April 2015:
It Can't Happen Here? But It IS!

As the founder of Choices Women's Medical Center, today a comprehensive women's health facility that I began as a small abortion clinic 44 years ago, I have consistently been in the crosshairs of an always-intense and sometimes murderous battle aimed at both providers and women.

George Tiller, M.D.

My longtime friend and associate, a skilled and loving abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, was assassinated by a fanatic's bullet six years ago as he began Sunday services in the vestibule of his church. He was the most recent of eight providers and clinic staff killed in cold blood in their line of duty serving women.
And women, desperate for lives of their own choosing but often having no access to safe, legal abortion in many parts of the country, are being forced to return to pre-Roe days of coat hangers, knitting needles and toxic chemicals.
But now there is a new and deadly complicity that has begun to infect the medical community itself – that of acting as the enforcer of laws against so-called crimes against the fetus and the criminalization of women for what can only be described as reproductive crimes.

Most of us by now are familiar with the tragic case of Purvi Patel, sentenced March 29 to a staggering 41 years, 20 of which must be served in prison, on charges of feticide and, in a bazaar companion accusation, to “felony neglect of an infant.” This did not happen under some “despotic” foreign regime but in Indiana in the “enlightened” US.

A 33-year-old Indian-American, Patel went to a hospital emergency room with heavy vaginal bleeding and at first denied she had been pregnant. She later said she had miscarried and disposed of the expelled fetus in a dumpster. She was admitted for treatment and recovered from the severe blood loss and attendant physical trauma. But the greater trauma may have been when police walked into her room as she was recovering from surgery. They had been summoned by hospital personnel (including an anti-abortion OBGYN physician) who turned over Patel’s private medical records while she was in surgery. It later came out that Patel earlier had texted a friend that she planned to send away for the abortion pill, and this became evidence that Patel had tried to self-induce – even though toxicologists found no trace of the drug in her body. While the “abortion pill” is available in the U.S. with a prescription, it's illegal to order them online.

Purvi Patel is NOT a criminal. She needed medical help but was betrayed by an Indiana M.D. and sacrificed to a law that values fetal existence over women's lives.

Purvi Patel is NOT a criminal.

The point here is NOT whether or not Purvi Patel experienced a spontaneous miscarriage or deliberately induced an abortion. The reason this happened is not the issue. What IS the issue and has alarming implications for women across the country, is that Purvi Patel was charged as a criminal for, according to Indiana law, killing a person. She is the first person to be charged, convicted and sentenced for the crime of feticide in the U.S.

This means that every woman who becomes pregnant is at risk, her life determined by what happens to the fetus. Fetal existence trumps the woman’s personhood and very humanity.

When I and a few others first began sounding the alarm years ago about the implications of draconian restrictions on women's reproductive choices, some minimized the threat, saying that women would always find ways to end unwanted pregnancies, that women themselves would certainly never be thrown into jail for miscarriages or abortions. The U.S. could never be like, for example, El Salvador, that criminalizes ALL abortions and where women have to submit to interrogation and examination to prove miscarriages were not intended. “It can’t happen here.”

Well, it's happening here now, and Purvi Patel's case is just the most well-known. Iowa, Utah, Louisiana, Florida....all have documented cases of women being prosecuted, arrested and imprisoned, with medical personnel – doctors, nurses, social workers – serving the role of the state's secret police.

This is an outrageous situation and should not be tolerated by anyone who cares about women. Personhood laws and the culpability of enforcers within the medical profession are among the greatest threats to women’s freedom today and must be opposed.

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April 2014:
"43 Years Later, I Am Still on the Front Lines"

By Merle Hoffman, Founder/President Choices Women's Medical Center

It has been 43 years since I founded one of the first legal abortion clinic in the country—2 years before Roe. V, Wade. It has been 25 years since I organized the first pro-choice civil disobedience.  It was 1989 and Operation Rescue was riding high, defying court orders and blocking clinic entrances, racking up eight hundred arrests in New York, New Orleans, and Cincinnati.  Anti-abortion restrictions were working their way up to the Supreme Court.

