Women’s Healthcare Pioneer:
When abortion became legal in New York State in 1970, Merle Hoffman didn’t celebrate—she got to work. While others were still absorbing the news, she opened one of the first standalone women’s health clinics in the country. No medical guidelines existed for a procedure that had only ever been done in secret, so she wrote them. Her patients didn’t know their rights, so she wrote those down, too—a document that became the blueprint for the federal Patient’s Bill of Rights.
Fifty-plus years later, Hoffman is still at it—still running Choices Women’s Medical Center in Queens, still fighting, and still asking the questions that don’t have easy answers.
“It’s an intrinsic trust in myself, which I’ve always noticed and always had. Things come to me and I feel them organically, and I want to do this, and I trust that my decision is the right decision. And I follow my own voice.”
To call Merle Hoffman the owner of an abortion clinic is only to scratch the surface of her complexity. She’s a pianist, a philosopher, an activist, a mother, and an adventurer in the world of spirituality. This is a conversation about courage, conviction, and what happens when we decide to trust ourselves.
“I can live in the question. I don’t have to know. I don’t know if we’ll ever know. But the question is so incomparably deep, profound, interesting, frustrating.”
Mentioned in this episode
Books
- Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom by Merle Hoffman (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- CHOICES: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto by Merle Hoffman (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (Amazon • Bookshop.org)
Publications & Organizations
- Choices Women’s Medical Center
- On the Issues Magazine
- Choices Global Institute
- National Abortion Federation
- National Coalition of Abortion Providers
- New York Pro-Choice Coalition
- Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights
- Planned Parenthood
- Thomas More Society
- HIP (Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York)
- Kaiser Permanente
Topics discussed
- Abortion rights in the United States
- Roe v. Wade
- Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
- Hyde Amendment
- Women’s health
- Henry Hyde
- Jerry Falwell
- Patient’s Bill of Rights
- Patriarchy
- Second-wave feminism
- Gloria Steinem
- Equal Rights Amendment
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
- Florynce Kennedy
- Bill Baird
- Absurdism
- Viktor Frankl / Logotherapy
- Sisyphus
- Oscar Wilde
- Sigmund Freud
- Artificial intelligence
- Thomas More
- Elizabeth I of England
- Mary, Queen of Scots
- Christian Science
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Social psychology
- Animal rights
- Medicaid
- Black Lives Matter
- Abortion in Russia
- Queens College, CUNY
About Merle Hoffman
Merle Hoffman is an internationally known leader in the struggle for women’s rights, a healthcare pioneer, founder of women’s health, political, and reproductive rights organizations, and a prize-winning writer and publisher. Her work spans 52 years and continues today, proving to be more essential and relevant than ever in the ongoing fight for women’s human rights, including the ability to make their own reproductive choices.