By Victor Ochieng
Choices Women’s Medical Clinic (Choices) is known for its spirited support to abortion. The organization’s president and CEO Merle Hoffman has utilized every opportunity that comes her way to fight for a women’s right to abortion.
Speaking under oath before the Liberty Counsel during a questioning session, the leader of the Jamaica, New York-based CHOICES asserted that the “act of abortion positions women at their most powerful” because it gives women “power-and the responsibility-of taking life” in a bid to take control of their lives.
After she made that comment, Liberty Counsel Founder Mat Staver, said, “Merle Hoffman has acknowledged the obvious—that abortion is the taking of human life. What is shocking is that she believes killing a helpless child empowers women by enabling them to achieve their selfish goals.”
Testifying in court, Hoffman admitted that she collaborated with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to front the federal lawsuit that critics believe is aimed at punishing and silencing pro-life and Christian speech on the sidewalks outside her offices. She believes the mere existence of pro-life groups is a “crime against women.” The case resumes next week in a federal court in Brooklyn.
There are 13 defendants in the case, with Liberty Counsel representing one of them, Scott Fitchett Jr., a pre-K teacher who spends most of his time on Saturdays sharing the gospel on public sidewalks, including outside Choices offices.
In her memoir, “Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom,” Hoffman shares her personal abortion experience. In one part she says, “The idea of abortion was a valve, an opening, a way to breathe. There was no question of whether I would have one. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, I held my stomach and said aloud, ‘Sorry, little one, it’s just not time.’ My diary entry from that night reads, ‘For one night I am a mother.'”
In the book, Hoffman makes it clear that abortion is the act of taking away human life and that, she says, is what makes women so powerful. “Does the fetus not impede a woman’s tendency to maintain her own existence? Is it not an unjust aggressor, threatening the survival of the mother? Is not a woman’s choice of abortion an act of self-defense?”
Hoffman praises the people and institutions that provide abortion services to women, saying they work “not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives, but also the power-and the responsibility-of taking life in order to do that.”
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