“As a woman I have no country. . . . As a woman my country is the whole world.”
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
By the late 1980s I’d had my hand in almost every theater of the war for reproductive rights, including legal, political, medical, academic, media, activist, and personal spheres. As Reagan’s conservative reign came to an end, I felt the need to get involved in yet another: electoral politics, one of the most important battlegrounds in our struggle. This arena was all about compromise and strategy; it was time for me to get pragmatic.
As a leader of the pro-choice movement I’d had the chance to see the political scene firsthand. Many politicians who had started their careers as allies with high personal standards were forced to make compromises to stay in the game. Marty would politick at dinners and meetings, and back at home he’d tell me what he really thought of those bastards, warning me to “trust no one,” a lesson I was learning quite well on my own. Though I’d decided not to go into politics myself, I understood the importance of working with politicians. I was constantly attending fundraisers and meeting with pro-choice supporters, pushing my agenda with my hand always ready to sign a check. Often the best I could do was whatever it took to get the least bad candidate elected and the needed bills vetoed or passed.
At one elegant Upper East Side fundraiser I met Oregon senator Bob Packwood, an early and ardent player in the abortion rights struggle, a staunch and able ally of the pro-choice forces on the Republican side of the Senate. Our connection was so immediate that I solicited and received a piece from him for On the Issues, after which he called me to request a meeting at a New York City hotel.
We discussed the existential nature of power, the causes for which we’d be willing to die, those for which we would be willing to send others to die. He seemed to be genuinely moved by the responsibilities of his office and the loneliness of power. Even with the intensity of our conversation and the compliments he interspersed throughout our time together, I did not expect his embrace and attempted French kiss in the middle of Park Avenue as I hailed a cab.
Of course I did not believe that men who did good deeds in the public arena were necessarily good boys in private. Packwood’s sexual come-on was just that; the fact that it was more an adolescent groping than a sophisticated seduction was, to me, more of an annoyance than a threat. But as the world later found out, Packwood had been sexually harassing women on his staff since at least 1975. He was eventually forced to resign from office under threat of expulsion. A piece in the New York Times described the fire against him by women’s groups as being fueled by a sense of betrayal. Was Packwood’s early support of abortion rights, it asks, a true expression of avant-garde Republican liberalism, or a form of political opportunism?
Without Packwood’s influence the pro-choice position would have had less representation in the Senate, and I was willing to overlook his indiscretion with me for the sake of my greater cause. Working in the sphere of politics meant interacting with very strange bedfellows; however, I wasn’t sorry when he was caught.
As the leader of the PCC, I had political agency, too. Abortion was especially hot the year of the 1989 New York City mayoral race due to the passage of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a Supreme Court ruling allowing states the right to limit access to abortions. New York was still the “abortion capital of the nation,” and the issue was being watched carefully for its impact on this election.
The PCC used our high profile to make abortion one of the defining issues of the race. Before the primaries we sent out a questionnaire to the candidates, both Republicans and Democrats, detailing the nuances of a truly pro-choice position and asking them where they fell on the spectrum. We used their answers to rate them on a scale of one to ten.
The race was a heated one, with Edward Koch defending his seat in the primaries against Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins as well as two other candidates. The winner would run against Rudolph Giuliani. Our ratings of the candidates—seven in all—had the potential to play a big role in the outcome of the election. We planned to hold a press conference a few weeks before the primaries to broadcast our results.
When we analyzed and rated the questionnaires, Dinkins scored slightly higher than Koch, who had made deals with the archdiocese that we felt betrayed the movement. Dinkins was the favorite among the progressives and a majority of the PCC, so publicizing him as our top pick was seen as a given.
On the sweltering summer night before the press conference I received an urgent call from Howard Rubenstein’s office. Someone had gotten wind that the pro-choice coalition would be exhibiting Koch’s large photo underneath Dinkins’s on the eight-by-twelve-foot “choice chart” we had created for the press. Rubenstein summoned me to his office to let me know in no uncertain terms that if Dinkins were rated higher then Koch (whom Rubenstein was representing) it might cost him the race.
Howard was someone with whom I had worked for many years. I’d strategized the Patient Power campaign with him, and his son had worked with me on all of my political actions. Now here he was, sitting in his glass tower office with a couple of Koch’s aides and laying the responsibility of the outcome of the mayoral race on me!
I was receiving my honorary doctorate in compromise. After a practically sleepless night during which I conferred with the PCC, I came up with an answer that I thought I could live with. But that was the point—I was forced to live with myself after bending to the pressure to compromise. I realized then that this would become my life if I allowed myself to become too engaged in electoral politics.
