“If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you must use it by the third act.”
—ANTON CHEKHOV
Dr. David Gunn was shot three times in the back by pro-lifer Michael Griffin as he was ariving at a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic in March of 1993. Griffin yelled, “Don’t kill any more babies!” before gunning the doctor down as he stepped out of his car. He was the first provider to be killed in the war against abortion. When I heard that the National Coalition of Abortion Providers was arranging a memorial service in his honor, I knew I had to be there.
Pensacola was enemy territory. There had been a rash of clinic bombings there, and the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement was particularly active in the area. I was used to living in a war zone, but I was still surprised when Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, got on the plane with me and told me that Paul Hill, a notorious anti-abortion activist, had been sighted at the hotel we were to stay in with two unknown aides. An anonymous threat had been made the night before on television by a man whose face was covered by a large, blue dot; we could expect a mass murder, he predicted, something so big that it would surprise both sides, something like Hebron or Beirut. John Burt, one of my old television debating opponents, was quoted on the Pensacola evening news to the effect that he would be getting out of town because the spectacle of two to three hundred abortionists in one place was too much of an incentive for mass murder. He would put himself out of the way of temptation.
Word soon came down that the FBI had intercepted someone in a car loaded with a cache of weapons, headed for the hotel. Agents in Houston had arrested a local antiabortion activist, Daniel Ware, on weapons charges. At his arraignment, evidence was presented to show that Ware had traveled to Pensacola armed with explosives (as well as three guns, one a .357 Magnum, and about five hundred rounds of ammunition) with the stated intention of staging a suicide attack on the abortion providers gathered there.
The morning of the memorial a special meeting was called to discuss defensive strategy. It was agreed that a decision not to go would be respected. Many people were frightened, but no one stayed away. We boarded buses outside our hotel alongside armed police, FBI agents, and members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The reality of driving to a memorial service for a murdered gynecologist in a procession interspersed with motorcycle cops and police cars was one of the more haunting experiences of my life.
The service was held in an amphitheater opposite the clinic. Given the sunny Florida weather, I found it odd that Smeal was wearing a turtleneck sweater with a long, dark blue raincoat. Only after a few minutes of looking at her carefully and noticing that she appeared rather boxy did it occur to me that she was wearing a bulletproof vest. She was not the only one; two male physicians were outfitted with vests, but they were making no secret of it. One walked within twenty feet of a lone picketer holding a sign that read “The wage of sin is death” and “Abortion is murder.” As everyone watched, the doctor pounded his chest, screaming, “Why don’t you just do it! Come and get me! You don’t have the guts.” During this display of righteous passion and provocation, Smeal and I stood next to each other scanning the windows that faced the stage, looking for the butts of rifles.
Upon my return to New York, I learned that Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, an anti-abortion activist, had been convicted of attempted murder in Wichita, Kansas, after she admitted to shooting—though not fatally—Dr. George Tiller, one of the few physicians in the US who specialized in therapeutic late term abortions. Tiller was a friend of mine, and for many years I referred women to his clinic for these difficult procedures. He always wore a bulletproof vest, and drove to work in an armored car. He survived that attack, but he would not be so lucky in 2009.
Two days later, Dr. George Wayne Patterson, owner of four abortion clinics and one of the few physicians to perform abortions in the Mobile/Pensacola area, was killed as he returned to his car in the nightclub district of Mobile. Police attributed his murder to a robbery gone awry, but reports revealed that nothing was stolen from Patterson; his body was left with his wallet on it.
On July 29, 1994, in Pensacola, Florida, the “Reverend” Paul Hill pumped three shotgun blasts into the head of Dr. John Bayard Britton, killing both him and his clinic escort James Barrett and wounding Barrett’s wife, June. I had witnessed Paul Hill’s crusading in Pensacola during the memorial service for Dr. David Gunn, which he had contaminated with a sign reading “Execute Murderer Abortionists.”
Six months later two clinic workers were murdered in Brookline, Massachusetts: Shannon Lowney at Planned Parenthood and Leanne Nichols at Preterm Health Services. Young women doing their jobs—answering phones, copying charts, counseling, teaching, being there for patients—were now seen as collaborators in this abortion “holocaust.”
In addition to this sequence of murders, almost two hundred clinics had been bombed since 1977. There had been 347 unlawful clinic entries, 178 death threats, 568 acts of vandalism, and thirty-five burglaries. “Hit lists” of clinic workers circulated among anti-choice organizations. Progressives in the country thought they would be able to rest easy with the election of Bill Clinton, a pro-choice president, but after he took office the war on women went from hot to raging. It seemed that the loss of George H. W. Bush, the antis’ friend in the White House, led to feelings of frustration, alienation, anger, and hopelessness—the perfect cocktail to drive some to radical action. Aggressive activism rose in impassioned waves from the anti-abortion movement.
Their madness was also strategic. Anti-abortion leaders knew that without providers, there could be no choice; legal abortion was theoretical if they could frighten doctors away from providing them. Many of the early physicians, whose commitment was formed by the experience of having women die in their arms or in hospital emergency rooms from botched abortions, had died off or were on the verge of retiring. The increasing number of physicians unwilling to perform the procedure because of harassment or lack of commitment and the dearth of medical schools willing to train residents resulted in the need for traveling doctors like David Gunn, who had taken on the burden of providing abortions for multiple counties and sometimes multiple states. The antis’ strategy seemed to be working.
