Book Review: Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room by Merle Hoffman
Could you say what percentage of the women you know have had an abortion?
Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States, abortion is still something that people don't talk about as a personal choice. That's why it's refreshing to read Merle Hoffman's memoir "Intimate Wars."
Hoffman is an unapologetic abortion provider: She owns a clinic in New York City that traces its history back to 1971, when the doctor she worked for decided to get into the business. Originally Hoffman didn't even define herself as a feminist; she liked the challenge of managing the business and became emotionally involved with the issue as she worked with her clients. As the abortion wars heated up and clinic blockades became common in the late 1970s, she became politicized and helped organize resistance to the abortion backlash.
Hoffman's clinic was a microcosm of changes in the field of women's health and in the debate about abortion. Originally, it was operated with typically sexist male doctors who made comments such as "'Come on, you knew how to spread your legs before you got here, you can spread them for the exam.'" Hoffman began sitting in on procedures to keep the doctors in line, offered counseling to clients and eventually promulgated a concept she called "Patient Power" -- the idea, common today, that patients have rights in deciding their health care.
As anti-abortion forces regrouped, Hoffman's clinic faced threats of gun attacks and bombings; her clients had to run a gantlet of persistent "sidewalk counselors" who tried to block the entrance. Hoffman, by no means a pacifist, even kept a shotgun at home to protect herself.
Hoffman is eloquent in writing about why the right to abortion is necessary -- and why women shouldn't shrink from it, even though "Mothers?...?knew that?...?'abortion stops a beating heart.' ... The act of choosing whether or not to have a child is often an act of love, and always an act of survival." Hoffman asserts that instead of the right to privacy invoked in Roe vs. Wade, the right to abortion should be based on the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude.
Unfortunately, Hoffman tends toward the grandiose. Her avowed role model is Queen Elizabeth I (the one who executed Mary Stuart and defeated the Spanish Armada), and her website features a picture of herself riding a white horse. She is clearly concerned with establishing her place in women's history and makes some anachronistic claims. For example, her narrative makes it sound as if she was the first to use the symbol of a coat hanger, at a rally in 1985, to represent the bloody alternatives to legalized abortion, declaring it "went on to become a ubiquitous symbol of reproductive rights." But coat hangers were used in abortion rights protests throughout the 1970s and probably before that.
More surprisingly, Hoffman talks about "Patient Power" as if she came up with it all on her own, not acknowledging the ferment of similar ideas coming from feminist women's clinics in the same period. Hoffman asserts that the seminal self-help manual for women's health care, "Our Bodies, Ourselves," with a similar underlying thrust, hadn't yet been published when she developed her ideas. But the book was published in 1971, the same year her clinic opened.
Hoffman is frank about her personal life, including getting her start as the prot