In the end, I gave Dinkins and Koch the same rating. I reasoned that I could not really rate Dinkins higher than Koch, because Dinkins’s campaign was just theory at that point; he only had a campaign pledge, and Koch had an actual record. And Koch’s record was a pretty good one, if not perfect—and what or who in politics is ever perfect?
We held the press conference on the steps of City Hall to broadcast the results. It was attended by most of the Democratic city politicians. I and a couple of other PCC members held up our choice chart detailing the candidates’ ratings for all the world to see: Dinkins, 9.5; Koch, 9.5; Giuliani, 3 . . .
The day after the press conference, newspapers around the region carried an Associated Press report stating that the PCC had hurt Koch’s chances in the mayoral campaign since he had tied with Dinkins. Koch, outraged, called the PCC a “pipsqueak fringe group,” whining, “Protect me from my friends.” This part of politics, the dueling and debating, the responding to attacks, I relished. “I don’t think he understands our rating system,” I was quoted as saying. “I don’t think he understood we rated him in a positive way.”
Giuliani had a strong reaction to our ratings, too. I enjoyed watching him trying to twist himself into a pretzel to spin an explanation for his stance that would not immediately position him as anti-choice. After saying he would “uphold the right of choice” and “oppose any attempt to make abortions criminal or illegal” he was called out for flip-flopping on the issue, an accusation that ultimately hurt his campaign.
I MAY HAVE DECIDED not to become a politician or be actively involved in more elections, but I was a trusted figure within the New York City health community. I worked with City Councilman Bob Dryfoos, Senator Schumer, and Comptroller Hevesi—all pro-choice, and all very strong supporters of mine, as I was of them. After the Associated Press published a press release of mine urging women to take control of their health, Dryfoos asked me to speak at a town meeting on the topic of monitoring the struggle for women’s reproductive rights and to testify in favor of the Women’s Health Equity Act of 1990. Newsday interviewed me about a bill limiting the testimony defense lawyers were allowed to solicit from crime victims about their sexual past, and I was invited to be part of a panel of respondents to the “Dear Abby” question of the day, “Do we have a responsibility to limit the size of our families?”
I was becoming one of the go-to experts on the feminist point of view, and I commented on an ever-broader range of topics. Some American feminists had a tendency to separate our work on women’s equality from other equally important social justice issues, hesitating to speak out on race, class, and global women’s rights.20 I believed that we were all bound by our common potential for victimhood. No matter one’s race, one’s class, or one’s nationality, we were targets simply because we were women. Keeping quiet about an issue for fear of crossing into unknown territory was against the spirit of feminism as I saw it.
In the early nineties New York was plagued by a series of race-related crimes. The media played up the racial aspect of each incident, but they burned in my mind as examples of the sexism that soaked our society. One could not be separated from the other. Yusuf Hawkins, a young black man, was shot dead by police in the white part of town; his death was blamed on Gina Feliciano, a young white woman whose “crime” was daring to break out of her white ethnic ghetto and invite blacks to her home. Another young woman was blamed for her boyfriend’s act of setting a fire in a nightclub that killed eighty-seven people. Racism and sexism were present in equal measures in both cases, but the sexism went unreported.
Then came the explosive internationally reported and analyzed Central Park jogger case. From the first reports of the young, white investment banker raped, sodomized, beaten, gagged, and left for dead in Central Park by a group of young black and Latino males, people expressed outrage and astonishment at the randomness and brutality of the attack.
The trial of the five young defendants accused of her rape and attempted murder became a lightning rod for a city already suffering the wounds and anxieties of ongoing racial tensions. The rape was played up to promote paranoia and backlash against men of color. This case was quickly followed by that of Carol Stuart in Boston, who was eventually found to have been murdered by her supposedly well-adjusted, white middle-class husband while pregnant—but only after dozens of black men had been rounded up and wrongly investigated.
In the midst of all the hyperbole and race-baiting, there remained the reality of one young woman whose life had been brutally altered, another who had been murdered, and thousands of others who lived in fear of increasingly horrific sexual violence.
As I wrote in an editorial published in Amsterdam News, “Rape is a great equalizer; it has no color and no class.” It makes all women sisters, just like unwanted pregnancies do. Indeed, according to trial transcripts, when the Central Park jogger screamed out in pain and panic she was told, “Shut up, bitch.” Not white bitch, not black bitch, not rich bitch: just bitch. The same week as the Central Park attack, there were twenty-eight other rapes or attempted rapes in New York City, nearly all of which were ignored by the media. These women were raped, attacked, and murdered simply because they were women.
