Merle Hoffman's Remarks at NYU Law School
On Women's Equality Day - August 26, 2006
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Merle Hoffman is founder and president of Choices Women's Medical and Mental Health Centers, Publisher and Editor of On the Issues Magazine, founder of the National Abortion Federation, NY Pro-Choice Coalition, author, debator, and activist. I am honored to be here with you today, in this time of struggle, challenge, and transition. The theme of this conference is Feminists Moving Forward: Our past is the Future.
In terms of Reproductive Rights, OUR PAST is littered with corpses, butchered women, shattered lives and families with dreams deferred and denied.
When I SPEAK OF ABORTION, FEMINISM IS THE THEORY AND ABORTION IS THE PRACTISE. When I speak of abortion - Women are the primary sources and the texts are written in blood.
I remember the first patient who came to Choices. It was 1971 and New York was one of only seven states that had repealed their abortion restrictions prior to the US Supreme Court’s legalizing abortion in the 1973 Roe V. Wade decision. This woman was white, married, and in her early twenties. And she came from New Jersey because abortion was still illegal in that state. And she was nervous, very. very nervous.
This woman was terrified. She was pregnant and did not want to be. The memories of back alleys and coat hangers were very present to her.
In the end, I do not remember a word of what passed between us. It was... strangely Irrelevant. I do not remember her face. And her hand. Yes, her hand became for me, in that moment, without my knowing, the guiding force of my life.
FAST FORWARD TO THE PRESENT WITH ME AT THIS PODIUM:
WHY IS THE RIGHT TO LEGAL, SAFE. ABROTION STILL CONSIDERED ONE OF THE HOTTEST ISSUES IN THIS COUNTRY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS? WHY?
Because the act of abortion and choice is power. It is women at their most powerful, exercising the right of fetal existence, defining what grows within them as a welcome event or an overwhelming assault. Because It is not politics but necessity that drives women’s choices and forms the political and theoretical foundation of the right to choose.
BECAUSE THIS IS THE CHOICE THAT IS THE FRONT LINE AND THE BOTTOM LINE OF WOMEN’S FREEDOM AND CIVIL RIGHTS.
BECAUSE IF WE CANNOT DECIDE WHEN OR WHETHER OR NOT TO BE A MOTHER, HOW, CAN WE EVER BE FULL CITIZENS? INDEED, HOW CAN WE EVER BECOME FULL HUMAN BEINGS?
Right here, right now, in our country, thirty-three years after Roe v Wade, our wombs remain battlefields. And we are the soldiers, willing or not, in this generational and cosmic power struggle against a movement that has been extraordinarily successful in its guerilla campaign against legal abortion, and now birth control, on multiple fronts.
From harassing patients in front of clinics, to marginalizing and killing doctors and clinic workers, to insuring that eighty-seven percent of counties in this country have no abortion providers, to bombs, economic pressures, evictions, guerilla malpractice, and legislation, to parental consent, waiting periods, to winning hearts and minds for a bill that criminalizes a medical procedure for the first time in history, the so called “partial-birth abortion” bill, anti Choice forces march on!
In 1989 I organized the first pro-choice, civil disobedience action, where nine people were arrested. I held up a huge coat hanger signifying the future for American women if Cardinal O’Conner continued to support Randall Terry and Operation Rescue. We placed a large parchment on the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a la Martin Luther at Wittenberg.
We affirmed these principles:
Women are full moral agents with the right and ability to choose when and whether or not they will be mothers.
Abortion is a choice made by each woman individually for profound personal reasons that no man or state should judge.
The right to make reproductive choices is women’s legacy throughout history and belongs to every woman regardless of age, class religion or sexual preference.
Abortion is a life-affirming act chosen within the context of women’s realities, women’s lives and women’s sexuality
Abortion is often the most moral choice in a world that frequently denies health care, housing, education and economic survival.
SO HOW DO WE PUT THESE PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTISE?
So how do we insure that our reproductive past is not our future?
AND HOW DO WE CHANGE THE WORLD FROM WHAT IS TO WHAT SHOULD BE?
Any woman having an abortion is political in the deepest sense of the word. Her feminism is forged in the fires of experience. WE MUST TRANSALTE THAT BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE INTO A POLTICIAL ONE!
And we must create a true national collectivity as women! We must create a transcendent class where we would identify with all women struggling to make choices and defend them rather then resist that power through guilt and denial.
And we must work on COMING OUT OF THE ABORTION CLOSET AND ON HAVING ABORTIONS WITHOUT APOLOGY! WHY
Must we APOLOGIZE for saying that THE POWER OF THE STATE STOPS AT OUR SKIN? WHY MUST WE apologize for wanting power, for wanting freedom, and for wanting equality?
Women who have had abortions should say so publicly and stand for that choice with their lovers, husbands and friends!
We must STAND WITH THE PROVIDERS ON A DAIILY BASIS, UNDERSTANDNG THAT THE BATTLE IS FOUGHT EVERY SINGLE DAY, not once a year with a march or two. We must change our politics from defensive to offensive, and not be satisfied with the crumbs left over from the power tables of both parties.
American women are privileged. Unlike the women with whom I’ve worked in Russia or in Nepal, we have gained the right of reproductive freedom.
BUT WE ARE ON THE PRECIPICE OF LOSING IT! AND IF WE DO, IT IS INTO THE MIRROR THAT WE MUST LOOK FOR REASONS.
Two weeks after the murders of clinic workers Shannon Lowny and Leanne Nichols in Brookline, Massachusetts, I went down to see where they were gunned down. I made them a promise on that day, and it’s one that I make again today. And I also make a promise to that first woman whose hand I held, and to the daughter that has just come into my life, AND TO ALL WOMEN WHO HAVE STRUGGLED AND WORKED BEFORE ME.
That we mourn, yes, but in the words of the immortal Emma Goldman: We also organize OURSELVES AND OUR COMMUNITIES, TO-CHANGE OUR OWN WORLD FROM WHAT IS TO WHAT SHOULD BE, AND TO SPEAK THE TRUTH OF OUR OWN POWER.
WE MUST make ourselves strong. That is the only true monument.
Merle Hoffman
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