As ever, the media’s talking heads reassured the public that the murders were random acts of violence, tragedies wrought by psychopathic personalities that had snapped. This placement of the acts within a mental health context had the effect of depoliticizing them. But I viewed this take on the situation as a serious analytic error. The rhetoric was the loaded gun; the killers just pulled the triggers. Anyone, emotionally troubled or not, could plug into that anti-abortion message and participate in violent acts fully sanctioned by their peers.
Evidence of the deliberate construction of a climate undermining support for legal abortion and positioning these killers as god’s rescuers was ubiquitous. Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry, writing in the New York Post shortly after the Brookline murders, made it clear enough: “A society cannot expect to tear thirty-five million innocent babies from their mothers’ wombs without reaping horrifying consequences. Was it perhaps inevitable that the violent abortion industry should itself reap a portion of what it has so flagrantly and callously sown?” Paul Hill, Dr. Britton’s killer, chimed in with an appearance on Nightline during which he told the United States that “sometimes you have to use force to stop people from killing innocent children.” A Roman Catholic priest, David Trosch, unsuccessfully attempted to place an ad in Alabama’s Mobile Register that showed a man pointing a gun at a doctor holding a knife over a pregnant woman with a two-word caption: “Justifiable Homicide.” Conservative government forces and fundamentalist religious groups were taking advantage of the fact that Americans had no viable external threats on which to focus their attention. They manufactured a very effective abortion narrative that painted providers as the new Soviet threat, an “evil empire,”23 and offered Americans a new war with which to revive their American manhood.
The antis loved to invoke history—the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Crusades—to add gravitas to their cause, but they were ahistorical at heart. They had crafted themselves into new social beings, “abortion warriors” who existed out of time and space, who engaged in the present with a terrible sense of urgency directing them to act now. The pro-choice community took issue with the idea that people could claim to be “pro-life” and support the murder of doctors, but this seemingly contradictive act made perfect sense within the millennialist and apocalyptic zeal of the born-again pro-lifer. Paul Hill and other killers who went to prison were seen as martyrs for the cause.
“I HAVE A GUN. I will be hunting your doctors next week,” the voice on the line calmly stated shortly after Dr. Britton’s murder in 1994. Choices had been harassed with many bomb threats over its twenty-three years of operation, and I received death threats on a regular basis, but this one was especially frightening.
My staff, which then included seven physicians, was upset and anxious. Although Choices had a group of loyal clinic escorts on duty every Saturday morning to counteract the antis’ harassment of patients, they were a meager substitute for twelve-gauge shotguns. My doctors discussed wearing bulletproof vests, but decided against them when they recalled that Dr. Britton had been wearing one when he was shot in the head.
We felt like sitting ducks. I was skeptical of the law enforcement community’s will or ability to protect my clinic. It took the murders of three doctors for the government to begin to take anti-abortion violence and harassment against clinic patients and staff seriously. In 1994 the Supreme Court ruled that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which was originally intended to be used to prosecute members of the Mafia and other organized crime, could be used against anti-abortion protesters who crossed the line. That same year, President Clinton signed into law the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), making it a federal crime to block access to an abortion clinic or to use force or threats against a clinic’s patients. Federal protection was ordered for clinics under siege around the country, and for a moment, greater safety for providers, clinic workers, and patients seemed visible on the horizon.
Then I found out about Henry Felisone and Tony Piso, two New York City residents who had signed Paul Hill’s infamous petition describing the use of lethal force in the killing of Dr. David Gunn as “justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children.” They lived within a ten-block radius of Choices.
Now was the time to put law enforcement to the test. I called the New York State attorney general to demand protection, and two days later, Washington posted two federal marshals in front of Choices on a twenty-four-hour basis. But the FBI agents who were investigating our threats were new to the intricacies of the FACE act, and I found myself in the strange position of having to coordinate representatives of the civil rights and criminal divisions of the FBI with my local police precinct to begin an investigation of Felisone and Piso on criminal conspiracy charges. I met with the police department’s community affairs directors to help educate the cops on the street. When a few weeks passed without further threats, the federal marshals dropped down to guarding Choices for just seven hours a day, and patients came and went as they had for years.
It infuriated me that we had to protect or at least be very involved in protecting ourselves when we were operating a legal, constitutionally protected service. I began a gynecological resident training program at Choices in conjunction with La Guardia Hospital and taught doctors in other facilities how to search for bombs, the pros and cons of gun ownership, and where to buy bulletproof vests. I called a meeting of New York abortion providers and representatives of the city’s political establishment to strategize about how to deal with the escalating violence to clinic patients and staff, and soon after, convened a summit in Washington, DC, for providers, pro-choice organizations, and politicians across the country. The leaders of all the major political lobbying and pro-choice organizations gathered to discuss the tactics the movement would need to employ in the coming years.
Wanting to get a sense of what providers experienced in conservative areas of the US, I sent my activist friend Mary Lou Greenberg and another member of the PCC to the South with Refuse and Resist!, a radical human rights activist group, to learn more about small clinics and doctor’s offices that were particularly vulnerable to attacks. They found that many abortion providers felt isolated, left to deal with groups of Operation Rescue members and endless anti-abortion protests on their own. They were ostracized within the medical community and were often treated as social pariahs. Refuse and Resist! created a National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers (March 10) to support the providers and help offset their feelings of isolation.
Mainstream leaders of national feminist organizations urged providers to focus on working with authorities rather than hiring private security forces and taking matters into their own hands, for fear of making matters worse by “stooping to the level” of the antis. Some clinic directors were afraid that counterdemonstrations by pro-choice activists would give their clinics a circus-like atmosphere. But as Mary Lou reported, such hesitation was harmful in the long run because the system could not be relied upon to act in the interests of women. The PCC and Refuse and Resist! encouraged the clinics to uphold their fundamental right to self-defense against armed attacks—no one else was going to do it for them.