Sexuality itself, as it was named, defined, sold, and com-modified in American culture, diminished women and left them vulnerable to violence. The famous black comedian and political commentator, Dick Gregory, began an address he gave at an Ivy League university by asking his audience, “What do you call a black nuclear physicist?” The answer: “A nigger.” It was the same with women. Whatever our race, class, education, age, nationality, and so on, to some people, we were all cunts.
MY PUBLIC PERSONA made Choices a popular target for anti-choice publicity stunts. In June 1990 Brooklyn’s Bishop Daily announced to the press that he would lead a prayer vigil outside Choices. “If one is doing the Lord’s work, why do you need a press release?” I asked the Daily News. He recited the Hail Mary more than 150 times in front of Choices with one thousand demonstrators, but on the day of their protest, none of our scheduled one hundred abortions were canceled.
While Daily gathered his followers to pray on their beads outside my clinic, I was helping to run what I deemed a sort of underground railroad. Women from states with restrictive abortion laws were traveling to New York to have their procedures—just like my first patient who had traveled to my clinic from New Jersey so many years before. I lowered the fees for out-of-state clients and welcomed them to my clinic.
Business was booming. In the early days, when Choices served two to five patients per week, I understood very quickly what women needed from an abortion provider: immediacy of access, affordability, confidentiality, safety, compassion, and dignity. The system I had developed to address all of those needs—creating the ancillary services of the counselors, and leaving the physicians to do the technical work—had proven successful. We grew exponentially until we were seeing over five hundred patients for abortions per week. With my staff of 115 I was basically running a midsize hospital. At our height we performed almost twenty thousand abortions per year, over one hundred per day, making us one of the largest abortion facilities in the United States.
Nearly 97 percent of the abortions were done in the first trimester at a cost of $300. Later term abortions, because of their increased risk, were priced higher. Almost all of the New York clinics charged the same fees. The only price wars were waged by unscrupulous physicians who preyed on illegal immigrant women, charging them unconscionably higher rates, knowing they were afraid to go to a licensed facility for fear of having their status revealed. Abortion, unlike other medical procedures, did not go up in price with inflation. Even so, Choices started to become very profitable. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I made my first million dollars.
I was generous with salaries, including my own and Marty’s (who functioned as the medical director), but most of the profits went back into the clinic. I frequently offered new services at Choices and always did my best to subsidize poor women’s care. We were famous for never turning a patient away. At least once or twice per week I would get a call from the front desk or a counselor starting with the words, “I have this patient . . .” The power to be able to help them gave me a great deal of pleasure—but I could only have that power if I had the money to service it.
I was the only woman owner of a licensed abortion facility in New York, yet my feminist peers often made me feel as though I was doing something wrong. Many in the movement felt a real activist should be struggling financially, or at least be working for a nonprofit. How, they wondered, could I be a radical feminist and a successful entrepreneur? I was “making money off the movement” (which could be said of every abortion provider), even more than most because I was not one of the doctors performing the abortions, but the person who hired them. Male abortion doctors faced less opprobrium, anyway; the fact that they were making money off abortions did not tarnish them the way it tarnished me. I was a woman, a feminist, a radical, a writer, a publisher, and an activist, and I was making a hell of a lot of money. Something wasn’t right.
My relationship with money has always been nuanced and complicated. I have felt its deprivation, earned a lot of it, saved it, given it away, risked it, been on the verge of bankruptcy twice, invested it well, and spent it unwisely. I have been envied for it, abused for it, and used for it. Money has given me many types of power. With it I have been able to run my clinic the way I want it to be run, create new programs, and hire talented staff. I have been able to travel and move in worlds I would not otherwise have had the chance to enter.
Money has given me the power to support political campaigns and donate to worthy causes. In the nineties I spent half a million dollars every year publishing On the Issues and started a 501(c)3 called the Diana Foundation so that I could donate to feminist groups and individual radicals that had no access to institutional funds.21 I donated to the campaigns of pro-choice politicians like Schumer and Hevesi, and of course paid for political actions put on by the PCC.
But at times that ability has almost seemed like a one-sided pleasure. It was a brutal education in reality for me to see how so many friends and allies slipped or dropped precipitously away when I almost went bankrupt. Many women were passively resentful of my money. I would go to dinner with friends, and they would apologize for picking a restaurant that was not “one I was used to,” although I was as comfortable eating at a diner as I was in an expensive restaurant. It became difficult to know for sure whether people connected to me in true friendship or because of my money. But eventually I came to feel comfortable with this part of my self-presentation. Just as the scandal of my love affair left its residue on me, made me who I am, the distinction of being a wealthy feminist became part of my persona.
