We fought for Roe and we’re fighting again: Meet the veteran activists battling for the right to choose

The US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs Wade galvanized a generation of women who’d fought for a woman’s right to choose more than a half-century beforehand. Some had seen the reversal coming; others had not. All were horrified -- with droves dedicating their twilight years to continuing the fight. Bel Trew, Julia Saqui and Sheila Flynn report

This story is part of an investigative series and new documentary, The A-Word, by The Independent examining the state of abortion access and reproductive care in the US after the fall of Roe v Wade.

It’s impossible to miss the massive wire coat hanger in the New York offices of Merle Hoffman’s reproductive rights clinic.

It stands out defiantly, like the now 78-year-old who commissioned it decades ago to show “this is what will happen” without legalized abortion, she tells The Independent’s documentary The A-Word – women will resort to dangerous and often fatal methods in the desperation to end pregnancies.

The oversized hanger has become Hoffman’s trademark at rallies and abortion-access events for more than 35 years – though she’d been lobbying on behalf of reproductive rights for far longer.

The journalist and activist opened one of America’s first abortion clinics in 1971, two years before Roe vs Wade passed, then watched as the movement swelled, the Supreme Court legalized the procedure in 1973 and many considered abortion enshrined in US law.

Veteran feminist Merle Hoffman says fighting for reproductive rights again is like “Groundhog Day" (Julia Saqui/The Independent)

Hoffman, and others monitoring the country’s rising political temperature, rightly worried that it wasn’t. Now she’s fighting the same battle all over again.

“I’ve been doing this for 53 years,” she tells The Independent, surrounded not only by the hanger in Choices Women’s Medical Center but also reams of memorabilia from those advocacy-packed decades.

“It’s like … what is that movie? Groundhog Day,” she says, adding wryly: “How many people get the chance to relive their youth?”

Quite a few committed and disheartened activists across the country, it turns out.

Merle Hoffman runs Choices Women’s Medical Center, in Queens, New York, a clinic she founded as one of the first abortion clinics in the country. (Julia Saqui/The Independent)

Right now a gender generation – those who celebrated Roe vs Wade as young women, giving thanks for hard-won rights they thought would extend to their daughters and beyond – are taking to the streets again in their twilight years. They’re working alongside those very same daughters and the next wave of Americans battling to restore reproductive freedoms after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade in June 2022.

Six hundred miles southwest of Choices, 71-year-old Barbara Schwartz keeps guard outside Bristol Women’s Health on the Tennessee/Virginia border. She’s a retired Planned Parenthood employee and now a clinic escort with State Line Abortion Access Partners, guiding patients through throngs of protesters towards doctors providing the same care she received as a young woman in New York City.

Hoffman keeps a huge hanger in her office commissioned decades ago as a symbol of ‘what will happen’ as a result of strict abortion laws - and the dangerous lengths to which women have historically gone to obtain procedures illegally (Julia Saqui/The Independent)

Schwartz had been 23 and using an IUD when she became unexpectedly pregnant three years after the passing of Roe vs Wade. Accompanied by her best friend and supportive partner, she took the subway to her appointment to terminate the pregnancy, then contributed financially for decades to Planned Parenthood and national abortion rights funds.

“I have to admit that I went on for years without realizing that things were being incrementally chipped away,” she tells The Independent.

Then, in 2013, she was moved by the 24-hour now-famous filibuster of Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis against anti-abortion legislation.

“And then I started to see it all being chipped away,” Schwartz says. “And I said: ‘Nobody should have an experience that wasn’t as easy as mine was’.”

She went to Planned Parenthood in Orlando, where she was living at the time, and “got the training, escorted there for a couple of years, and then they actually hired me as a medical assistant … That was my last working job before I retired.”

It was only this spring that she relocated to Virginia, where she first became involved with State Line Abortion Access.

Barbara Schwartz, 71, had an abortion at 23 and admits she ‘went on for years without realizing that things were being incrementally chipped away;’ she now volunteers as a clinic escort on the border of Virginia, where abortion is legal, and Tennessee, which enacted some of the strictest laws in the nation (The Independent)

“My husband and I had really gotten over Florida – the meanness, the politics, the heat, picking ticks off our pets,” she says. “We looked and Virginia was the first purple-ish state that we could afford.”

She’s standing alongside fellow clinic escort and State Line co-founder Kimberly Smith, a 51-year-old who grew up on the Tennessee side of Bristol and returned in 2017 after decades in the Northeast.

“In the Trump years, when I saw sort of the crazy divisiveness … in our US politics, and so much of it was happening in red states in the South, I thought about myself, and I’m someone who has always worked for social justice,” Smith tells The Independent. “I made a career out of it, but I left and I said, ‘Well, I’m the right kind of person to go back and maybe try to make a difference.

