Intimate Wars (20 page)

When I visited the AIDS ward at San Francisco General, I saw that the disease had galvanized the gay community and changed the conventional avenues of medical treatment. I thought of my beginnings at Choices in the early seventies, before abortion had been legalized nationally, when we still dealt with all the shame, guilt, fear, and stigma. I remembered how the community of women had reached out—how they referred, educated, counseled, and supported women seeking abortions. In the case of AIDS, where medical technology had not been able to develop a definitive test to diagnose, let alone treat the disease, physicians so used to playing god had to face the reality of limited answers. Now, as then, the medical community had out of necessity stepped aside for love, for another definition of healing. This was Patient Power.

Pregnant teens, women in prison, lesbians, gays—they were all pariahs, and they were all suffering, even dying, from the resulting guilt and shame that status produced. Shame was used as a defense by some to not seek services, and by others to block out possible help from the outside. And as with abortion, situations branded as transgressive or even illegal prevented many people from forming connections and political coalitions to address their rights. Many cast-outs experienced a kind of existential disgust that caused them to deny or ignore their reality. But the battle cry of the AIDS movement—that Silence=Death—said it all.

IN THE LATE 1980S, another front opened in the war against women. In 1986 Randall Terry had founded Operation Rescue, an organization whose initial tactics involved peaceful sit-in demonstrations at abortion clinics inspired by the civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. King in the 1960s. But soon Terry and his protesters progressed to more violent tactics, shutting down a clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Operation Rescue sprang to prominence as a national organization during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, where hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, capturing national attention. By then they had adopted a slogan to fit the times: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it's murder.” That year, Reagan gave a speech to more than fifty thousand pro-life supporters gathered in Washington to mourn fifteen years of
Roe v. Wade
. “We're told about a woman's right to control her own body, but doesn't an unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” he asked.

In April of 1988, Operation Rescue summoned its ranks to New York City to begin what they called “a righteous, peaceful uprising of god-fearing people across the country that will ‘inspire' politicians to correct man's law, and make child-killing illegal again.... If we don't end this holocaust very soon, the judgment of god is going to fall on this nation.” Hundreds came to New York with the intention of gathering in large numbers to blockade abortion clinics across New York City over the course of several days. Their goal was to get favorable media coverage and project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion while preventing women from exercising their reproductive rights.

I led the PCC on the offensive. We declared a Reproductive Freedom Week that would kick off with a march and rally on Friday, April 29, the day before Operation Rescue arrived
in New York City. Approximately fifteen hundred people participated in our march, the largest pro-choice event in New York in ten years. Leading the way, I walked up to the right-to-life office clutching a “Support Operation Rescue” placard in my hands. I held it up to the crowd and tore it to pieces, declaring my action a symbol of how women were going fight back against the terrorists in Operation Rescue.

Marches were always an important public statement of support. They gave people who otherwise would not get involved an opportunity to get into the streets and show their support for choice. Women could bring their mothers, daughters, and friends to bond over the issues in the exhilarating, almost celebratory atmosphere created by thousands of people coming together for a common cause. But it was the persistent, grueling, day-to-day activism that was necessary to resist the conservative and oppressive forces of the Right. We had to make sure a band of soldiers was present at every clinic, every day, to physically ensure that women's rights weren't blocked by the antis.

The PCC meeting space turned into a war room. We began by writing and distributing a pamphlet called “The Battle to Defend Abortion Clinics,” the only strategic military pamphlet of the pro-choice movement. It detailed the politics of the battle and included concrete tactical suggestions for organizing against planned and unplanned pro-life demonstrations and actions. The week before Operation Rescue's demonstration we held a training session on how to protect and defend the clinics. People living near the hotels where Operation Rescue activists planned to stay were leafleted and encouraged to give Operation Rescue a “fitting welcome.”

For the next week we organized clinic watches and phone trees, dispatching people to the sights Operation Rescue was targeting. We secretly followed Operation Rescue members
to find out which clinic they would target next, communicating the information to each other using walkie-talkies. Emergency announcements were made on a radio station (WBAI), giving the location of the facility being attacked and calling on people to come and defend it. Despite our efforts, Operation Rescue succeeded in closing facilities three out of the four days it staged blockades.

So began a long year of defending abortion rights against Operation Rescue.

Many of my mornings in 1988 began at dawn, when the lights of the city mingled with the sunrise. On one such morning I waited with other pro-choice warriors in front of the Carter Hotel, where the troops of Operation Rescue were gathering to begin their terror tactics against a local abortion clinic. Someone handed me a token for the subway, and before I knew it I was swept underground. Then we were running down Twenty-Third Street next to Randall Terry and his cohorts, determined to beat them to the clinic so we could keep those doors open. Terry and I locked eyes and gave each other a nonverbal acknowledgement of our competition as we raced each other down the street.

We did manage to get to those doors, but Terry controlled all the outside traffic. No one could enter or leave, and seeing patients that day was impossible. But by 11 a.m. we were still there, refusing to surrender the clinic to Operation Rescue. Surrounded by their voices singing “Amazing Grace,” we chanted, “Not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate,” and “Operation Rescue your name's a lie, you don't care if women die!” I can say them in my sleep even now.

Another day, I was called to assist Eastern Women's Center in the middle of an attack by Operation Rescue. The antis were lying on the floor forming a “Kryptonite Block,” a madly creative device that allowed a group of protesters
to attach themselves to specially designed bicycle locks that defied police attempts to free them. By the time I arrived at the clinic, five Operation Rescue participants had been in the same positions, leg to neck to ankle to thigh, for approximately three hours; it would be at least another two before the police could dismantle them. One Catholic priest, attached to five women, was sitting with his neck chained like a dog, screaming to the women in the waiting room, “Go home, go home. There'll be no baby killing here today. You will not be killing your babies this Saturday.”