IN THE 1980S I noticed an influx of Russian émigrés coming to me for abortion services. The immigration policies of the Soviet Union had eased, and masses of Russians were finding their way to New York City. Abortion was the major form of birth control in the Soviet Union, and many of the women had had ten or twenty before coming to Choices. For these women, the issue of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life.
I’d been to the Soviet Union once, in 1983, with Marty and a group of his colleagues. A friend who was familiar with the culture begged me to take a suitcase full of contraceptives: pills, diaphragms, condoms. My concerns about arbitrarily distributing hormonal medication and diaphragms that would not be fitted by physicians were laughed off. “They need anything and everything they can get.” After learning that the two most popular forms of birth control were douching with lemon juice and jumping on cardboard boxes when periods were late, I stuffed my bags full.
At the time Russia was still a communist country. It was impossible to escape the feelings of state control and oppression. We would get on a bus and no one would smile or meet our gaze; the energy of the place was stifling. I could not stay in a situation where I knew that every word I spoke was being listened to or taped. We left three days early to go to Norway.
The Soviet Union’s power to astound confronted me again when a thirty-five-year-old Russian woman came to Choices for her thirty-sixth abortion. The patient expressed relief at the supportive and positive aspects of the clinic as opposed to the brutal conditions with which she was familiar, but seemed quite resigned to having as many abortions as necessary. Like many Russian women, she was violently opposed to using birth control. Most Russian gynecologists promoted the idea that the pill caused cancer, and preached the virtues of repeat abortions. Of course, the fact that many of them subsidized their three-dollar-a-month salaries by doing abortions in women’s homes might well have had an influence on their thinking.
The only contraceptive devices locally produced were condoms. These were so poorly made that they were called “galoshes,” and few men consented to using them. In Russia the obstetric wards were empty of patients, and one out of three women who sought second trimester abortions in hospitals died from complications. My patients told me story after story of lives blighted by sterility, sexually transmitted diseases, and domestic violence. One woman confided that the brutality of the state maternity wards was Russia’s most effective means of family planning. The lack of choice resulted in an alarming number of abortions performed both legally and illegally in Russia. It was impossible to get an accurate number, but it was estimated that between five and 18 million abortions were performed annually as compared to 1.6 million in the United States.
I could not turn away from this situation. In 1992, Joy Silver, the Choices marketing director, arranged for two Russian feminists from I and We Magazine who had heard about my facility to visit me. My philosophy of informed medical consumerism astonished them. In Russia, you got whatever treatment was being offered at the moment. If they had a stock of old-fashioned spiral IUDs, that’s what was dispensed. If they had high dose estrogen pills, that’s what was prescribed, regardless of any individual contraindications or preferences.
When they got home they faxed me an official invitation to lead a team of physicians and counselors from Choices to go to Moscow for an educational exchange. We would be meeting with gynecologists from state-subsidized Teaching Hospital Number 53 to demonstrate state-of-the-art women’s health care. Three months later I was on my way to Russia with nine of my staff.
MY HOSTS HAD ARRANGED for us to stay in a prerevolution-ary mansion that functioned as a government artist colony where pensioned writers and old artists retired. Marty came along as part of my entourage of Choices staff, a role that infuriated him. He became even more upset when I asked to have my own room; I had a lot of pressure to deal with—giving speeches, meeting international press. I tried to explain this, but Marty perceived it as a public embarrassment in front of the Choices staff, especially the male doctors. Here we were as husband and wife and I was asking for my own room, a public declaration that he did not have sexual access to me. He was sullen and cold, even threatening. “I made you, I can break you,” he told me more than once. But I insisted, and we slept in separate rooms.
Resolving to brush off his anger and focus on my mission, I dove into the first day of meetings and interviews. Most of the women I spoke with seemed to be insulated from feminist thought and the feminist movement as we knew it in the United States. They referred to me as Miss or Mrs. Hoffman, and one of my staff corrected them and wrote out “Ms.” “But isn’t she married?” they asked. I explained that yes, I was married, but that it was not necessary that my marital status be public. They loved that!
