Intimate Wars (17 page)

This rage reared its head in casual conversations and was present in images of women in the media. It was as ubiquitous in the workplace as it was in the home. Often, it took the form of physical violence. Humiliations faced us each morning as we scanned the media reports. A 1987
New York Times
article reported that there were six million battered women in the United States that year;
¹⁴
experts estimated that a woman was battered every fifteen seconds. The constant threat of violence served to reinforce and institutionalize men's physical and societal dominance over women.

Of course legal abortion, a symbol of the penultimate right of women to have power over their bodies and reproductive lives, became the natural public focus of this backlash against feminism. As Susan Faludi wrote, it was a “counterassault on women's rights . . . an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories the feminist movement did manage to win for women.”
¹⁵
Deeply frustrated by their inability to get Human Life legislation passed, fundamentalist zealots bent on removing this civil right decided to take matters into their own hands.

Their aggression toward abortion clinics and providers first manifested through increasingly violent language. The word “choice” was positioned against “life,” diminishing the one and empowering the other so that “pro-choice” came to mean pro-death, pro-murder. As the angry rhetoric of the anti-choice movement intensified, I noticed a growing tendency to liken abortion to the Holocaust, to compare the private moral decisions of individual women to the wholesale slaughter of Jews during the Second World War. An abortion clinic in Westchester was labeled “Auschwitz on the Hudson,” and anti-abortion protesters raised placards with Nazi insignias in front of clinics across the country. Pseudoscientific books were written detailing Nazi experiments in concentration camps and their supposed similarities to procedures in abortion clinics, and the specter of Hitler's death camps abounded in terminology like “Abortoriums” and “Child Killing Centers.” This analogy between Jews and fetuses was an effective way to humanize fetuses, casting them as victims deserving of civil rights.

Comparisons between fetuses and black slaves achieved the same end. The first time I heard the Civil War analogy used to describe the abortion struggle was in 1983 when I debated Nellie Gray, an anti-abortion leader who coordinated
the annual January 22 March for Life on Washington. An early attempt at finding “common ground” failed miserably when I suggested we work together to reduce the need for abortion by educating women on birth control and making it more available. During a break in our taping, she said, “You know, this is just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery.” I smiled in recognition until I realized that she was positioning me as Douglas. “We'll stop our attacks and talk about birth control when you put down your knives and stop the killing,” she told me.

Pro-lifers played fast and loose with demonizing metaphors, and put themselves on the side of angels when it suited their strategic purposes. Even as they compared the atrocities of the Holocaust to abortion, they accused Jews and lesbians of running the abortion industry for “blood money.” They publicly equated abortion with the United States' history of slavery, but told African American patients outside of Choices that they were desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. They stopped at nothing.

The incendiary atmosphere the leaders of the anti-choice movement created around the abortion issue was fuel for religious fervor among their followers. Cardinal John J. O'Connor, the archbishop of New York and a leading voice in the anti-abortion movement, riled his disciples with Mother Teresa's assertion that “the greatest enemy to world peace is abortion.” Reproductive freedom and women's lives were now not merely synonymous with murder, but a threat to world peace. If fetuses were being murdered, then the women choosing abortion were committing genocide against their own race. Every woman became a murderess, or potential one.

Women trying to exert control over their own bodies were working in league with the devil against the sacred Christian
hierarchy. One speaker famously stated at an anti-choice rally, “Ask my son who's boss and he'll say Mommy. Ask my wife who's boss and she'll tell you it's me. My wife submits to me because I submit to god.” Antis projected their fears of powerlessness and social disorder onto the fetus, becoming its “saviors.” And of course, a savior stops at nothing when it comes to eliminating the enemy.

But for whom, exactly, were they fighting? Few but the most religiously fanatical would wage a hot war in the name of a group of cells. No, this war was being fought
against
women, not
for
fetuses, and they had found an ingenious way of disguising that truth: they began calling it a baby and emphasizing the developments that made it recognizable as human. At eight weeks the fetus's heartbeat could be detected; at twelve, it could bend its thumb; at fourteen, it could breathe amniotic fluid.

Photos of fetuses, however, didn't make for effective propaganda; they weren't cute enough, human enough. Because humans seem to be hardwired to respond to animals that have certain facial characteristics—big eyes, round heads, and short snouts—antis began comparing fetuses to helpless animals. Nat Hentoff, writing in the
Village Voice
, asked his readers to imagine the fetus as a baby seal, assuming that all the protective feelings one would naturally get while viewing an adorable white pup being clubbed to death could be transferred to a fetus floating in its mother's womb.

This drive to encourage a reflexive empathy with the fetus was expressed perfectly at a right-to-life conference I attended with Bill Baird, where an Australian priest described to a hushed audience the ten-day fast he had conducted in a public square to “get in touch with the helplessness and defenselessness of the fetus.” A slide show began. It showed
a funeral, a small casket, hundreds of marchers each carrying one rose, tears, speeches, an interment. “Mary Elizabeth,” a four-month fetus supposedly rescued from a garbage can and posthumously named and celebrated, appeared on the screen with the caption, “Victim of the abortion holocaust.” Moving through the crowd, I saw fetuses floating in bottles of formaldehyde. Everyone seemed to be wearing mother-of-pearl pins on their lapels. Looking closer, I saw it was their logo: tiny fetal feet, on sale for three dollars.

The concept of the fetus as independent from the mother reached its apotheosis in Bernard Nathanson's 1984 film
Silent Scream
, which supposedly showed a fetus withdrawing in fear during a second trimester abortion procedure. The patient, however, was absent; the film never showed anything but the fetus in utero, its mother's womb looking like some subterranean ecosystem. You might have thought the woman didn't exist at all.