At Choices, I hired more guards and upgraded my alarm and security systems, making every attempt to demonstrate and encourage bravery in the face of this terrorism. We had regular clinic escorts who would courageously come out every Saturday wearing orange Choices vests. I was doing everything I could to keep them safe, but nothing could change the fact that it would take only one act of violence to destroy our fragile sense of security.
Neither was I able to protect my patients from feeling the threat of violence outside the clinic and the anxiety it caused the staff within. They would come in crying and upset after hearing the awful exhortations from the antis’ “sidewalk counselors,” and indeed, a great part of many counseling sessions was spent dealing with those psychological assaults.
Even though we spoke with every patient individually prior to her abortion, these short sessions were but pebbles in each woman’s ocean of need and struggle. There was never enough time to address the shame and fear that so many patients brought to the counseling rooms. It became increasingly clear that abortion could not be extricated from other issues women brought to the clinic—violence at home, abusive relationships, incest, danger on the streets, harassment in the workplace, and economic assaults. It was my daily reality and frustration to see the accompanying despair and hopelessness, the feeling that there was no possibility of change, the feeling each woman had that this was not just her life, but life.
As a psychologist I knew something more could be done, as an activist I knew it should be done. I needed to find a way to address each patient’s entire experience, body and mind, as a participant in this struggle. One night while I was in bed watching the eleven o’clock news, I saw a piece about how the Mount Sinai Rape Crisis Center, run at the time by Iona Siegel, was going to lose its funding. I sat bolt upright as they interviewed victims of domestic violence who were distraught because they had no other resource. The next day I contacted Segal and met with her about starting a program at Choices.
That moment was the conception of the Choices Mental Health Center. I appointed Mahin Hassibi as the medical director. She supervised the social workers and made herself available to meet the psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual needs of patients and counselors alike. The entire Choices staff, who also deeply felt the pressure of having to absorb the stress of the patients, was eager and willing to participate in the project. They, too, walked past the protesters, and they, too, had to explain to their friends and families that they worked in an abortion clinic. The Mental Health Center would be as helpful to them as it was necessary for the patients.
We knew many women were in abusive relationships but never asked for help. We understood that this reluctance, especially in our large immigrant population, was based on shame and fear of further violence or the potential of breaking up their families. We thought that the most effective way to reach them was through their primary care physicians, the doctors they went to for usual checkups. Many women would go with inchoate complaints—stomach problems, headaches, inability to focus—symptoms of depression that were also symptoms of being a victim of domestic violence. Mahin and I trained the doctors to use a questionnaire we developed to pick up these signs and assess whether the patient needed a referral for mental health treatment, legal services, or both. We developed a new paradigm termed “disorders of intimacy” that allowed us to define domestic violence as a dysfunction of certain intimate relationships. My willingness to see and treat my patients’ partners—excluding those who had orders of protection against them, or who were deemed to be immediate threats—led to a great deal of debate on the subject with other feminists involved in the domestic violence community who felt that abusive partners should be immediately removed from the home. But I found that agreeing to work with the partners and employing the concept of “disorders of intimacy” enabled women to feel their own agency instead of inhabiting the role of victim. Our goal was to enable them to be more comfortable asking for help and be more effective at stopping the abuse cycle, and in some cases, preventing the first violent act.
Years before, when I’d worked with the Brooklyn Martial Arts Center, I’d helped teach women how to scream, how to use their voices to resist passivity and the enormous power of the collective conditioning to be “good girls.” But as Sally Kempton said, “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” Part of the work of the Mental Health Center was to help women to be present, to feel their power and resist the enemy within and without.
In a sense, the same concept applied to the threatening situation all providers faced. The fact that we were “victims” put us in a kind of female position, waiting for the bully to calm down, hesitating to make too much noise, lest we potentially exacerbate the situation. Like the women who came to us for help with domestic abuse situations, abortion providers and workers collectively held a deep social conditioning that had to be overcome. We had to learn to resist.
ONE EVENING Andrea Dworkin and I discussed the dire situation women in general and abortion providers in particular were facing over dinner at an Afghan restaurant. She said she was questioning the efficacy of nonviolence as a tactic against oppression. With her usual prophetic gravitas she told me she had begun to think about using force, of fighting back against those who would take our lives in their hands.
I was not surprised to hear this. The zeitgeist was definitely changing; there was a palpable, inescapable sense of resistance in the air. When Thelma and Louise hit the theaters, women saw themselves in the two friends who transgressed every barrier and protected each other to the death. Women identified with the characters’ sense of personalized justice rather than lawfully bound definitions of right and wrong. You rape me or my friend, I kill you. You mess with my freedom, I leave you. And, ultimately, you try to kill me, I kill myself, because death is superior to your laws around me.
I thought of the antis marching in front of my clinic, threatening my staff with bombs, seemingly unstoppable forces who believed they were doing god’s work. It was maddening to be unarmed, defenseless, while the antis openly spoke of murdering our forces, then acted on their word. We activists had all been taught that pacifism was generically feminist, that gains could be made through patience and careful, legal steps forward. Yet for every woman served by Choices and Choices Mental Health Center, unknown numbers were suffering violence. I could hold summits, teach my staff self-defense, and publish dozens of editorials in On the Issues, but, as Elie Wiesel said, “One man with a machine gun can kill a thousand sages.”
I knew that things had changed when I was handed a button that read “I’m Pro-Choice and I shoot back” at an abortion providers conference in Washington, DC. Six years before, when the danger had involved only invasions, harassment, and bombings, the buttons and bumper stickers read “I’m Pro-Choice and I vote.”