There was no word for “counseling” in the Russian system, because they didn’t perceive a need for it. Abortion was not only the status quo, but the only choice the majority of women had to control their fertility. There was no organized opposition on religious or moral grounds (although there was a growing American right-to-life presence in Moscow), and women regarded their multiple abortions pragmatically, as a way of “getting cleaned out.” I wondered whether bringing to Russia the concepts of choice and responsibility, the need for women to think deeply about birth control and abortion, the need even for counseling prior to abortion, would contribute to an anti-abortion groundswell. Would I inadvertently be introducing anxiety or guilt to an already overburdened and oppressed female population? After all, the slogan of many pro-choice activists in the US—“Abortion on demand and without apology”—was a reality in Russia. But because there were no other choices, abortion had little to do with freedom and privacy and much to do with oppression and coercion.
The day I was to participate in an educational symposium at the Moscow Literary Society, I awoke with an intense feeling of excitement. I would make my presentation and challenge the assembled physicians and journalists to create a truly revolutionary society. During my talk I stressed what I knew to be true in the most personal and political sense: if one accepts that the exercise of free will defines what it is to be moral and fully human, then women who lack the information to make choices are destined to remain second-class citizens.
Along with translated copies of my birth control pamphlet, “Birth Control Facts and Fiction: The Choice Is Yours,” T-shirts, and magazines, I had brought seven thousand condoms with me to distribute after the presentations. When the time came to hand them out, the journalists, students, and physicians turned into a swarming mob. I was surrounded as a frenzy of hands reached out to grab the condoms, leaving me breathless and amazed.
My staff was scheduled to perform abortions and Norplant inserts at the state teaching hospital. It would be the first time Norplant had been inserted into Russian women, and the first time abortions would be performed there with state-of-the-art technology. Students, gynecology residents, and the administrative staff of the hospital hovered around the operating room tables. There were three patients in the operating room; multiple abortions were often performed at the same time, without any type of anesthesia. It was faster and more efficient that way. The women came in their own nightgowns because there were shortages of paper supplies. They placed themselves on the table and followed orders.
The next day I had a meeting at the Russian Family Planning Association, one of the only voices calling for a reasoned and intelligent family planning program. The director, Inga Grebesheva, was famous for being the only woman deputy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The energy of the women in that room was so strong, I urged them to take immediate action. We decided to draft an open letter to Boris Yeltsin outlining the grave conditions of women’s health care and demanding economic funding for birth control and education. I asked Grebesheva if she could have it done by the next day so that leading feminists at the Feminist Roundtable where I would be speaking could sign it. She smiled and told me, “I’ve been writing it in my head for four years.”
When we returned to New York, Marty had a change of heart about the anger he’d felt on our trip. An enormous bouquet of flowers was waiting for me on my desk at Choices on my first day back. The card read, “Darling—you are an international star. With love and admiration, Marty.” But I’d already put Marty’s dark moods and manipulations out of my mind. I was thinking about Russia.
My trip had received international support, with profiles in the Economist and the London Times detailing the work I had done there. The Russian media had celebrated my project, proudly displaying my picture on the front page of the Moscow Times and reporting that we had “made history” on our trip. Dr. Grebesheva told the press that “until Hoffman suddenly landed on our heads,” she had almost given up trying to improve the plight of Russian women. “It is only her enthusiasm and energy that prods me into renewing our own campaign. If Merle wants to start a Choices model clinic in Moscow, we promise to find her premises tomorrow.” Indeed, I was considering replicating Choices there. I could offer Russian women state-of-the-art family planning and counseling, as well as high quality abortion care. Russian women needed a safe harbor, a feminist outpost. I felt I had to do it.
TWO YEARS LATER, with great excitement and a sense of destiny, I boarded the plane for Moscow to build Russia’s first feminist medical center. I would call it Choices East. I was aware of the odds: out of thirty-three hundred American /Russian joint ventures formed in 1993 in Moscow, only three hundred were still operative the next year. The American press carried endless stories of the difficulties of doing business in Russia. Apart from the basic challenge of negotiating with people whose core philosophy was for seventy years built around hostility to free markets, I had to take up the challenge of bringing a feminist consciousness to life in a highly misogynist, authoritarian society.
I began thinking in terms of “capitalism with a conscience,” a term I coined that had been met with scorn by some American feminists. Perhaps with the enormous economic and political changes in Russia at the time, my take on capitalism would find fertile ground. At that time in Moscow there was what was called soft and hard currency; soft was the ruble, which all the Russians were paid with and used, and hard was the dollar, the franc, the pound, the deutsche mark—the money that was used by foreigners to both purchase goods and bribe officials to get what they needed. I wanted to charge the Russian women for abortions in soft money—about three rubles, equivalent to about fifteen American dollars. I would charge foreign women between $100 and $150 in hard money. The idea was to subsidize the poor women with the profits or surplus that was made from doing abortions on foreigners.
