Merle Hoffman Telling it Like it Is Radical, committed commentary on critical questions to encourage discussion and action, coming to you monthly or whenever needed. Your comments are welcome.

Merle Hoffman being presented
2015 "Bella" award by BALI Founder Liz Abzug

I Remember Her Hand...

I want to share with all of you the pleasure of being the recipient of the 2015 “Bella” Award given to me earlier this month by the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute (BALI).

Not only was I honored to be presented this award by Liz Abzug, Bella's daughter and founder of BALI, but to be in the presence of some of the young women who are BALI-trained and mentored here in NYC each year. After a warm introduction by Liz Abzug, I made the following comments:

I am so deeply honored, not only because of the recognition and reinforcement that this award gives me, but because this award comes from YOU and BALI who come from the inspiration and the lived life of your extraordinary mother, Bella Abzug.

How fortunate the young women of BALI are, as we all are, to have Bella come before us.

When I grew up in the 1950s there were not many role models of women who achieved greatness, so I became obsessed with Queen Elizabeth the First and Joan of Arc.

They are very hard acts to follow.

I was very young when I first heard Bella speak against the War in Vietnam. I remember going into a room full of standing, cheering people – and experienced that energy, that passion, that transcendent righteous rage that burned right through you.

I always thought of Bella when I found myself speaking to crowds and exhorting and inspiring them to fight against another kind of war, a war that continues today, a multi-national and -generational war against women. A war whose theaters of operations are women's bodies themselves.

Because, make no mistake, the struggle for reproductive justice and legal abortion is the front line and the bottom line of women's freedom.

Bella Abzug (foreground left) and
Merle Hoffman at abortion rights rally
Jan. 22 , NYC, circa 1980s

I have been privileged to lead a life on the front lines of this war where I have witnessed and learned to practice courage, patience and humility. My journey has been a difficult, challenging and unique one, and my politics came from the ground up.

I was very young and in graduate school for social psychology when I saw my first patient. Abortion had just become legal – and what had been a crime the day before, a sin, an abomination, now was a legally sanctioned medical procedure. The world had turned upside down.

She was young, she was white, married with one child, and another would mean financial disaster. Someone said to me, go in there and counsel her. Counsel her?

Theories and more theories rushed into my mind. I was terrified, and so was she. There was no such thing then as abortion counseling. But I went into the room and spoke to her, was present with her. I have no memory of what we talked about, perhaps the details of the procedure itself. And then I stayed with her – there was no anesthesia, so I held her hand through her abortion. And it was her hand, that intimate personal connection that wed me to this issue, to this struggle.

Now so many years later, so many hands later, the responsibility of that commitment still is with me. I don't remember her name or her face. But I remember her hand, her hand that became the catalyst and inspiration for all my future work.

And I remember the moment I became political. It was in 1977. Henry Hyde, the Republican Congressman, had inserted his infamous – and now, it appears, eternal – ban on Medicaid funds being used for abortion. I remember watching him on the television saying, if we can't save all the children, we can save the children of the poor. These were my patients; this was my lived reality.

Merle Hoffman, Liz Abzug, and some young BALI leaders

Thirty-eight years later – yes, 38 years later – we still have the Hyde Amendment, and much worse, as egregious Orwellian anti-woman laws are passed state by state. We still have millions of women who are ashamed to and afraid to say “I had an abortion.” And we still have many young people who do not realize that freedom is not free – and requires constant vigilance.

BALI, we need you – we need young, committed, passionate, righteously angry young women to take up this struggle. To risk, to be bold, to follow the visionaries like Bella who came before you - because if you can't learn to follow, you will never lead.

It is 44 years since I saw that first patient – 44 years of struggle, death threats, evictions, harassment – and my patients, the women who through all the years have kept coming, over one million of them, have taught me that.

As my old friend Flo Kennedy said, “You've got to learn to love the struggle.” Because we will have struggle for generations, and if you love it and embrace it, that love will change the world and give you a life of meaning.

