Intimate Wars (27 page)

And then there were the turncoats. The pro-choice movement had always had defectors—people like Dr. Bernard Nathanson (the owner and operator of CRASH, one of the nation's first and largest abortion clinics, who went on to produce the anti-choice film classic
The Silent Scream
) who had a public change of mind and heart. Thanks to Clinton
and Gore the numbers began to increase at an alarming pace. Norma McCorvey,
²⁴
a.k.a. Jane Roe, the original poster girl for choice, was the most famous example of this particular social and political trend. It has always amused me that people can find Jesus in the strangest of places; when news broke that McCorvey had gotten herself baptized in a Texas swimming pool by a leader of Operation Rescue, I was not surprised. Reverend Flip Benham, who did the honors, reported that Jesus Christ “had reached through the abortion mill wall and touched the heart of Norma McCorvey.” “I've cheated people out of money,” McCorvey told Ted Koppel in a
Nightline
interview on August 15. “I've sold drugs. I've done a lot against his teaching. But I think the greatest sin that I did was to be the plaintiff in
Roe v. Wade.”

Feminist Naomi Wolf argued in
The New Republic
that the pro-choice movement had committed three mortal sins: “hardness of heart, lying, and political failure.” She posited that by using the language of communitarianism, positioning abortion rights within a paradigm of traditional Judeo-Christian rights and responsibilities, the pro-choice movement would be able to expand its political base to include the all-encompassing middle where most Americans felt comfortable. To my thinking, this strategy would only operate as a Trojan horse to bring the enemy's arguments into the heart of pro-choice territory, potentially tearing the movement apart.

Wolf concluded her piece by calling for a fantasy of a world where “passionate feminists might hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead” (the unborn, the never to be born). In the real world I lived in, passionate feminists were desperately needed to stand shoulder to shoulder with doctors and clinic workers to help protect them against the Michael Griffins, Paul Hills,
and John Salvis who shot them down in cold blood. We were facing expansions of the Hyde amendment, increased clinic violence, limits on federal employee health insurance, denial of abortions to women in the military, and the reinstatement of the global gag rule. Where was her anger? Where were Thelma and Louise? I didn't care about the rhetoric and rituals of memorials and lighting candles for the dead. I wanted the sisterhood to light the fires of resistance in the living.

That spirit of resistance had already begun to fade, replaced by politically institutionalized actions. The anti-choice and pro-choice movements were operating as sophisticated political campaigns, using visuals, metaphors, debating points, and strategies to construct abortion narratives that would win over the masses. The media contributed by perpetuating the kind of soulless sports mentality that registered everything in neatly competitive categories: Right-to-life 2, Pro-choice 0. Cable channel New York 1 even wanted me to debate two right-to-lifers on the issue of whether or not murdering doctors was justifiable homicide. I declined. The fact that this debate was even proposed was indicative of the backslide the movement had undergone.

The words “pro-choice” were no longer descriptive of the women's movement on anything but a theoretical, ideological level. People felt it was necessary for the movement to cloak and soften the crushing reality of abortion in order to instill in people the knowledge that it was absolutely necessary for women's survival and participation as full citizens in this society. But women's rights, women's lives, and women's equality and autonomy wouldn't sell in the American marketplace, no matter how appealingly they were presented. In the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the American people, the pro-choice and women's movements had to take care not to lose their souls.

IN A CHANGING political climate in which even the Left could not be counted on to support abortion clinics and providers, it was more important than ever for me to keep Choices functioning at its highest level. The women who came to us seeking abortions did not care about Bill Clinton's flip-flopping or communitarianism. They just needed abortions.

I always had to make tough choices to ensure their needs were met, but in the mid to late nineties, gut-wrenching decisions seemed to be part of my daily fare. I had been subsidizing my Mental Health Center with the surplus revenues of Choices to keep it alive while working to get it licensed, after which I assumed it would support itself. But mental health patients were always the stepchildren of the health care system. Insurance and Medicaid rates were not high enough to pay providers, and limits on the number of mental health-related visits made it hard for patients to get the care they needed. Subsidizing these expenses drained Choices, contributing to an extreme cash deficit.

The situation was compounded further by an avalanche of economic and political attacks. Choices' twenty-year lease was up, and it was time to negotiate a new one. But my landlord, Sam LeFrak, had ceded the management of his real estate corporation to his son Richard, who had very different politics from his father. When it came within one year of discussing the possibility of signing another lease, Richard LeFrak made it clear to me that he had no intention of having an “abortion center” continue to be a tenant in his building. If I was not out by the end of the lease, he told me, I would be forcibly evicted.

He had already signed a contract with CompUSA to take over my lease at the end of a three-month holdover period, and he threatened to “bulldoze” my space if I remained one extra day. But it was nearly impossible to find a new building
and move the entire clinic with so little warning. We petitioned the court to keep our doors open until we could get a new space ready, and dozens of letters of support were sent by prominent members of the community to the civil court of Queens County in 1998. “This is more than a landlord/tenant dispute—this action threatens to impact the health and safety of many Queens County residents,” wrote Geraldine Ferraro. Yet the courts ruled against me, and I was forced to liquidate my entire savings to cover the costs of speeding up the construction of the new site.

When we finally did move into our new space (at which time it was only 70 percent finished) in October of 1997, we found that we'd simply gone from one crisis to another. Six months after I had signed the lease, the building had been sold to an owner who was anti-abortion—and committed to making my life miserable. Tim Ziss, the owner's representative, attempted by any means possible to prevent me from moving into the new space, trying to make me change the layout from the front door to the back of the building—in essence, attempting to change our address. When I refused, Ziss did not allow the contractors to work, again jeopardizing the operation. The extent of the harassment was so severe that I had to call Attorney General Janet Reno's office, which provided armed federal marshals to guard my space during the last few months of construction.