The Russians I spoke with were aghast at this idea. They wanted to have two separate services, one for foreigners and one for Russians—sort of like one for cash and insurance patients and one for Medicaid patients. This surprised me. Wasn’t subsidizing the poor a core belief of Communism—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?22
Much had changed in Russia since my first exploratory visit in 1992. The rise of fascistic nationalism promoted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky had produced rampant inflation, and growing disillusionment with American capitalism due to the loss of their life savings had left much of the population anxious, frustrated, and despairing. Organized crime had grown at alarming rates, a 43 percent rise in the previous five months. Gang violence, too, was so common that the Moscow Times reported a rate of one bomb attack every two days, mainly carried out against bankers and businessmen as gangs battled for control of the city. I’d felt relief on my first visit to Moscow upon discovering that pornography was almost nonexistent, but now I saw it everywhere. The Russian version of Cosmopolitan greeted me with the question, “Would you rather have sex or chocolate?” The opening of Russian markets to all things American, like Snickers bars and McDonald’s, included imports of our special brands of fundamentalist misogyny: tapes of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart now graced Russian television. The American right-to-life movement sponsored a weekly half-hour television program, and a recent right-to-life conference in Moscow boasted five hundred attendees.
I was not surprised to learn that the attacks on me in the press began before I hit the ground. A former KGB general, one Alexander Sterligov, leader of the Russian National Assembly and an ally of Zhirinovsky, was worried that under Yeltsin the mortality rate exceeded the birthrate for the first time since World War II. Calling my plans to set up a women’s clinic in Moscow an “anti-Russian ploy,” Sterligov was quoted as saying, “We will not put up with Russians having more coffins than cradles.” Not only were women the victims of repeat unsafe abortions, now they were being made to feel guilty for having them on both religious and political grounds.
I knew not to graft my American feminist philosophy onto Russian reality. My mission was to work with the Russians on an equal basis; that way they could adapt the Choices philosophy of Patient Power to their Russian sensibilities. The philosophy could then grow organically and be replicated in other parts of the country.
And in this regard things were moving along well. In February I returned to Russia to sign the Protocol of Intent with my partners: the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital and the Department of Marine Transport of the Ministry of Transport. Choices East would be built in the Moscow facility first, and then instituted in eighteen other hospitals.
I took great care in having the legal documents drawn up because the law, like everything else in Russia, seemed to change almost daily. Of particular importance was the division of control. We agreed that both the American and Russian sides would hold equal shares in the venture, sharing in both the potential success and risk of the project. Needless to say, it took many phone calls and faxes to produce the detailed legal documents necessary to form the company.
At the end of my February trip, with much fanfare and press attention, we signed the Protocol of Intent that would lead to our agreement. On my return in the summer, we would finalize and sign the formal documents. Then the real work of setting up the clinic could begin.
In June, my first working day in Moscow was to be spent at the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital. I immediately noticed changes. Our cars were met at the gate by armed guards. The head of the hospital, Dr. Osipov, seemed nervous and distant, his behavior erratic at our meetings. When I questioned my Russian aides about this, they informed me that he had been involved in a business venture that had soured, and had been the victim of an attack that left him in a coma for three months. I began to feel concerned that whatever his motivations, Osipov did not seem willing to move forward on the terms we had agreed upon.
My heart turned cold when he demanded 51 percent of the company. I certainly had never agreed to this. To accomplish anything for women in Russia I needed equal control of the project. Forty-nine percent would render me powerless to control the health care Choices East provided, and would allow my Russian partners to make use of my status, name, and the investments I had arranged. They knew my motivation was not financial gain; the possibility of the clinic making a profit was minimal, and my goal was only to make it self-supporting. I caucused with my aides, who believed that this was a negotiating strategy, political theater designed to gain a controlling share, and that in the end he would sign.
I was on a deadline. I had scheduled a press conference to announce the signing of the agreement; forty international journalists planned to attend. I would have to cancel it. I gave Osipov my ultimatum: by noon the next day he would have to agree to the terms laid out in February, or the deal was off. He looked at me arrogantly and said, “If you are so concerned about saving women’s lives, what’s one percent to you?”
The next day at noon, I asked Osipov for his decision. His answer, “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” hit me like a body blow. So much work undone, so many hopes dashed. I stood up, shook his hand, wished him well, and walked out of the room. Osipov’s aides were amazed. If Osipov was surprised he seemed to hide it well.