READ MORE OF MERLE HOFFMAN'S NEWEST POSTS

ON THE 40th ANNIVERSARY OF ROE V. WADE

The Love of Strangers - by Merle Hoffman

"Patient #4 in recovery was moved by your work and wants to see you." When my assistant's email came through, I was in the middle of a meeting in my office. Excusing myself, I put on the white coat I always keep hanging on the back of my chair and went up to the recovery room. In the fourth bed, I met the wide dark eyes of the woman who wanted to see me and introduced myself. She reached out her arms, and as I drew her close to me her words spilled out: "You saved my life. I was 18 weeks--the baby was dead--they should have told me weeks ago. The doc--she didn't want to help. I found you on the Internet--read all about you. Why didn't they tell me earlier? You saved me--thank you, thank you." •Art by Norma Bessouet

"She Had a Heartbeat Too" The Tragic Death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish Hospital - by Ann Rossiter

A 17-weeks pregnant woman with severe back pain is admitted to a hospital in the west of Ireland. After an examination, she is told that her cervix is fully dilated; her amniotic fluid leaking. Her immature fetus will not survive. This is made clear to her. She is also told that once she miscarries her ordeal will be over and she can return home. But this never happens. A spontaneous abortion does not occur in the four or five hours predicted by the consultant gynecologist. The woman and her husband are informed that because the fetal heartbeat is still present, no intervention is possible. In spite of her repeated requests for an abortion, the woman is refused. Her husband says they were told that abortion "is against the law." He says they were told, "this is a Catholic country."

First Irish Abortion Clinic Opens Amid Controversy, Threats and Confusion - by Caelainn Hogan: On The Issues Special Correspondent

On October 18, 2012, the first clinic to offer legal medical abortions, albeit within the tight legal restrictions, finally opened in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Marie Stopes International, Belfast's new private clinic, is located on Great Victoria Street, just across from Belfast's main bus station, and a two and a half hour ride from Dublin. It is part of a network of reproductive health clinics that reports serving more than 100,000 men and women throughout Great Britain and also runs more than 600 centers in forty countries. •Art by Joyce Kozloff and Susan Kraft

Forty Years After Roe V Wade, Getting an Abortion is Still a Major Challenge - by Eleanor J. Bader

Ramona, 32, mother of a four-year-old daughter, is dropped off at the Summit Women's Center in Bridgeport Connecticut at 8 a.m. on a frigid December Saturday. As she gets out of the car to walk the thirty feet to the clinic, she notices a dozen people holding weathered pictures of mangled babies bearing the words "abortion kills." The protesters can't trespass on clinic property or enter the fenced-in parking lot, but plastic bullhorns amplify their voices. "The Lord loves you," they shout. "He has a purpose for every life. You don't need to go in there and murder your child." •Art by Norma Bessouet

It's Up to Us to Defend Abortion Rights - by Mary Lou Greenberg

The action starts at 7 a.m. every Saturday when volunteers start arriving, women and men, some who get up at 5 a.m. and travel far on the subway to be there, donning white lab coats and positioning themselves on the sidewalk. They come to help escort women patients through the gauntlet of physical and mental harassment outside into Choices Women's Medical Center, so they can get the abortions, birth control, or pre-natal or routine gynecological exams that Choices offers to about 40,000 patients a year. •Art by Georganne Aldrich Heller and Susan Kraft

The Art Perspective: Transition Art

I’m caught in an artistic state of transition. I didn’t plan it. It came slowly, over a period of 6-8 months, maybe more. I wasn’t aware of it happening. It took me by surprise. Now, it’s become clearer to me: I have, indeed, been in a gestating/ incubating phase. Let me try to remember its beginning, to articulate its progress, to recount my process. •Art by Linda Stein

Poetry....... Back and Forth - by Judith Arcana

Judith Arcana is a Jane, a member of Chicago's pre-Roe underground abortion service. She's written a lot of poems and stories about abortion and reproductive justice. Her most recent book is The Parachute Jump Effect; two new stories are in the fall 2012 issue of SERVING HOUSE JOURNAL online. •Art by Andrea Arroyo

The Poet's Eye: Curated by Judith Arcana

Featuring poetry by Rosellen Brown, Patricia Smith, M, and Susan Eisenberg. These poems were curated by Judith Arcana, outgoing co-poetry editor of On the Issues. Her wisdom and perception over the years shall be missed. •Art by Andrea Arroyo

Suggested Reading - by Anna Platt and the Feminist Press

Reviews of Complaints and Disorders (Second Edition) by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us by Carole Joffe, Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement by Sarah Erdreich, The 'Abortion Trail' and the Making of a London-Irish Underground, 1980-2000 by Ann Rossiter, Delirium: the Politics of Sex in America by Nancy L. Cohen, and The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle over Abortion by Stephen Singular.