Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room

Author: Merle Hoffman

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Pages: 336 (paperback)

Price: $18.95 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1558617513

The Susan G. Komen Foundation, the nation’s largest and best funded breast cancer research charity, has found out the hard way that this nation’s wannabe Christian theocrats will lay waste to anyone or any institution to make abortion unavailable in this country.

The beleaguered charity should have consulted Merle Hoffman, author of the recently published memoir, Intimate Wars, before agreeing to the anti-abortion agenda of a vice president of public policy hired last year. The veep pushed Komen to stop funding Planned Parenthood breast cancer screenings under the guise of adopting new grant standards.

That ill-advised action has done the charity extensive harm. Komen has somewhat backtracked, saying that Planned Parenthood will still be eligible to apply for grants but not promising to provide any further funding beyond what has already been approved.

Komen is now in the no-win position of every woman who faces an unwanted pregnancy. Damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t.

It’s the ultimate irony and an object lesson that abortion is still a hot issue almost four decades after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, on Jan. 22, 1973, granting women in every state legal access to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Welcome to the polarized world of Hoffman, who has lived the public and private war over abortion for most of her adult life. Her powerful book is really about personal power, set in the context of abortion politics, the reality of abortion in women’s lives, and her own life, too.

It should be required reading for every young women who takes legal access to abortion for granted. It is outstanding reading, too, for those of us old enough to remember it all and those who want to know what happened from an insider.

“The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by so many in society,” Hoffman explains. “Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it.”

This book, of course, is a humanist examination of personal power that does not delve into the subject’s spiritual, energy-based implications. Intimate Wars does, however, take the critical first step of putting power and women in the same sentence—still a rarity even in today’s culture and politics and certainly unheard of just a few decades ago when much of this book’s action unfolds.

Hoffman takes readers for the ride of her life. And what a life it has been to date. In 1971, in her twenties and without any type of healthcare related training or credentials, Hoffman was nonetheless in a position to help found and direct one of the country’s first abortion clinics. It was the Flushing Women’s Medical Center in Queens, New York, which later became Choices. This was two years before Roe, just after New York state legalized abortion.

The author and I think the same way about the legal foundations for abortion. Hoffman writes, “Roe determined that the right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action was broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy (within a gestational framework), thus classifying it as a fundamental right. But I had always believed that arguing for the right to reproductive freedom under the same umbrella as the right to read pornography in one’s home was a tenuous arrangement…

“As the stealth laws threatened to defeat the impact of Roe, I became more and more convinced that the right to abortion should have been articulated under the Thirteenth Amendment. This would frame reproductive freedom as a universal human right, and perhaps give the pro-choice movement the strength to hold the relentless attacks by the antis at bay.”

I have had this perspective on abortion since 1989. Coercing women into unwanted pregnancy and childbirth by making abortion illegal violates the Thirteenth Amendment ban on involuntary servitude. Women are more than childbirth chattel and their lives have meaning beyond their ability to reproduce the species.

The author and I also regard women as moral agents—just like men. Think about literature of the past and present as well as popular culture of yesterday and today. How often has women’s moral agency been portrayed or even mentioned in passing? Women have been protagonists in domestic dramas or comedies for hundreds of years and, lately, they have been portrayed on screens small and big as sexually active (but always focused on or in pursuit of a man).

Almost never does fiction in any medium portray women as protagonists capable of making conscious, rational choices (moral agency) in any context or setting other than domestic or sexual, and even in these areas the woman’s moral agency is a tossup. Hoffman sees abortion as ground zero for women’s moral agency. I heartily wish it were otherwise but cannot argue with her keen observation. Why can’t a woman be a hero? I have asked this question since I was a child reading the same romantic tales of adventure and intrigue as Hoffman and wondering, Where are the women?

The central irony of Hoffman’s life, laid out forthrightly in this memoir, was the gulf between her public persona and her private experience of intimacy. She soon became a leading U.S. advocate for women’s right to legal abortion and for what she developed and called patient power. She insisted that the physicians and other professional members of her staff treat their patients with respect, and she advocated for informed patient consent and for educating women about how their bodies worked. It became a model for patient treatment across the board, not just for healthcare unique to women.

It was very forward-thinking for the 1970s. And it was motivated, at least in part, by Hoffman’s getting to know her patients and hearing the horror stories of how they became pregnant when they did not want to be. She does not let the medical profession off the hook.

“The trail of pregnancies cause by doctors’ misinformation, ignorance, or carelessness was endless,” Hoffman recalls. “I began to call this phenomenon iatrogenic pregnancy...many of the good-hearted male doctors supporting the clinic did not see abortion in the context of a woman’s right to control her reproduction and thus her life. It was more a way for them to control woman’s messy, complicated bodies.”

Out of the spotlight, however, Hoffman filled woman’s age-old role of mistress to one of these physicians, alone on nights, weekends, and holidays while he spent time with his wife and family. She finally put her foot down and they eventually married after a three-year messy divorce. It was never an easy union and Hoffman, like many tough-minded women, was challenged to navigate the minefield of being part of a couple without losing herself.

In public, Hoffman also was on the front lines of domestic antiabortion terrorism that quickly moved beyond acrimonious words to clinic bombings, murders, and non-stop legislative efforts at the federal and state level to restrict access to abortion and thus render Roe meaningless.

“The antis clearly understood that to keep women in the traditional roles of wife and mother—and thus prevent wholesale societal upheaval—they had to remove a women’s power to choose,” she writes.

Although Hoffman reviews the wider political and historical variations of abortion law, it is the personal narrative of the patients’ experiences and background and of her own abortion that transform her memoir into a page-turner.

She is at her independent best raising her feminist colleagues’ ire. When the violence against her clinic and other abortion providers reaches a crescendo that is ignored by federal and local authorities, she buys a gun and learns to use it. Good for her. She also gets rich providing abortions, and is ostracized by other women’s movement leaders who insist, naively, from Hoffman’s perspective, that abortion should be free.

Hoffman again displays her independent streak when she writes that framing support for abortion rights as a choice refuses to consider the consequences of that choice, and blunts our “capacity to register the depth of this issue and disrespects the profound political and social struggle women’s choices engenders in society.”

In other words, out of her own experiences with the patients in her clinics, Hoffman knows that unwanted pregnancy is a profound crisis: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and economic, and that abortion may help resolve the physical and economic problems, but does not begin to address the other issues.

One of those issues, not explored by Hoffman’s book but one I have thought about for years, is the meaning of abortion for the fetus. This is a metaphysical question, of course, but it is not merely rhetorical. It can be answered, and quite simply.

Abortion means delay. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. It certainly does not mean the utter annihilation of an innocent life, all hot air to the contrary notwithstanding.

Whether the fetus is aborted naturally, which happens more often than most realize, or artificially, the soul chooses another mother (or the same one later on) and comes to earth that way.

This is possible because the soul is energy-consciousness, which cannot be destroyed, and it both precedes and survives the physical body. When we as a society finally grasp this deeper understanding about the true nature of our being, abortion politics will fade away.

Hoffman eventually becomes a mother through adoption, and finds hope and healing through her child. Her life certainly demonstrates what I have known for some time.

One woman can make a difference.