The press conference was canceled, but I did give private interviews. The reporter from Izvestia was dismayed. “What will Russian women do now?” she asked me. “How long will they have to wait?” We discussed organizing a grassroots feminist movement. She cautioned me that Russian women would be difficult to mobilize on the issue of women’s rights, but that if we could appeal to them to mobilize for the benefit of their children, we would have a better chance. I mused over the irony of women once again reinforcing the traditional role, being there for others and not for themselves. When they tried to be, the results were often fatal. I met with a young American woman who had been working on setting up the first battered women’s shelter in Russia. The day she opened the hotline they received four hundred calls. But in the last year, two of the volunteers had been murdered by their husbands.
The visionary in me embraced the pragmatist. I felt disappointed, but not destroyed. I knew I had done the right thing, and that it was not a failure. I had planted seeds in a very dry environment. It was not the right time, but that time would come.
BACK AT CHOICES, I looked into the eyes of the women I served and saw the faces of Russian women, their eyes questioning, hopeful. “How long will women have to wait?”
A conversation I’d had in the hotel leaped into my memory. Svetlana, a dark-eyed Russian journalist, had been writing a newspaper piece about my visit. We were discussing Stalin’s criminalization of abortion when she put down her pen and said quietly, “You know, there was some good in what Stalin did. If he had not criminalized abortion, I would not be here.”
My mind went to a television debate during which I had been asked, “What would you do if your mother aborted you?” It was the ultimate existential question, the one that plagued so many anti-choice activists, their empathy singularly focused, crushed between self-preservation and hypothetical non-existence.
But there was another hypothetical question to ask: What if Svetlana’s mother had had an illegal abortion and perished in the process? That one did not cross her mind. She was giving voice to the assumption that the control of reproduction should be in the hands of the state. She could not see that the State viewed women and their bodies as commodities, property that each state appropriates for its own purpose. They are used as a means of production and a way for the state to exert control over its people.
The comparative history of abortion is actually the history of power relations between states and their female populations. The geopolitical and economic goals of any regime are heavily articulated in its population policy. When Stalin made abortion illegal, allowing Svetlana to be born was not the agenda; the agenda was to populate Russia with soldiers to counteract Hitler’s rising militarism. Meanwhile, Aryan women in Nazi Germany who were thought to have aborted their fetuses could be punished with the death penalty, while those deemed “hereditarily ill” were permitted to have abortions.
The battlefields are different, but the war is always the same. For women in sexist, authoritarian societies, the issue of abortion can pose no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life. There is only the harsh reality that sex rarely comes without anxiety and that the price one often pays for it is high and dangerous.
Romania offered abortion on request until concern over the decline in fertility instigated a change in policy in 1966, severely limiting access to abortion and calling for incentives to childbearing such as birth premiums and tax reductions; the country then legalized them again with the rise of abandoned babies and maternal mortality. Abortion laws enforced by military dictatorships in Chile mandate that women can be jailed for up to five years if they are caught. In China, abortion is considered an important tool for limiting population growth. The legality of abortion in the United States is a wedge issue that flip-flops according to the party in power. And in Russia, women are still being forced to turn to abortion as the primary form of birth control because the state refuses to prioritize their needs.
It is not only the size of population that is subject to control, but the kind; not only the quantity, but the quality. In all of these calculations, women are the losers. True reproductive freedom for women is never under consideration. And so women make the choices they have to make. We navigate the distance and tension between the collectively defined good of society and the good as we individually define it in the context of our own lives. Choice is not a static concept; it expands and contracts depending upon the nature of the regime or the society in which we live.
A Hindu Indian woman, eighteen weeks pregnant, came into Choices with her husband and two young sons, seeking an abortion. She’d had amniocentesis to insure that there were no fetal abnormalities, and found there was nothing wrong with her fetus. Why, then, was she here? What was her reason for wanting this abortion? “It’s a girl,” she told me. “I can’t have a girl. Girls are liabilities.”
I thought of the fetus within her and the primal birth defect it carried. I looked at her two sons, holding on to her with unyielding, demanding hands. I felt rage that it was my gender that was the least wanted, and despair over the reality that within this act was a total denigration, denial, and devaluation of the female principle, the female self. I so much wanted to say: “No. STOP! You should not.” Not “you cannot,” but “you should not.”
Yet even as I raged against her choice, I understood why she had to make it. She had left India, but India was where she lived in her heart and her head. Attitudes about abortion are situational, historic, and geographic. The decision to make what in her mind was the only rational and intelligent choice resulted in an ambivalent type of freedom. A freedom that said that in order for a woman to have more than a minimal chance at survival and actualization she must deny and negate her own gender.