They held their biggest action yet on our turf on January 15, 1989. Defying a federal judge's orders to stop blocking clinic entrances, eight hundred Operation Rescue members were arrested during protests at abortion clinics in New York, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. Demonstrators chained themselves together and to fences in front of the clinics, halted elevators, triggered fire alarms, and lay in front of police buses attempting to carry them away. They began their demonstration just as the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal that would have made the fetus a constitutional person with rights and privileges. New York City, the abortion capital of the United States, was to be the place where their national revolution would begin.

In reaction, I arranged for the PCC to hold a “back alley” press conference in an alley between Broadway and Lafayette Streets in Manhattan to emphasize what women would face if the antis were successful in making abortions illegal. I held up my hanger and declared, “As I stand here in this alley among this garbage, this graffiti, this filth and debris, I know that I am possibly standing in and looking at my future—the future of millions of American women.... Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. What it will do is send women by the hundreds of thousands into alleys just like this one.
When that time comes there will be not enough alleys, not enough hospital emergency rooms, and not enough coffins to hold them.”

 

WE FEMINISTS were encouraging the formation of new coalitions and inspiring others to act, or at least think about action. We never let an attack go unanswered, a clinic undefended. But what I wanted was for the entire pro-choice silent majority of the country to stand up and say, women's rights are human rights! We will not allow any of these terrorists to stop our mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends from being able to exercise their moral and constitutional rights. I wanted mass mobilization. A girl can dream, can't she?

This frustration was occupying my mind when an Operation Rescue activist asked, “Where are your troops, Hoffman?” on yet another rainy, cold morning of protesting.

I turned to face my questioner. Middle-aged, white, male, polyester suit, fetal feet button—in all, a good soldier of the Lord.

“Where are your troops?”

I looked past him to our small band of about fifty feminist activists, chanting and intense; beyond the five hundred or so kneeling, praying “rescuers”; past the police, the press, the passersby, and thought about his question. Where were my troops? We appeared sadly outnumbered. Compared to the antis, we always were.

The small, two-story abortion clinic under attack was situated between Third and Lexington Avenues. As the drama unfolded, business went on as usual. Dogs got walked, some people shopped, some stopped to chat, others rushed on to work, all going about their daily routines as if a war were not happening in front of them. My questioner had verbalized one of my private intellectual dialogues. But it was really
not so private after all. The question of just where the feminist movement was now, where the feminist movement was going, whether the feminist movement was alive or dead, had become a popular issue around which media, politicians, and anyone who felt like it could instantly pontificate.

Of course the “rescuer” had a far more literal interpretation of this question in mind. He was merely counting heads.

Operation Rescue was bent on trying to publicly project the image of a groundswell of pious people against abortion through the media, and at this it was somewhat effective. It chose as its battlefront small, unprotected doctors' offices rather than large well-known (and well-prepared) facilities. Considering that every day in New York City alone there were hundreds of women who terminated their pregnancies at any one of at least one hundred providers, Operation Rescue's claim that they were on the way to eliminating abortion was more than slightly exaggerated.

It reminded me of their other exaggerations and falsehoods: their shameless self-comparisons to the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., or their obscene claim that their movement was akin to the great civil rights struggle of the sixties.

Many people bought their lies. During the reign of Reagan, “double-think” had become the accepted form of social and political reality. Nuclear missiles were “peacekeepers,” ketchup was a “vegetable,” and all Americans were “better off now” than they had been some time in the past. This sinister tactic of obscuring truth with wishful thinking was actively appropriated by much of the local and national press, which helped Operation Rescue and its participants by affording them a great deal of coverage and sometimes even positive reviews. Reagan himself met personally with Joseph Scheidler and publicly praised him, officially giving these terrorists the highest institutional backing.

The New York City police, many of whom seemed to be politically inclined to Operation Rescue's philosophy, were also caught up in the fantasy. Pursuing a policy of “selective enforcement,” police treated the anti-choice blockaders with kid gloves, using stretchers to take protesters away gently, issuing desk tickets, and releasing Operation Rescue “prisoners of war” soon afterward, allowing them to return to the blockade site once again.

This treatment was in marked contrast to that given pro-choice activists, who were pushed, pummeled, and herded into small areas behind barricades. It took intense and pressured meetings with Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward to publicly shame the police into upholding the law and ensuring women's access to constitutionally protected medical treatment. Going up against Operation Rescue, we faced the daily possibility of being physically hurt or killed. I almost got clubbed by police in one of the early actions outside of a doctor's office in Queens.

Operation Rescue had succeeded in casting pro-choice forces as the generic “female”: dangerous, assertive, selfish, shrill feminists who had to be controlled and diminished if only, at this point, by paper tigers in the press declaring feminism dead and obscuring the progress we made with each march, the successes we had each time we kept a clinic open.

That anti-choice man's question—where are your troops? —helped clarify what I already knew that day. Looking through his eyes, people might have agreed that the right wing was winning. It was an illusion. Yes, we were outnumbered on the streets, and that could be frustrating. But a mass mobilization of sorts
was
occurring. The historic bifurcation between abortion providers and political activists had finally begun to dissolve, and a powerful new alliance was beginning to form. Participation in direct action against Operation
Rescue at clinic sites put ideological feminists face to face with the reality of abortion. Over one million women each year were having legal abortions at clinics across the country, and they each risked harassment, violence, and restrictive, even dangerous, regulations in upcoming Supreme Court cases. Providers were now at the forefront of the abortion rights struggle, and patients themselves, in the midst of the most personal and intimate of decisions and life events, were thrust into a vortex of politics and passion.