, had become a popular issue around which media, politicians, and anyone who felt like it could instantly pontificate.
Of course the “rescuer” had a far more literal interpretation of this question in mind. He was merely counting heads.
Operation Rescue was bent on trying to publicly project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion through the media, and at this it was somewhat effective. It chose as its battlefront small, unprotected doctors’ offices rather than large well-known (and well-prepared) facilities. Considering that every day in New York City alone there were hundreds of women who terminated their pregnancies at any one of at least one hundred providers, Operation Rescue’s claim that they were on the way to eliminating abortion was more than slightly exaggerated.
It reminded me of their other exaggerations and falsehoods: their shameless self-comparisons to the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., or their obscene claim that their movement was akin to the great civil rights struggle of the sixties.
Many people bought their lies. During the reign of Reagan, “double-think” had become the accepted form of social and political reality. Nuclear missiles were “peacekeepers,” ketchup was a “vegetable,” and all Americans were “better off now” than they had been some time in the past. This sinister tactic of obscuring truth with wishful thinking was actively appropriated by much of the local and national press, which helped Operation Rescue and its participants by affording them a great deal of coverage and sometimes even positive reviews. Reagan himself met personally with Joseph Scheidler and publicly praised him, officially giving these terrorists the highest institutional backing.
The New York City police, many of whom seemed to be politically inclined to Operation Rescue’s philosophy, were also caught up in the fantasy. Pursuing a policy of “selective enforcement,” police treated the anti-choice blockaders with kid gloves, using stretchers to take protesters away gently, issuing desk tickets, and releasing Operation Rescue “prisoners of war” soon afterward, allowing them to return to the blockade site once again.
This treatment was in marked contrast to that given pro-choice activists, who were pushed, pummeled, and herded into small areas behind barricades. It took intense and pressured meetings with Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward to publicly shame the police into upholding the law and ensuring women’s access to constitutionally protected medical treatment. Going up against Operation Rescue, we faced the daily possibility of being physically hurt or killed. I almost got clubbed by police in one of the early actions outside of a doctor’s office in Queens.
Operation Rescue had succeeded in casting pro-choice forces as the generic “female”: dangerous, assertive, selfish, shrill feminists who had to be controlled and diminished if only, at this point, by paper tigers in the press declaring feminism dead and obscuring the progress we made with each march, the successes we had each time we kept a clinic open.
That anti-choice man’s question—where are your troops? —helped clarify what I already knew that day. Looking through his eyes, people might have agreed that the right wing was winning. It was an illusion. Yes, we were outnumbered on the streets, and that could be frustrating. But a mass mobilization of sorts was occurring. The historic bifurcation between abortion providers and political activists had finally begun to dissolve, and a powerful new alliance was beginning to form. Participation in direct action against Operation Rescue at clinic sites put ideological feminists face to face with the reality of abortion. Over one million women each year were having legal abortions at clinics across the country, and they each risked harassment, violence, and restrictive, even dangerous, regulations in upcoming Supreme Court cases. Providers were now at the forefront of the abortion rights struggle, and patients themselves, in the midst of the most personal and intimate of decisions and life events, were thrust into a vortex of politics and passion.
Some were reluctant warriors, engaging with the struggle but still unable to own their choice. Others were able to draw strength and courage from the news of pro-choice rallies and actions. Still others marched in the streets, lay down in acts of civil disobedience, wrote checks to pro-choice organizations, or activated students on campuses. Millions more voted only for candidates who expressed the pro-choice position.
We had always had plenty of troops in this battle. They were everywhere, and they were far from outnumbered. They just had to be activated.
I DECIDED IT WAS TIME to make a statement that could not be ignored or manipulated by the media, Reagan, or Operation Rescue. We would deliver a message to the cardinal of New York, John J. O’Connor—a proclamation, a Bill of Rights on abortion. Invoking Luther’s 95 Theses at Wittenberg, we would hold our demands for women’s moral, legal, and civil rights to reproductive freedom up on the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The PCC quietly spread the word to gather across the street from the cathedral on the morning of Sunday, April 2. We gave no further instructions for fear that Operation Rescue would get wind of the plan and stage an opposing action. I was very careful not to organize the protest at the time of Mass; we would begin just as the service ended.
When the day arrived, everything was in place. As people began pouring forth from the cathedral, pro-choice activists marched across the street to the concrete steps. Mary Lou Greenberg and Maria Lyons stood in front of the massive bronze doors and unfurled a proclamation:
On behalf of the women of New York City and their sisters throughout this country and out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light.
We stand here today to affirm the following to Cardinal John J. O’Connor who has blessed, praised, and hosted the anti-abortion fanatics of “Operation Rescue”:
That you have consistently turned a deaf ear and a cold heart to women by repeatedly ignoring urgent requests to meet with us about the terrorism and violence towards women that “Operation Rescue” represents.
That you have added to the atmosphere of fear, terror, and anxiety that women must face when attempting to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.
That you have encouraged the fanaticism and women hating that feeds the politics of “Operation Rescue.”
Now, therefore, we stand here not as beggars at your gate but as people of conscience to affirm that:
1. Women are full moral agents with the right and ability to choose when and whether or not they will be mothers.
2. Abortion is a choice made by each individual for profound personal reasons that no man nor state should judge.
3. The right to make reproductive choices is women’s legacy throughout history and belongs to every woman regardless of age, class, race, religion, or sexual preference.
4. Abortion is a life-affirming act chosen within the context of women’s realities, women’s lives, and women’s sexuality.
5. Abortion is often the most moral choice in a world that frequently denies health care, housing, education, and economic survival.
Cheering exuberantly and waving coat hangers, hundreds of pro-choice supporters who had been waiting across the street surged to the steps of the cathedral. They began chanting slogans in support of our proclamation. William Kunstler, Charlotte Bunch, Phyllis Chesler (and her son Ariel), Sue Davis, Lawrence Lader, Joan Gibbs, Rhonda Copelon, and Esperanza Martell were among the crowd.
I made my way up the church steps with the six-foot hanger I had commissioned for the occasion. It was a symbol of potential terror and aggression against all women, but it was also the symbol of our future. And taking my place in front of the doors to the cathedral, I knew that it was also the ultimate symbol of both defiance and gentle desecration.
As I lifted the hanger above my head, the crowed throbbed and screamed with new energy. Police officers showed up on the scene, pushed our people back across the street, and arrested nine activists for trespassing on church property, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. We marched after them with Norman Siegel of the New York Civil Liberties Union to the precinct to rescue our activists.
The media could not ignore this one. It was our most successful, best publicized action yet, covered in every major newspaper across the United States. The New York Times quoted me on the cover of the Metro Section, saying, “Women’s rights are in a state of emergency,” and the Philadelphia Enquirer marked the occasion as “an important strategic change in the movement.” It was the first time pro-choice supporters had been arrested. Some of them had planned to be. Others had been caught up in the intense spirit of the moment, ready for a higher level of sacrifice. We had placed our thesis on the great doors of the cathedral, where statues of the saints looked coldly at the passing activity below them. It was a time of radicalism, a moment when the light pointed to the root cause and we addressed it.