But it is for this very fundamental civil right of reproductive freedom that I have put my life on the line many times. Without it, we will never have a world where being female is not considered a birth defect, where women do not have to have thirty-six abortions or be forbidden from having one.
How long will women have to wait?
We will have to wait as long as it takes to bring about women’s equality. We will have to wait for people of conscience to create a society where choice truly exists—not one where economic deprivation, racism, sexism, or despair dictates the outcome of pregnancies.
MY THOUGHTS OFTEN turned to philosophy after the experiences I had in Russia. For years, Phyllis Chesler, Letty Cot-tin Pogrebin, E. M. Broner, and other politically active Jewish women had gathered a group of feminists together for Feminist Seders, during which they took on the roles traditionally assigned to men and retold the ancient tale of Jewish slavery and redemption. The group was growing, and Phyllis invited me to join. When it came to Judaism of any denomination, I always felt a bit removed; most of these women were far more articulate in everything Jewish then I was. I enjoyed being with them, but I always felt like an observer.
But when the Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, I felt myself inexplicably drawn to it. I had been keeping up with the politics, challenges, and questions that had riddled this particular project since its inception over ten years before. How to bridge the distance between memories that remain personalized and mutable, and those which become collectively reified? How to portray the Holocaust as something “outside history” as Elie Wiesel described it, a pathology apart from and outside of any known human parameter but at the same time quintessentially human? In this time of intense secularization coupled with new kinds of spiritual journeys, the Holocaust had become an experience of Jewishness that everyone could relate to.
I had first been introduced to Wiesel as part of my studies in graduate school. His need to tell of the unbelievable evil of the camps, and his burning desire to help prevent the Holocaust’s reoccurrence while insuring that the world would not forget its victims drove him to write, and drew me to him. I was transported by his novels and analytic work, which all spoke of his inner journey, his continual search for meaning and god in a world filled with evil and despair. He had a commitment to the moral dimension in life, to the moral answers.
When Mother Teresa, speaking on abortion, said, “We have created a mentality of violence—massive, manipulated, propagandized movements that have brought about more than a million and a half unborn deaths every year,” Elie Wiesel didn’t agree. The violence he was concerned about was the violence of the abortion debate itself. After reading that he had to think more about abortion and had refused to take a side, I decided that I had to meet with him and discuss it. He agreed to have a dialogue with me for On the Issues.
I got off the elevator on the twenty-sixth floor of his New York apartment building, and when I turned left, the first thing I saw was an open door revealing a room with shelves and shelves of books. A small, smiling, intense man waited there for me. I took his hand, met his eyes, and began our conversation.
“When abortion was debated in 1977 in the Knesset in Israel, the anti-abortionists articulated the feeling that abortion was annihilating the Jewish people, that there were no “unwanted” Jewish children, and how can we, after the Holocaust, slaughter Jewish children in the womb? What do you think of this?” I asked him.
“Fanatics are all the same. These are fanatics. I am against fanatics everywhere. I don’t understand these words: Abortionist, anti-abortionist. Those who give women the right of choice he or she [sic] is an abortionist? What kind of articulation is that?”
“Yes,” I said, “but there is a feeling that women who choose abortions are not active moral agents. That women’s reproductive capacities and women’s lives are secondary to political ideology or religious morality.”
“I don’t like generalizations. Some people feel that they need abortion. For them this is their morality. Other people say that for moral reasons they are against abortion. I don’t like simplistic definitions.”
“You have said that you are uncomfortable with the violence of the abortion debate, but when Cardinal John J. O’Connor first came to New York, he held a press conference in which he stated that legal abortion was the ‘second Holocaust.’ How do you feel about abortion being likened to the genocidal slaughter of the Jews?”
“I am uncomfortable with the language of this debate. I resent the violence of the language, the words that they use, like Holocaust—no it is not a Holocaust. It is blasphemy to reduce a tragedy of such monumental proportions to this human tragedy, and abortion is a human tragedy. What should be done is to give back the human proportion to the abortion issue, and when we see it as such we may be able to have much more understanding for the woman who chooses it.”
I thought for a moment. “Women who choose abortion are consistently labeled killers, and I personally have been compared to Hitler and called a great murderer.”
“A woman who feels she cannot go on, and with pain and despair she decides that she has to give up her child, is this woman a killer?” he mused. “Look, you cannot let these words hurt you. You have to be strong not to pay any attention because those who do that—call you a Hitler and relate it to the Holocaust—prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was.”