Doctors hadn’t signed up for this. When they first began to perform abortions they were viewed as progressives, or mavericks. Now they were living in a constant state of post-traumatic stress. Any attack on another provider struck fear and terror in them, which is exactly what the antis wanted. One physician in Nevada had built a million-dollar clinic outfitted with strategic military defense protection and six .357 magnums. He called it Fort Abortion. The late Dr. William Harrison of Arkansas bravely announced, “I have chosen to ride this tiger unquietly, raking its side with verbal spurs, swinging my hat and whooping like a cowboy.” No matter how they chose to handle their plight, doctors had been forced to join the battle.
The gun was on the wall; were we nearing the right time to use it? In order to minimize my vulnerability, I purchased a twenty-gauge, pump-action Mossberg shotgun at a small shop on Garrison’s Main Street to keep at home for self-protection. I shot at tin cans in the woods behind my home to practice my aim, and before long my neighbor noticed the noise and called the police. A Daily News journalist got wind of my purchase from the police blotter and wrote under the headline “Make Her Day”: “If you’ve noticed the Right-to-Life crowds thinning in front of Choices Women’s Medical Center in Queens, maybe it’s because the abortion clinic’s president, Merle Hoffman, just purchased a shotgun.” There was a negative reaction from some of my feminist colleagues, especially my On the Issues editor Beverly Lowy, who was aghast. “Gloria Steinem will be very upset,” she told me. A feminist with a gun? It was politically incorrect.
THE RELENTLESS PRESSURE was compounded by the first patient death at Choices, a thirty-six-year-old Haitian woman who died of an amniotic embolism, a rare but almost always fatal phenomenon that is unforeseeable and unpreventable. Her name was Alerte Desanges.
Even though everything that could have been done to save her had been done, and even though there was no way to prevent or to identify the possibility of the event even occurring, I had a tremendously difficult time with this fatality.
I took many trail rides on Hollywould, my beautiful Arabian horse, trying to come to terms with the reality of her death—and the challenge of having my face and Choices smeared all over television, radio, and print media. These catastophic events happened everywhere, but this one happened at Choices, and that made all the difference. I was forced to make an excuse for something that was impossible to make an excuse for. Since I was not a medical doctor, I was dependent on my physicians’ expertise—but as the CEO of Choices, I was ultimately responsible for what happened there.
Dr. David Gluck, who had performed the abortion, had previously had his license suspended because he’d been writing illegal prescriptions to fund his gambling habit. He was an excellent doctor, though, and an ally wholly committed to women’s reproductive freedom. Marty’s recognition of this and his willingness to hire and supervise Dr. Gluck at Choices during the five years of his probation had saved his career. Now, his past indiscretions complicated the otherwise straightforward incident of Desanges’s death, giving the press the chance to question the medical standards at Choices and our employment of Dr. Gluck.
I told reporters that it was in the American character to give people a chance at redemption, hoping that word might strike a chord. But the media was hungry for stories about abortions gone wrong, ready to cast abortion doctors—never referred to as physicians—as the pariahs of medicine. Well-run, safe clinics like Choices were lumped together with “bargain butchers” who took advantage of poor women or undocumented immigrants who felt they couldn’t turn to a licensed facility for services. When the trial of Abu Hayat, the “Butcher of Avenue A” who botched the abortion of an eight-month-old fetus, leaving the woman hemorrhaging and her daughter with only one arm, hit the press, anti-choice groups used the opportunity to call again for a law declaring the fetus a person with constitutional rights. The pro-choice movement stayed quiet on the issue, hesitating to comment lest they dig themselves even deeper into the hole the press had put them in. We could not defend Hayat—what he did was unconscionable—but we had to make it clear that safe providers existed, too. The department of health was largely responsible for the hypocrisy and politicization of the issue; licensed facilities were held to extremely rigid standards, yet unlicensed facilities were not held to task when they “illegally” (according to a New York State law that was never enforced) performed second trimester abortions, leading to dangerous situations in which doctors were performing twenty-four-week abortions in their own offices.
WELL-PUBLICIZED botched abortions brought second- and late-term abortion procedures, which are more physically and psychologically trying for both patients and doctors than first-term procedures, under public scrutiny. Indeed, when Choices had gone “up” in gestation in the mid-eighties by offering second-term abortions, even I found the process to be emotionally difficult. The results of choice were not diffused and amorphous, but observable and definable.
The only second-trimester procedure offered at the time was the saline abortion, in which saline was injected into the uterine cavity to kill the fetus, after which labor was induced. Due to medical considerations, saline abortions could not be performed until the woman was sixteen or seventeen weeks pregnant. Aside from the fact that a woman who was twelve weeks pregnant (the cut off for first trimester abortions) had to go through the trauma of waiting five weeks to have an abortion, when she entered the hospital to expel the fetus she faced another special kind of hell: abortion patients were placed in the maternity ward of the hospital next to mothers who were giving birth, and many became the targets of antiabortion sentiments.
Wanting their patients to avoid that experience, gynecologists eventually developed dilation and evacuation (D and E), a technique where the fetus was dismembered within the woman’s uterus and removed. D and E’s were much safer and psychologically easier on the patient since they could be performed at any point after twelve weeks and did not require the woman to go through a delivery. But the procedure was difficult for the doctor and staff performing it—and difficult for the public to stomach. As debates about fetal pain entered the public discussion, some physicians began routinely injecting and killing the fetus with digoxin prior to the abortion itself, eliminating the possibility that the fetus might experience pain.