Over the next two years, Ziss left Choices without heat or air conditioning, and unfinished roof work resulted in multiple floods. All of these financial pressures forced me to delay paychecks, forgo my salary for six months, purchase supplies on personal credit cards, implement pay cuts, lay off staff, and suspend all advertising, resulting in a drastic reduction in my patient population.

Then came the ultimate test: should I choose theory or practice, vision or pragmatism, ethics or survival? I had only enough money to either meet payroll and get supplies, or to pay taxes. Opting to survive, I accepted the fact that I would have to deal with my tax situation when it arose, hopefully far in the future. I stopped paying them—the point was to have a future.

By now I was living on pure adrenaline, going from one lawyer to another as I tried to stave off bankruptcy, keep the builders working, the clinic open, the patients safe, and my own sanity intact. Just as with the indictment, Marty was having difficulty keeping himself psychologically together. He often told me he felt weak, and he had difficulty walking long distances. He was nearly eighty years old.

 

I REMEMBER EMBRACING Marty in the hallway outside of my studio apartment in Queens in the full flush of passion, telling him that I would love him forever, that things would never change between us. He looked at me with a poignancy that struck me as strangely sweet at the time. “No,” he said, “I will age, and it won't be the same.” And he was right. In a brutally honest, yet gentle discussion, we acknowledged we were no longer meeting each other's needs. We still loved each other, but we knew we had to let each other go. He began to spend his weekends in Florida while I stayed in Garrison. We were not legally separated, but we arranged to have split custody of the house.

Despite all that, we were still allies. When Marty turned eighty, I wanted to honor him, our marriage, and our partnership. He was never really recognized by the powers at HIP for all his important work, and I wanted to give him the retirement dinner they never had for him. I threw him an eightieth
birthday party at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park and invited many of the HIP colleagues and personal friends of his who were no longer friends of mine.

About a month before he died we had dinner at one of our old favorite Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village. Having recently spent so much time apart, we began to reflect on our relationship. We expressed how much we had given one another, and how sorry we were for the hurt we had caused each other just by being ourselves.

I arrived home at my apartment late one Sunday evening after an event. When I flipped on my answering machine I was greeted by my sister-in-law's voice. “Merle, Merle, it's Marty. He had a heart attack. He's gone.” Click.

I erased the message and sat in silence. After what seemed an immeasurable amount of time, I picked up a pen and spent the night writing Marty's obituary.
²⁵

 

BY THE TIME of Marty's death I had come to know myself enough to be able to apologize to his ex-wife, Bernice, at the funeral, for all the pain I had caused her. Indeed, with Marty's death, my eviction, and the constant stress of being a pariah, I thought I knew everything there was to know. But there was another lesson in reality waiting for me. I had never really felt that the world had lost its moorings, never questioned the certainty of my own survival, until I was betrayed, soon after Marty's death, by one of my doctors, Alan Zarkin. He brought me the closest I had ever come to my own destruction. He was the worst of my paid enemies.

Marty had taken Zarkin on as another of his pet projects, “rescuing” him after he came under fire for a drug addiction problem—all too common with doctors in high stress fields. I'd worked with him off and on for years, and I knew him to be an excellent physician, someone who had struggled with
his addiction demons and triumphed, and a good Jewish son who took care of his mother. But one day I received a complaint from a lawyer naming Zarkin as the plaintiff. This in and of itself was not very unusual; a busy medical center receives complaints, requests for charts, and other legal documents on a fairly regular basis. I read through it quickly until my eyes came upon the words “carved two inches high into her stomach.” I went back and read it again, transfixed. Zarkin was being accused of carving his initials into a patient's stomach after he delivered her baby at Beth Israel Hospital, where he had worked before coming to Choices. I picked up my phone and paged Zarkin, who was on the second floor doing cases.

When he entered my office I waved the legal papers in his face. “Is this true?” Without even asking me what the papers were, he answered calmly, “Yes.”

I had the sickening feeling inside my stomach that one gets when falling off a very high cliff in a nightmare.

I called my management team and my lawyers for an immediate meeting in my office, during which it was revealed that Zarkin had been sued for this carving in the past and had lied to me on his medical application when asked whether he was accredited to work at Beth Israel. He was not. I was sitting in amazed silence, still shocked, when Zarkin announced, “If you have nothing else for me to do I have to catch a plane for Paris.” I told him he was fired.

The first phone call came from the
Daily News
, and then the games began. Dr. Elahi, the medical director I had hired Zarkin to replace because of his incompetence, told the
New York Times
he thought I'd known about Zarkin's act when I hired him—a lie. But Dr. Elahi had known, my administrator had known, and Beth Israel had known, and they had all neglected to inform me that I had hired a compromised
physician. The Department of Health had known, too, but since they were required to give Zarkin “due process,” they kept me in the dark, letting Choices take the fall.

I was familiar with the manipulation of the media, acutely aware of how one word, one turn of phrase, could create new worlds. New headlines greeted me each morning. The
Queens Courier
: “Clinic Director Says, ‘Dr. Zorro Betrayed Me.'” The
New York Post
: “Abort-Clinic Deaths Didn't Nix His Career”; “Probed Doctors Aren't Feeling Much Pain”; “Mark of Zorro Remains a blight on NY Women”; “Zorro Clinic should be out of abortion biz”; “Zorro cut some slack.” And the
Tablet
: “Abortion Is a Dirty Risky Business.” I tried to protect myself when I gave an interview to the
New York Times
by having my lawyer on the other end of the conversation, but the piece was essentially a smear job, and my reputation in the field, which had been the best in the industry, was blasted to pieces.