Unable to make their choices in a vacuum, women were forced to endure the psychological, and often physical, trauma of entering a public war with the antis and a private war with their own bodies. The more symbolic and legal independence the fetus gained, the less agency women had over their own reproductive choices.

Human Life Amendments, while never passed, were still frequently brought to the table, and judicial concern for fetal welfare and rights began to escalate. Court cases addressing policies in which employers selectively barred pregnant women—or even women who were not pregnant, but of childbearing age—from specific jobs because of a “threat to the fetus” became increasingly common. In a ruling for one company, the court stated that “an unborn child's exposure to lead creates a substantial health risk involving the danger of permanent harm.”

What about permanent harm to the mother? In one Washington, DC, case, a pregnant woman dying of cancer was advised by George Washington University Hospital administrators to undergo a cesarean section against her wishes. A local judge ordered the operation to be performed because he felt there was a slight chance of saving the fetus, and the woman was going to die anyway. What would the difference be if she died a few weeks earlier? The cesarean was performed, the woman died, the fetus died, and the operation was listed as a “contributing factor” to her death on her death certificate.

In another well-publicized battle over fetal rights, Nancy Klein, seventeen weeks pregnant, had remained in a coma for two months after a tragic automobile accident. Told by physicians that his wife's life was at risk more and more with each day that the pregnancy developed within her, her husband ordered an abortion. Two right-to-life attorneys, one of whom attempted to become “Baby Klein's” guardian, filed legal brief after legal brief to prevent the life-saving abortion for Nancy. In a radio debate with one of the attorneys, John Broderick, I asked him what he would do if it were his wife's life that hung in the balance. “A baby is a baby is a baby,” he said. I have a photo of Bill Baird and me in front of the Suffolk County Court House, the two of us the lone pro-choice demonstrators at the trial.

The rise of fetal rights placed a woman's job, social standing, economic security, and her very life at risk. Right-to-lifers claimed to act in the name of “innocents,” for the sake of their human rights, by the order of god. But I viewed fetal rights as a smoke screen, an opaque barrier, an intellectual and imaginative device to control women's lives and reproductive choices. The fetus had become a weapon that could be used against women to reinforce the status quo.

VIOLENCE IS A LANGUAGE, and the antis were becoming more and more articulate. At the encouragement of their leaders the antis began taking their crusade to our clinics, where they could be physically confrontational. Joseph Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League—the “Green Berets of the Pro-Life Movement”—published a book on how to harass and intimidate abortion providers and clinic patients entitled
Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion
. He quickly became the leader of the activist wing of the anti-abortion movement, bragging that the rate of abortion complications went up when there were demonstrators in front of clinics.

Nineteen eighty-five alone saw approximately 150 attacks against abortion clinics and family planning providers. The newspapers seemed to report a new attack every day. A woman in Brooklyn was violently thrown against the wall of a clinic by an off-duty police officer screaming, “In the name of Jesus, do you know what they are doing inside there?” An eighteen-year-old perpetrator of what were called the “Christmas bombings” against a clinic in Pensacola, Florida, called the blasts a “gift to Jesus on his birthday.” In Huntsville, Alabama, a Catholic priest threw red paint into a clinic waiting room and injured two staff members, while “sidewalk counselors” thrust photos of dismembered fetuses in women's faces and screamed that they were “murdering their children.” A gunshot shattered the living-room window of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the man who wrote the Courts' majority decision legalizing abortion.

Other terrorist-style intimidation methods were even more sinister: a clinic counselor returning home one evening found her cat decapitated. A man drove his war surplus vehicle directly into a clinic, destroying two waiting rooms. Anti-abortionists noted license plate numbers of patients' cars at
clinics, used police connections to get their names and phone numbers, and called them in the middle of the night to harass them with a recording of a childish voice crying, “Mommy, mommy, why did you kill me?” This tactic was particularly used against teenagers.

On ABC's
Nightline
, Cal Thomas, spokesperson for the Moral Majority, approved the violence against clinics, which he said would “stir a national debate on abortion.” He claimed that the violence was against “bricks and stones”—not people. By denying that the continuous and escalating violence against women's health care centers across the country involved planned and coordinated acts of terrorism, the conservative media, the FBI, and the Reagan Administration callously disregarded women's constitutional rights and fed the fanatical zeal of the terrorists.

God's word was the theory, and bombing clinics and harassing women and doctors was the practice. What we in the pro-choice movement called terrorism, they called battle tactics. Were those who tried to assassinate Hitler and bomb Auschwitz terrorists? Anti-choicers were like today's “freedom fighters” who saw themselves as knights of a higher cause, made even more intense when the cause was a lost one. The womb had become a true battlefield, and we were all soldiers, willing or not.

Each time there was word of another clinic bombing or invasion, each time someone called me Hitler, each day when I walked into Choices past screaming antis and pink plastic fetuses, I travelled further into the trenches. One Monday, a day when many women were there for pre- and post-natal care, Choices received a bomb threat. The male caller allotted us less than fifteen minutes to leave the premises before we'd all be blown up. The call turned out to be a hoax, but that didn't alter the horror we all felt.

I arranged for my staff to work with the Brooklyn Martial Arts Center to learn self-defense. The first thing that was taught was how to scream—an exercise that had to be repeated many times, since women were unused to speaking up and speaking out. My secretary attended a course with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to learn how to correctly open my mail so that she could avoid damage from a letter bomb. I got used to checking the bottom of my car for bombs and taking different routes to the clinic, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

 

AMID THE TURMOIL of my days at Choices, my life was changed irrevocably by another kind of opposing force. I received a piece of paper that would hang over the next seven years of my life like the sword of Damocles. It was a subpoena from the Deputy Attorney General for Medicaid Fraud Control announcing that I was being investigated.