Graphic descriptions of the procedure, as well as misconceptions about how and why it was performed, added to the stigmatization of providers. These late-term procedures were done only under rare circumstances in which the mother’s life or health were at risk or it was determined to be a safer procedure by the physician. But antis focused on the difficult, traumatic procedure itself rather than on the fact that it was only performed when medically necessary. Learning that in some critical late-term cases the fetus was partially dismembered, and the skull crushed, outside the birth canal—a procedure called intact dilation and extraction (IDE)—antis renamed the procedure “partial birth abortion,” using physiological geography to further advance their claim that the procedure was no different from murder.
The 1996 case of Amy Grossberg and Brian C. Peterson, Jr., two high school sweethearts charged with intentionally killing their newborn son and abandoning him in a dumpster, was publicly twisted by the antis into a parable with a pro-life moral. Arguing that the Peterson-Grossberg neonaticide was merely an extension of a late-term abortion was a particularly insidious style of political spin, similar to the arguments that fetuses were analogous to Jews during the Holocaust or blacks during slavery. And like “aboritoriums,” “abortion mills,” and “Hitlers,” “partial birth abortions” became a hot-button term used to manipulate the truth about the hows and whys of abortion in the eyes of the public.
Ron Fitzsimmons, the founding executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (NCAP), publicly said that he’d lied in 1995 when he told Ted Koppel on Nightline that there were only five hundred “partial birth abortions” in the United States each year, stating the number was actually over five thousand. He implied that all abortion providers had agreed to be deliberately dishonest about how often IDEs were performed on patients. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times, Fitzsimmons was not himself a provider, he was a lobbyist, and the “shocking” revelation of the number of IDEs performed each year was already common knowledge. But the damage had been done, and anti-abortion activists reacted with glee, publicizing Fitzsimmons’s lie as if they’d uncovered a conspiracy.
I was furious. He was a hired gun who had shot himself and the pro-choice movement in the foot, and I didn’t want him to get away with it. NCAP had played a very important role for providers since its inception in 1990 and I had worked closely with them to develop their organizational philosophy. It was a coalition of smaller, independent providers that acted as a balance to NAF, which was heavily loaded with Planned Parenthood leaders and interests. Planned Parenthood was quite different from the smaller facilities and clinics, and it had access to political power and money for nonprofit activities that allowed it to become a fierce competitor of smaller, but equally important, doctors’ offices and abortion clinics. Fitzsimmons had sabotaged the reputation of a very important vehicle for women’s choice. The reaction of many of the women of NCAP mirrored the “stand by your man” persona of political wives who supported their philandering or criminally involved husbands. But I pulled out of the organization, recalling a $10,000 grant I had given them. I thought he should have fallen on his sword, at least—and if he wouldn’t, someone else should have helped him to do it.
Perhaps the worst effect of Fitzimmons’s debacle was its political impact. Some pro-choice leaders were willing to publicly oppose IDEs as a way to appease the antis. After a New York Times article on the issue broke, the House revisited and approved the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act by an even larger veto-proof majority than it had the previous year. It gave some normally pro-choice, progressive Democratic senators reason to vote for legislation that placed women’s right to choose in increasing jeopardy.
The antis had found a way to incorporate their agenda into the democratic platform, and they were being given free openings. More pro-life Democrats began demanding equal access to the Democratic platform and powerful committee positions, and in the name of the “big tent,” the Democrats handed it over. They nominated Dr. Henry Foster, Jr., a moderate physician who publicly stated that he “abhorred abortion,” for the position of surgeon general, and even invited Harold Ford, Jr., an anti-choice House representative from Tennessee, to give the keynote speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.
The antis had effectively transcended the bifurcation of the Right and Left on the issue of abortion. Combining the “right to life” with other progressive causes, antis could find a home wherever they were on the political spectrum. Many people who described themselves as politically pro-choice began to feel the need to say, “I don’t like abortion, but.. .” while political leaders regularly followed President Clinton’s adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”
As a pro-choice president Clinton did deserve credit for his two vetoes of the “partial birth” abortion bills, but his willingness to cater to the Blue Dog Democrats, and increasingly the Republicans, was becoming a political problem. At the UN Population and Development Conference in Cairo Vice President Al Gore, bending to pressure from the Catholic Church and its fundamentalist allies, assured the attendees at the conference that “the United States has not sought, does not seek, and will not seek an international right to abortion.” He cemented the US government’s position that reproductive freedom was not a transcendent human or civil right, but merely a local privilege that could be granted, limited, or denied according to national customs and laws. This may have been situational diplomatic maneuvering, but it read as gender-specific noblesse oblige.
And then there were the turncoats. The pro-choice movement had always had defectors—people like Dr. Bernard Nathanson (the owner and operator of CRASH, one of the nation’s first and largest abortion clinics, who went on to produce the anti-choice film classic The Silent Scream) who had a public change of mind and heart. Thanks to Clinton and Gore the numbers began to increase at an alarming pace. Norma McCorvey,24 a.k.a. Jane Roe, the original poster girl for choice, was the most famous example of this particular social and political trend. It has always amused me that people can find Jesus in the strangest of places; when news broke that McCorvey had gotten herself baptized in a Texas swimming pool by a leader of Operation Rescue, I was not surprised. Reverend Flip Benham, who did the honors, reported that Jesus Christ “had reached through the abortion mill wall and touched the heart of Norma McCorvey.” “I’ve cheated people out of money,” McCorvey told Ted Koppel in a Nightline interview on August 15. “I’ve sold drugs. I’ve done a lot against his teaching. But I think the greatest sin that I did was to be the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade.”
