Merle Hoffman

On The Issues Magazine

Merle Hoffman is an award-winning journalist, author, activist, political organizer and women’s health care pioneer. She is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine and the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities. Her memoir, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion From the Back Alley to the Board Room, to be released in January 2012 (Feminist Press), is a personal account of the history of abortion rights and her critical role in the reproductive rights movement. 

Rounding Up The Pro-Choice Troops: When We Started Fighting Back

Merle Hoffman

In 1989, the historic bifurcation between abortion providers and political activists had finally begun to dissolve, and a powerful new alliance was beginning to form. 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. This is one story from that time.

Selecting the Same Sex

Merle Hoffman

While sex selective abortion allows women to make what is, in a sense, the ultimate in supposedly informed consumerism, it also can work to create a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal of birth defects.

The Dangerous Complacency of Victory

Merle Hoffman

The worst years of abortion clinic violence occurred during the Clinton presidency. Without a "friend in the White House," will anti-abortion extremists ratchet up violence against clinics again? Hoffman, an abortion provider, shares her fears.