I recognized then that those of us who understand how necessary the right to safe and accessible abortion is to women's lives had to respond and that the time for patience was over.  On Sunday, April 2nd, hundreds of us gathered in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.  Mary Lou Greenberg and Maria Lyons burst onto the steps of the Cathedral just as mass was ending and unfurled our proclamation.  “On behalf of the women of New York City and their sisters throughout this country and out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light,” it began, ending in our assertion:

"We stand here not as beggars at your gate but as people of conscience who affirm that:

1. Women are full moral agents with the right and ability to choose when and whether or not they will be mothers.
2. Abortion is a choice made by each individual for profound personal reasons that no man or state should judge.
3. The right to make reproductive choices is women's legacy throughout history and belongs to every woman regardless of age, class, race, religion, or sexual preference.
4. Abortion is a life-affirming act chosen within the context of women's realities, women's lives, and women's sexuality.
5. Abortion is often the most moral choice in a world that frequently denies health care, housing, education, and economic survival."

The next day, the New York Times quoted me as saying, "Women's rights are in a state of emergency."

Twenty-five years later, it is dizzying how much truer those words are now.  Since that time, eight people have been murdered for their role in providing abortions.  Hundreds of acts of violence and terror have been carried out against clinics.  Patients and staff everywhere, including at the doors of my own clinic in New York City, are harassed every single week.  203 laws have been passed restricting abortions just in the last three years.  And in those same three years dozens and dozens of clinics have been forced to close – in Arizona, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and beyond.

This is why I am proud that a new generation of organizers are stepping forward, including by returning to St. Patrick's Cathedral 25 years later, to take forward the righteous legacy I helped establish.  I am also proud to be joining friends and colleagues in the nationally webcast Emergency Abortion Rights Speak-Out to be held in New York City this Friday evening.

I urge people everywhere to tune in and turn out.  The future of women depends on what we do.

See you April 11 and 12th!

 

 

Friday April 11, 7-9:30pm EDT

Abortion Rights Emergency Speak-Out

Advent Lutheran Church, 93rd & Broadway, New York City, 7-9:30 p.m.

Speakers include:

Dr. Willie Parker, award-winning doctor at the last abortion clinic in Mississippi
Merle Hoffman, CEO of Choices Women's Medical Center, which has provided abortions and other health services to women since 1971
Sunsara Taylor, writer for revcom.us/Revolution newspaper, leader of the Abortion Rights Freedom ride, and initiator of StopPatriarchy.org.
Donna Schaper, Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church, on her own abortion and why we must defend this right
Marge Piercy, poet, novelist, memoirist, via video message: "It was a time when falling in love could get you killed."
Bill Baird, reproductive rights pioneer who was jailed eight times in five states in the 1960s for lecturing on abortion and birth control
David Gunn, Jr., son of first abortion doctor to be assassinated, via video message .

Testimony from:

Susan Cahill, owner of the Montana abortion clinic that was destroyed and closed on March 3, 2013 about how this is an attack on all women
Dr. Susan Robinson, one of only four doctors in the U.S. who openly provide late-term abortions; featured in the acclaimed documentary After Tiller

True stories of illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade

Saturday, April 12th: PROTEST!

RAISE BLOODY COAT-HANGERS* AND BREAK THE SHACKLES OF WOMEN'S ENSLAVEMENT

NYC: 2pm: Gather at NW corner of 49th St. & Fifth Avenue; 3:00 pm: Procession to St. Patrick's Cathedral and silent protest

Check StopPatriarchy.org for protests in other cities or to plan your own.

* Wire coat hangers were used by many women as an instrument to self-abort when abortion was illegal. 5,000+ women in the U.S. are estimated to have died every year from illegal, unsafe abortions before Roe v. Wade legalized abortions.