Feminist Naomi Wolf argued in The New Republic that the pro-choice movement had committed three mortal sins: “hardness of heart, lying, and political failure.” She posited that by using the language of communitarianism, positioning abortion rights within a paradigm of traditional Judeo-Christian rights and responsibilities, the pro-choice movement would be able to expand its political base to include the all-encompassing middle where most Americans felt comfortable. To my thinking, this strategy would only operate as a Trojan horse to bring the enemy’s arguments into the heart of pro-choice territory, potentially tearing the movement apart.
Wolf concluded her piece by calling for a fantasy of a world where “passionate feminists might hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead” (the unborn, the never to be born). In the real world I lived in, passionate feminists were desperately needed to stand shoulder to shoulder with doctors and clinic workers to help protect them against the Michael Griffins, Paul Hills, and John Salvis who shot them down in cold blood. We were facing expansions of the Hyde amendment, increased clinic violence, limits on federal employee health insurance, denial of abortions to women in the military, and the reinstatement of the global gag rule. Where was her anger? Where were Thelma and Louise? I didn’t care about the rhetoric and rituals of memorials and lighting candles for the dead. I wanted the sisterhood to light the fires of resistance in the living.
That spirit of resistance had already begun to fade, replaced by politically institutionalized actions. The anti-choice and pro-choice movements were operating as sophisticated political campaigns, using visuals, metaphors, debating points, and strategies to construct abortion narratives that would win over the masses. The media contributed by perpetuating the kind of soulless sports mentality that registered everything in neatly competitive categories: Right-to-life 2, Pro-choice 0. Cable channel New York 1 even wanted me to debate two right-to-lifers on the issue of whether or not murdering doctors was justifiable homicide. I declined. The fact that this debate was even proposed was indicative of the backslide the movement had undergone.
The words “pro-choice” were no longer descriptive of the women’s movement on anything but a theoretical, ideological level. People felt it was necessary for the movement to cloak and soften the crushing reality of abortion in order to instill in people the knowledge that it was absolutely necessary for women’s survival and participation as full citizens in this society. But women’s rights, women’s lives, and women’s equality and autonomy wouldn’t sell in the American marketplace, no matter how appealingly they were presented. In the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the American people, the pro-choice and women’s movements had to take care not to lose their souls.
IN A CHANGING political climate in which even the Left could not be counted on to support abortion clinics and providers, it was more important than ever for me to keep Choices functioning at its highest level. The women who came to us seeking abortions did not care about Bill Clinton’s flip-flopping or communitarianism. They just needed abortions.
I always had to make tough choices to ensure their needs were met, but in the mid to late nineties, gut-wrenching decisions seemed to be part of my daily fare. I had been subsidizing my Mental Health Center with the surplus revenues of Choices to keep it alive while working to get it licensed, after which I assumed it would support itself. But mental health patients were always the stepchildren of the health care system. Insurance and Medicaid rates were not high enough to pay providers, and limits on the number of mental health-related visits made it hard for patients to get the care they needed. Subsidizing these expenses drained Choices, contributing to an extreme cash deficit.
The situation was compounded further by an avalanche of economic and political attacks. Choices’ twenty-year lease was up, and it was time to negotiate a new one. But my landlord, Sam LeFrak, had ceded the management of his real estate corporation to his son Richard, who had very different politics from his father. When it came within one year of discussing the possibility of signing another lease, Richard LeFrak made it clear to me that he had no intention of having an “abortion center” continue to be a tenant in his building. If I was not out by the end of the lease, he told me, I would be forcibly evicted.
He had already signed a contract with CompUSA to take over my lease at the end of a three-month holdover period, and he threatened to “bulldoze” my space if I remained one extra day. But it was nearly impossible to find a new building and move the entire clinic with so little warning. We petitioned the court to keep our doors open until we could get a new space ready, and dozens of letters of support were sent by prominent members of the community to the civil court of Queens County in 1998. “This is more than a landlord/tenant dispute—this action threatens to impact the health and safety of many Queens County residents,” wrote Geraldine Ferraro. Yet the courts ruled against me, and I was forced to liquidate my entire savings to cover the costs of speeding up the construction of the new site.
When we finally did move into our new space (at which time it was only 70 percent finished) in October of 1997, we found that we’d simply gone from one crisis to another. Six months after I had signed the lease, the building had been sold to an owner who was anti-abortion—and committed to making my life miserable. Tim Ziss, the owner’s representative, attempted by any means possible to prevent me from moving into the new space, trying to make me change the layout from the front door to the back of the building—in essence, attempting to change our address. When I refused, Ziss did not allow the contractors to work, again jeopardizing the operation. The extent of the harassment was so severe that I had to call Attorney General Janet Reno’s office, which provided armed federal marshals to guard my space during the last few months of construction.
Over the next two years, Ziss left Choices without heat or air conditioning, and unfinished roof work resulted in multiple floods. All of these financial pressures forced me to delay paychecks, forgo my salary for six months, purchase supplies on personal credit cards, implement pay cuts, lay off staff, and suspend all advertising, resulting in a drastic reduction in my patient population.
Then came the ultimate test: should I choose theory or practice, vision or pragmatism, ethics or survival? I had only enough money to either meet payroll and get supplies, or to pay taxes. Opting to survive, I accepted the fact that I would have to deal with my tax situation when it arose, hopefully far in the future. I stopped paying them—the point was to have a future.
By now I was living on pure adrenaline, going from one lawyer to another as I tried to stave off bankruptcy, keep the builders working, the clinic open, the patients safe, and my own sanity intact. Just as with the indictment, Marty was having difficulty keeping himself psychologically together. He often told me he felt weak, and he had difficulty walking long distances. He was nearly eighty years old.
