Intimate Wars (25 page)

Their madness was also strategic. Anti-abortion leaders knew that without providers, there could be no choice; legal abortion was theoretical if they could frighten doctors away from providing them. Many of the early physicians, whose commitment was formed by the experience of having women die in their arms or in hospital emergency rooms from botched abortions, had died off or were on the verge of retiring. The increasing number of physicians unwilling to perform the procedure because of harassment or lack of commitment and the dearth of medical schools willing to train residents resulted in the need for traveling doctors like David Gunn, who had taken on the burden of providing abortions for multiple counties and sometimes multiple states. The antis' strategy seemed to be working.

As ever, the media's talking heads reassured the public that the murders were random acts of violence, tragedies wrought
by psychopathic personalities that had snapped. This placement of the acts within a mental health context had the effect of depoliticizing them. But I viewed this take on the situation as a serious analytic error. The
rhetoric
was the loaded gun; the killers just pulled the triggers. Anyone, emotionally troubled or not, could plug into that anti-abortion message and participate in violent acts fully sanctioned by their peers.

Evidence of the deliberate construction of a climate undermining support for legal abortion and positioning these killers as god's rescuers was ubiquitous. Operation Rescue's Randall Terry, writing in the
New York Post
shortly after the Brookline murders, made it clear enough: “A society cannot expect to tear thirty-five million innocent babies from their mothers' wombs without reaping horrifying consequences. Was it perhaps inevitable that the violent abortion industry should itself reap a portion of what it has so flagrantly and callously sown?” Paul Hill, Dr. Britton's killer, chimed in with an appearance on
Nightline
during which he told the United States that “sometimes you have to use force to stop people from killing innocent children.” A Roman Catholic priest, David Trosch, unsuccessfully attempted to place an ad in Alabama's
Mobile Register
that showed a man pointing a gun at a doctor holding a knife over a pregnant woman with a two-word caption: “Justifiable Homicide.” Conservative government forces and fundamentalist religious groups were taking advantage of the fact that Americans had no viable external threats on which to focus their attention. They manufactured a very effective abortion narrative that painted providers as the new Soviet threat, an “evil empire,”
²³
and offered Americans a new war with which to revive their American manhood.

The antis loved to invoke history—the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Crusades—to add gravitas to their cause, but they were ahistorical at heart. They had crafted themselves
into new social beings, “abortion warriors” who existed out of time and space, who engaged in the present with a terrible sense of urgency directing them to act
now
. The pro-choice community took issue with the idea that people could claim to be “pro-life” and support the murder of doctors, but this seemingly contradictive act made perfect sense within the millennialist and apocalyptic zeal of the born-again pro-lifer. Paul Hill and other killers who went to prison were seen as martyrs for the cause.

 

“I HAVE A GUN. I will be hunting your doctors next week,” the voice on the line calmly stated shortly after Dr. Britton's murder in 1994. Choices had been harassed with many bomb threats over its twenty-three years of operation, and I received death threats on a regular basis, but this one was especially frightening.

My staff, which then included seven physicians, was upset and anxious. Although Choices had a group of loyal clinic escorts on duty every Saturday morning to counteract the antis' harassment of patients, they were a meager substitute for twelve-gauge shotguns. My doctors discussed wearing bulletproof vests, but decided against them when they recalled that Dr. Britton had been wearing one when he was shot in the head.

We felt like sitting ducks. I was skeptical of the law enforcement community's will or ability to protect my clinic. It took the murders of three doctors for the government to begin to take anti-abortion violence and harassment against clinic patients and staff seriously. In 1994 the Supreme Court ruled that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which was originally intended to be used to prosecute members of the Mafia and other organized crime, could be used against anti-abortion protesters who crossed
the line. That same year, President Clinton signed into law the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), making it a federal crime to block access to an abortion clinic or to use force or threats against a clinic's patients. Federal protection was ordered for clinics under siege around the country, and for a moment, greater safety for providers, clinic workers, and patients seemed visible on the horizon.

Then I found out about Henry Felisone and Tony Piso, two New York City residents who had signed Paul Hill's infamous petition describing the use of lethal force in the killing of Dr. David Gunn as “justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children.” They lived within a ten-block radius of Choices.

Now was the time to put law enforcement to the test. I called the New York State attorney general to demand protection, and two days later, Washington posted two federal marshals in front of Choices on a twenty-four-hour basis. But the FBI agents who were investigating our threats were new to the intricacies of the FACE act, and I found myself in the strange position of having to coordinate representatives of the civil rights and criminal divisions of the FBI with my local police precinct to begin an investigation of Felisone and Piso on criminal conspiracy charges. I met with the police department's community affairs directors to help educate the cops on the street. When a few weeks passed without further threats, the federal marshals dropped down to guarding Choices for just seven hours a day, and patients came and went as they had for years.

It infuriated me that we had to protect or at least be very involved in protecting ourselves when we were operating a legal, constitutionally protected service. I began a gynecological resident training program at Choices in conjunction with La Guardia Hospital and taught doctors in other facilities
how to search for bombs, the pros and cons of gun ownership, and where to buy bulletproof vests. I called a meeting of New York abortion providers and representatives of the city's political establishment to strategize about how to deal with the escalating violence to clinic patients and staff, and soon after, convened a summit in Washington, DC, for providers, pro-choice organizations, and politicians across the country. The leaders of all the major political lobbying and pro-choice organizations gathered to discuss the tactics the movement would need to employ in the coming years.