“Even though I had worked on reproductive rights for many, many years, I didn’t know that there was a clinic in my hometown – that just goes how to show [the] stigma and how things were quiet, that that clinic operated the whole time I lived here. I left when I was 18.”

She only discovered the clinic when she drove past it and spotted protesters.

The pair and other clinic escorts regularly see the consequences of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in Bristol, where patients flock not just from Tennessee – which implemented one of the strictest bans in the country – but also from states much further afield.

Kimberly Smith, 51, co-founded State Line Abortion Access Partners, which helps patients who need abortions with logistics - everything from funding to transportation to clothing (The Independent)

When people don’t want – or are too afraid – to arrive at the clinic with plates from Texas, Alabama and other well known anti-abortion strongholds, volunteers will ferry them in local vehicles from a nearby drop-off point. Others fly in; Schwartz, Smith and their fellow activists have basically memorized the flight schedules arriving at a nearby feeder airport.

Like many other advocacy organizations across the country, State Line helps patients with logistics from funding to transportation to clothing, even having ready a stash of sweatshirts for those from further South who might find the weather too cool.

“There’s still a lot of tears, fears, arranging child care, driving all night … I can’t make that go away,” Schwartz says. “But … we can make that last 30 feet a little warm and welcoming bubble.”

At Choices in New York, Hoffman has also noticed a marked increase of patients arriving from Texas, Florida and other further-afield parts of the US.

Those out-of-towners previously constituted “about three or four percent; that’s [now] 10 to 15 percent of the total volume,” she tells The Independent.

But she points to another abortion travel trend that’s a flagrant reversal from the situation 20 and even ten years ago, when Latin American reproductive rights activists were fighting for the same types of freedoms then enjoyed in America. The movement was known as the Green Wave, its proponents wearing bandanas of the same color, and resulted in expanded rights in multiple Latin American countries looking to the US as a shining example to emulate.

“We were the most advanced; we were the most evolved,” she says. “Now women are going to Mexico to have abortions, and it’s just beyond acceptance.”

Schwartz, center, says that, through her work with State Line, she sees in women ‘still a lot of tears, fears, arranging child care, driving all night … I can’t make that go away. But … we can make that last 30 feet a little warm and welcoming bubble.” (The Independent)

When she co-founded a new abortion rights group following the Dobbs decision, they adopted green in homage to their counterparts further south.

“These women were out for 10 years; they were out continually, marching, pressuring, pressing, continually, so that there would be a change,” Hoffman says. “Now we’re looking to South America, when they looked to us.”

It’s a reality she laments but feared.

“I knew that this was definitely possible and that it was coming,” she says, frustrated by “the fact that so many people in the pro-choice movement didn’t – that they actually trusted that nothing could stop Roe vs Wade, it was law … that’ll never fall.”

Hoffman knew better, she tells The Independent, as she noted everything from the passion of the “extraordinarily creative” opposing movement to the murder of abortion-provider friends like George Tiller, a Kansas doctor gunned down by an extremist in 2009.

“I was evicted twice; I had multiple death threats,” she says. “I’ve been on the front lines.”

Hoffman employs the language and philosophy of battle as she talks about the ongoing reproductive rights movement and “lawfare.”

“We have a group here called veteran feminists,” she says. “We’re warriors, and we’re veterans, in a sense.

Hoffman’s office features not just the impossible-to-miss hanger but also evidence of her long-term advocacy; women across the country are taking to the streets again in their senior years after seeing a right they fought for and won years ago now stripped away again for future generations (The Independent/Merle Hoffman)

“I’m not a veteran; I’m still fighting … this is a great struggle, this war, this civilized struggle, and it’ll go on for many generations.

“And very few people actually understand the depth of it and the opposition to it.”

She’s seen generational connections in another way; in addition to abortion services, Choices offers a range of reproductive care, including gynecology and a prenatal program.

“Women sometimes change their mind, and we have intergenerational patients,” she says. “We have patients here now whose mothers came for their prenatal care, and then maybe even a grandmother.”

But as the old guard continues to fight for reproductive choices, Hoffman says, the newer wave needs to take up the mantle.

“We have to be the ones that are … vigilant, because freedom isn’t free,”she says. “You have to fight for it in every generation. I’ve seen older activists go up to young women in tears and say, ‘We’re sorry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t keep this from you.’

“I am not crying about that,” she says. “I’ve tried my best. Now it’s up to other generations.”

Hoffman calls her own work – which has constituted the majority of her lifetime – “a gift; it’s a privilege.

“But it can feel like a curse at times, because it just doesn’t let go of me,” she says. “I call the rage sacred fuel … because I have to fight this.

“I can’t deny the truth of my experience, the lives that I’ve seen come through these doors, the women [whose stories] I’ve been a part of, the staff that’s been with me – it’s very special.

“It’s fighting for things that I profoundly believe in.”