I REMEMBER EMBRACING Marty in the hallway outside of my studio apartment in Queens in the full flush of passion, telling him that I would love him forever, that things would never change between us. He looked at me with a poignancy that struck me as strangely sweet at the time. “No,” he said, “I will age, and it won’t be the same.” And he was right. In a brutally honest, yet gentle discussion, we acknowledged we were no longer meeting each other’s needs. We still loved each other, but we knew we had to let each other go. He began to spend his weekends in Florida while I stayed in Garrison. We were not legally separated, but we arranged to have split custody of the house.
Despite all that, we were still allies. When Marty turned eighty, I wanted to honor him, our marriage, and our partnership. He was never really recognized by the powers at HIP for all his important work, and I wanted to give him the retirement dinner they never had for him. I threw him an eightieth birthday party at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park and invited many of the HIP colleagues and personal friends of his who were no longer friends of mine.
About a month before he died we had dinner at one of our old favorite Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village. Having recently spent so much time apart, we began to reflect on our relationship. We expressed how much we had given one another, and how sorry we were for the hurt we had caused each other just by being ourselves.
I arrived home at my apartment late one Sunday evening after an event. When I flipped on my answering machine I was greeted by my sister-in-law’s voice. “Merle, Merle, it’s Marty. He had a heart attack. He’s gone.” Click.
I erased the message and sat in silence. After what seemed an immeasurable amount of time, I picked up a pen and spent the night writing Marty’s obituary.25
BY THE TIME of Marty’s death I had come to know myself enough to be able to apologize to his ex-wife, Bernice, at the funeral, for all the pain I had caused her. Indeed, with Marty’s death, my eviction, and the constant stress of being a pariah, I thought I knew everything there was to know. But there was another lesson in reality waiting for me. I had never really felt that the world had lost its moorings, never questioned the certainty of my own survival, until I was betrayed, soon after Marty’s death, by one of my doctors, Alan Zarkin. He brought me the closest I had ever come to my own destruction. He was the worst of my paid enemies.
Marty had taken Zarkin on as another of his pet projects, “rescuing” him after he came under fire for a drug addiction problem—all too common with doctors in high stress fields. I’d worked with him off and on for years, and I knew him to be an excellent physician, someone who had struggled with his addiction demons and triumphed, and a good Jewish son who took care of his mother. But one day I received a complaint from a lawyer naming Zarkin as the plaintiff. This in and of itself was not very unusual; a busy medical center receives complaints, requests for charts, and other legal documents on a fairly regular basis. I read through it quickly until my eyes came upon the words “carved two inches high into her stomach.” I went back and read it again, transfixed. Zarkin was being accused of carving his initials into a patient’s stomach after he delivered her baby at Beth Israel Hospital, where he had worked before coming to Choices. I picked up my phone and paged Zarkin, who was on the second floor doing cases.
When he entered my office I waved the legal papers in his face. “Is this true?” Without even asking me what the papers were, he answered calmly, “Yes.”
I had the sickening feeling inside my stomach that one gets when falling off a very high cliff in a nightmare.
I called my management team and my lawyers for an immediate meeting in my office, during which it was revealed that Zarkin had been sued for this carving in the past and had lied to me on his medical application when asked whether he was accredited to work at Beth Israel. He was not. I was sitting in amazed silence, still shocked, when Zarkin announced, “If you have nothing else for me to do I have to catch a plane for Paris.” I told him he was fired.
The first phone call came from the Daily News, and then the games began. Dr. Elahi, the medical director I had hired Zarkin to replace because of his incompetence, told the New York Times he thought I’d known about Zarkin’s act when I hired him—a lie. But Dr. Elahi had known, my administrator had known, and Beth Israel had known, and they had all neglected to inform me that I had hired a compromised physician. The Department of Health had known, too, but since they were required to give Zarkin “due process,” they kept me in the dark, letting Choices take the fall.
I was familiar with the manipulation of the media, acutely aware of how one word, one turn of phrase, could create new worlds. New headlines greeted me each morning. The Queens Courier: “Clinic Director Says, ‘Dr. Zorro Betrayed Me.’” The New York Post: “Abort-Clinic Deaths Didn’t Nix His Career”; “Probed Doctors Aren’t Feeling Much Pain”; “Mark of Zorro Remains a blight on NY Women”; “Zorro Clinic should be out of abortion biz”; “Zorro cut some slack.” And the Tablet: “Abortion Is a Dirty Risky Business.” I tried to protect myself when I gave an interview to the New York Times by having my lawyer on the other end of the conversation, but the piece was essentially a smear job, and my reputation in the field, which had been the best in the industry, was blasted to pieces.
Newspapers called ex-employees who were living in other states to try and pull up dirt about me. Reporters pushed their way into Choices, and someone sneaked in with a hidden camera posing as a patient to see if they could find anything. Confidential files were stolen from my office. Memos that I had written were flashed across the screen on prime time. My enemies watched and waited. People who were very close to me, people who were working for me, competitors, feminists, politicians—everyone was quick to believe what they read about me and the clinic. Even the women with whom I had fought on the barricades, people I had mentored and trained in radical abortion politics, were not there to support or defend me.
The next lie told by the New York Times hit Choices harder than anything that had come before: “Queens Clinic being investigated for Medicaid Fraud.” This was patently untrue. I was undergoing a routine audit like all other regulated health care providers, and if they found anything that they perceived as suspicious it would be referred to the attorney general. No issues were found, but the consistent negative publicity led to the loss of many longterm referral sources, an inability to recruit new staff, and ultimately, the near bankruptcy of the clinic.