Wanting to get a sense of what providers experienced in conservative areas of the US, I sent my activist friend Mary Lou Greenberg and another member of the PCC to the South with Refuse and Resist!, a radical human rights activist group, to learn more about small clinics and doctor's offices that were particularly vulnerable to attacks. They found that many abortion providers felt isolated, left to deal with groups of Operation Rescue members and endless anti-abortion protests on their own. They were ostracized within the medical community and were often treated as social pariahs. Refuse and Resist! created a National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers (March 10) to support the providers and help offset their feelings of isolation.

Mainstream leaders of national feminist organizations urged providers to focus on working with authorities rather than hiring private security forces and taking matters into their own hands, for fear of making matters worse by “stooping to the level” of the antis. Some clinic directors were afraid that counterdemonstrations by pro-choice activists would give their clinics a circus-like atmosphere. But as Mary Lou reported, such hesitation was harmful in the long run because the system could not be relied upon to act in the interests of women. The PCC and Refuse and Resist! encouraged the clinics
to uphold their fundamental right to self-defense against armed attacks—no one else was going to do it for them.

At Choices, I hired more guards and upgraded my alarm and security systems, making every attempt to demonstrate and encourage bravery in the face of this terrorism. We had regular clinic escorts who would courageously come out every Saturday wearing orange Choices vests. I was doing everything I could to keep them safe, but nothing could change the fact that it would take only one act of violence to destroy our fragile sense of security.

Neither was I able to protect my patients from feeling the threat of violence outside the clinic and the anxiety it caused the staff within. They would come in crying and upset after hearing the awful exhortations from the antis' “sidewalk counselors,” and indeed, a great part of many counseling sessions was spent dealing with those psychological assaults.

Even though we spoke with every patient individually prior to her abortion, these short sessions were but pebbles in each woman's ocean of need and struggle. There was never enough time to address the shame and fear that so many patients brought to the counseling rooms. It became increasingly clear that abortion could not be extricated from other issues women brought to the clinic—violence at home, abusive relationships, incest, danger on the streets, harassment in the workplace, and economic assaults. It was my daily reality and frustration to see the accompanying despair and hopelessness, the feeling that there was no possibility of change, the feeling each woman had that this was not just her life, but
life
.

As a psychologist I knew something more could be done, as an activist I knew it should be done. I needed to find a way to address each patient's entire experience, body and mind, as a participant in this struggle. One night while I was
in bed watching the eleven o'clock news, I saw a piece about how the Mount Sinai Rape Crisis Center, run at the time by Iona Siegel, was going to lose its funding. I sat bolt upright as they interviewed victims of domestic violence who were distraught because they had no other resource. The next day I contacted Segal and met with her about starting a program at Choices.

That moment was the conception of the Choices Mental Health Center. I appointed Mahin Hassibi as the medical director. She supervised the social workers and made herself available to meet the psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual needs of patients and counselors alike. The entire Choices staff, who also deeply felt the pressure of having to absorb the stress of the patients, was eager and willing to participate in the project. They, too, walked past the protesters, and they, too, had to explain to their friends and families that they worked in an abortion clinic. The Mental Health Center would be as helpful to them as it was necessary for the patients.

We knew many women were in abusive relationships but never asked for help. We understood that this reluctance, especially in our large immigrant population, was based on shame and fear of further violence or the potential of breaking up their families. We thought that the most effective way to reach them was through their primary care physicians, the doctors they went to for usual checkups. Many women would go with inchoate complaints—stomach problems, headaches, inability to focus—symptoms of depression that were also symptoms of being a victim of domestic violence. Mahin and I trained the doctors to use a questionnaire we developed to pick up these signs and assess whether the patient needed a referral for mental health treatment, legal services, or both. We developed a new paradigm termed “disorders of intimacy” that allowed us to define domestic
violence as a dysfunction of certain intimate relationships. My willingness to see and treat my patients' partners—excluding those who had orders of protection against them, or who were deemed to be immediate threats—led to a great deal of debate on the subject with other feminists involved in the domestic violence community who felt that abusive partners should be immediately removed from the home. But I found that agreeing to work with the partners and employing the concept of “disorders of intimacy” enabled women to feel their own agency instead of inhabiting the role of victim. Our goal was to enable them to be more comfortable asking for help and be more effective at stopping the abuse cycle, and in some cases, preventing the first violent act.

Years before, when I'd worked with the Brooklyn Martial Arts Center, I'd helped teach women how to scream, how to use their voices to resist passivity and the enormous power of the collective conditioning to be “good girls.” But as Sally Kempton said, “It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” Part of the work of the Mental Health Center was to help women to be present, to feel their power and resist the enemy within and without.

In a sense, the same concept applied to the threatening situation all providers faced. The fact that we were “victims” put us in a kind of female position, waiting for the bully to calm down, hesitating to make too much noise, lest we potentially exacerbate the situation. Like the women who came to us for help with domestic abuse situations, abortion providers and workers collectively held a deep social conditioning that had to be overcome. We had to learn to resist.

 

ONE EVENING Andrea Dworkin and I discussed the dire situation women in general and abortion providers in particular were facing over dinner at an Afghan restaurant. She said she
was questioning the efficacy of nonviolence as a tactic against oppression. With her usual prophetic gravitas she told me she had begun to think about using force, of fighting back against those who would take our lives in their hands.