It also left an opening for the Department of Health to go after the clinic with a vengeance. Antonia Novello, the health commissioner at the time who was later indicted for having abused her power during her seven-year tenure, had a personal anti-choice agenda. During a speech she made to a pro-choice group, she announced that she intended to go “hunting bear” at Choices the next day, looking for anything she could find to shut me down. Novello subsequently published a negative report detailing Choices’ infractions: our medical records were not organized according to the DOH’s specifications, the doctors’ signatures were not always legible, and we had difficulty with heating the facility due to problems with the landlord. She had gone searching for problems to make a political point. Choices was given a $60,000 fine, $40,000 higher than that of Beth Israel, where Zarkin had actually done his dirty work. I was ordered to close the clinic for two weeks, while Beth Israel was allowed to continue to operate without interruption. Their only casualty was Dr. Daniel Saltzman, the head of the OB/GYN department of Beth Israel at the time, who had known about Zarkin’s act when he came to Choices for a meeting to institute a referral agreement for prenatal patients with him. Saltzman had been fired by Beth Israel shortly after that meeting.
The DOH sent their operatives into the clinic the morning after Novello shut us down and put their fingers in the sinks to check whether we had used them in the middle of the night. It reminded me of Marty’s description of the Midnight Express—abortion by candlelight.
In a way, the patients had a better sense of reality than the media or the movement. Even when we were closed, they continued to show up for services. The Department of Health had developed a list of places to which the abortion patients—about 250 a week at the time—could be referred, but amazingly, some of these “facilities” were unlicensed doctor’s offices that didn’t even have anesthesiologists. The Department of Health wasn’t living up to its own standards. The patients preferred to follow my recommendations instead, trusting my judgment. Every morning when they arrived they willingly boarded buses I hired to take them to the Brooklyn Ambulatory Surgery Center, a licensed clinic that arranged to accommodate our patients in their facility.
After the two weeks were finally up and Choices had answered all the numerous citations of the Department of Health, I was told that I could begin to treat patients again. I was relieved, excited to get back to work and serve those who had loyally come back to Choices. There were about sixty patients in the waiting room the morning we reopened. My lawyer came into my office with a strange look—and more bad news. Ziss had reported to the Department of Buildings that I had been operating in his building for years without an appropriate certificate of occupancy. This was entirely untrue—I could never have opened in that location in the first place without Department of Buildings approval—but nevertheless, the claim had to be investigated. We were forced to close for one more week.
The Zarkin scandal had metastasized into losing longstanding referral sources, competitors taking advantage by feeding negative publicity, patients believing that Choices was closed for good, staff leaving because the press was harassing them at home, and international defamation of Choices and myself. To this day people come up to me and ask, “Does that crazy doctor still work for you?”
I HAD BEEN instrumental in defining the reality that it was not politics, but necessity which brought women to choose abortion. The only thing that bound them together, the primal commonality, was the physicality of the thing itself. The legs spread apart, the speculum, the suction machine—that never changed. But everything else had become a mediated reality. I wanted to go back to the beginning, when there was just me and my consciousness, not even informed by feminism. I longed for true solitude.
I stopped debating and giving speeches. In 1999 I suspended publication of On the Issues. The bomb threats, Marty’s death, the eviction from a space I had leased for twenty years, and my inability to subsidize the magazine anymore overcame my need for artistic expression. Looking back, I see now that I was in a constant state of agitated depression. Abortion had become as codified politically and institutionally as anything else. It was exhausting.
The adventures I had with Mahin were the only respite for me during these times. She understood my internal struggles more than anyone else, and I could be totally myself with her. On the eve of my fiftieth birthday we found ourselves in an old Russian helicopter, rising thousands of miles over the Himalayas. To further remove myself from materiality, I went to Nepal, a world that was, ironically, intensely physical. From Everest, where the rarefied atmosphere creates a constant focus on one’s breath, to Katmandu, where the fog of pollution and the stench of poverty and incense do the same, I found myself aware of my senses, surrounded by an endless cycle of death, birth, and rebirth that triggered a rush of physical memories of my own history.
What did being fifty mean for a woman?
I thought of the last twenty-five years: building Choices, defining and realizing a world where women’s lives and women’s realities were named and validated; the thousands of women who came expecting and receiving safety, compassion, and understanding; all the lives I touched, all the lives that touched mine; my deferred dream of doing the same for Russian women; all the great and small political battles fought and those still to come. Worlds away from Choices, I remembered the seeds of my passion.
I kept moving. I flew to South Africa to work with a rape crisis center. I traveled to Iran with Mahin, entering her country curiously, and somewhat apprehensively. In a sense, Iran entered me. Dressing as a Muslim woman in a chador, I moved awkwardly into a socially constructed invisibility. But remarkably, by the time I left Iran I would find the restrictive coverings an unexpected revelation. I felt totally concealed, yet strangely naked at the same time. Free from an individuality defined by attire, and with only one’s face exposed, the presented “self” became more focused and authentic. For the first time, I inhabited a space without familiar roles or stereotypic assumptions.
I traveled alone to the Galápagos. I experienced the barren, dry black lava with a breathless expanse of twilight-blue sky. At night there were so many stars I was able to lose myself in the sky, to reflect. I thought about my new life without Marty. At first I had struggled with my aloneness, with not having someone there to leave me alone. I had maintained the questionable belief that a romantic partnership could fill some void or truly fulfill me. Soon, though, I found that I no longer believed that. I knew how to fill myself.