It’s been over 40 years since I founded Choices Women’s Medical Center, one of the first and currently the largest and most comprehensive women’s health care centers in the country. Two years before the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, I opened the doors of Choices to provide women with services they desperately needed. To give them not just health care services, but also hope and the courage to go on with their lives.

As we celebrate the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the release of my memoir, Intimate Wars, I and others will be sharing our stories of how abortion and the right to reproductive freedom has been personal to us. Because for women whose bodies have become battlegrounds in the struggle for reproductive freedom and justice, the intimacy of this war is profound. Now is the time to reflect on just what the war on women means for the millions of us who are – and will be – touched by this very public debate of this very private act. Follow our journey today and tomorrow and be sure to join us on Twitter at #intimatewars. Below is an excerpt from my memoir about my own abortion experience.

An excerpt from Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room

My debate was taped on a Friday. I had taken a pregnancy test that morning, leaving my urine at Choices, the reproductive health clinic I founded. My period was a couple of weeks late, and I was worried. I was always so careful, almost obsessive, but no method of birth control is perfect.

As the debate progressed, I experienced an odd sort of splitting off. I responded to the gibes and questions of my opponent, all the while thinking that I could be pregnant. I felt removed enough to appreciate the irony of the situation, a battle being waged on multiple tracks. I was performing politically for the cameras and debating emotionally with myself.

In the closing argument I made a passionate plea for the importance of women’s lives, for remembering that the abortion “issue” was ultimately about that. Thousands of individual stories, thousands of different reasons, all culminating in one shared ambiguous reality—a reality I was beginning to enter.

I finished the taping and asked to use the studio phone to call my office. The assistant stood next to me, engaging me in conversation; I was talking, laughing. Then I got on the phone, spoke to my secretary, and found out that the pregnancy test was positive. It took my breath away.

Sweating profusely, I wondered whether I had stained the outfit I was wearing for the debate. I called a cab, flattened my back against the seat, and took slow, deep breaths, trying to keep from feeling suffocated. 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.” I don’t remember whether or not I slept. I only remember my exhaustion and an overriding sense of inevitability. The next morning I dressed carefully in a red-and-white suit. What does one wear to an abortion? There are no traditional costumes like those for funerals or weddings. There is no ritual from one generation of women to another to look to as a guide. There are only functional considerations; you wear something that comes on and off quickly and easily.

At Choices, the steps of the familiar process played out in surreal reversal. The blood tests, the images of the sonogram, the table, the stirrups—they were all for me. Marty stood at the head of the table and held my hand while Dr. Mohammed performed the abortion. Now I was joined to the common experience of my sex. But as I lay on the table I had stood beside to support so many others, I felt irrevocably alone. The hands that touched and caressed my hair felt as if they moved through a dark porous divide that separated me from everything that I knew or had been before. As I spread my legs like all my sisters, I thought of the child whose time was not now. Strange how I thought of the fetus as female, as if that shared gender gave me a more special connection.

Yet despite that connection, the recognition of the fetus’s potential to become my child, I knew that I could not allow this pregnancy to come to term. My sense of self, my sense of time, the flow of my movement toward goals that I had created had been interrupted the moment my test came back positive. The fetus was an invader, a separate force growing inside me, demanding and creating potentially unalterable realities. I couldn’t let my life become someone else’s.

After my abortion, as I slowly awoke from the anesthesia, I became conscious of immense and overwhelming feelings: non-specific, non-directed. Love, relief—then sadness.

A few days later, walking down the hallway in Choices, I heard loud, wrenching sobs coming from the recovery room. A woman was waking from anesthesia and crying for her mother. I went to her bed, lowered the side rails, and gently tried to soothe her. As I bent down to her face she whispered in a halting Russian accent, “You’re the only one I have now, I’m all alone. You’ve saved my life by being here.” I held the woman close, enormously moved, savoring our connection. There was no good or bad, no issue of choice. There was nothing more than the pure energy of survival, and women doing what they had been doing for centuries throughout history, what they will do forever.

This post is part of the Intimate Wars Blog Series appearing at Fem2.0 and On the Issues Cafe January 17-18, 2012 in celebration of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the release of Merle Hoffman’s memoirs, Intimate Wars.  You can purchase a copy of her book here.  To submit a post for the blog series, please contact us, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter using #intimatewars.

All wars are intimate. For women whose bodies have become battlegrounds in the struggle for reproductive freedom, the intimacy is profound. In the U.S. where the rise of the fundamentalist right has resulted in extensive attempts at creative new restrictions on women’s rights to Moscow, where an American style anti-choice movement has emerged, the struggle goes on. The womb is the ultimate theater of war and all women are potential casualties.

Being on the front lines of this generational struggle has been a challenge, a privilege and a gift. In my upcoming memoir Intimate Wars, I address the total war against women that started after the attacks of 9/11. Below is an excerpt.

Amazing Grace

An excerpt from Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room:

“Welcome to my world.” My words were published in the New York Post on October 17, 2001, just a little over a month after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It was a controversial statement, but it was the truth. Envelopes filled with anthrax were sent to television stations and five U.S. senators had instigated national panic, but I was used to checking my mail for white powder every day. Grand Central Station was threatened with a bomb, but I’d been looking under my car for signs of foul play, my heart beating quickly in anticipation of an explosion, for a decade by then. I’d been avoiding windows for fear of bullets since Bernard Slepian was gunned down at his kitchen window in front of his wife and child in 1998. I tensed my body every time I walked from my car to Choices.

The attacks of 9/11 provided an ideal context for Bush to lead his holy crusade as the god-ordained protector of American citizens, born and unborn. All Americans were awash in a sea of righteous patriotism. This was not the time for questioning or opposition to a “war president.” It was the perfect environment for Bush to attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact a deeply conservative reproductive and sexual agenda with the ultimate goal of banning abortion.

On January 22, 2001, the twenty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and President George W. Bush’s first full day in office, he reinstated the draconian “gag” rule, restricting funding for international family planning and denying medical information on abortion to poor women treated at federally funded clinics. The Bush administration’s opening salvo made it perfectly clear that the U.S. was going to use its enormous power and prestige to tell the world in no uncertain terms that girls’ and women’s lives were not important.

In the wake of 9/11, Bush followed his first act as president by withholding $34 million in funding for women’s health care from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Then the United States became the only developed nation not to ratify the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Against all fact-based anecdotal and experiential information, the administration insisted that knowledge about sex encouraged promiscuity, mandating abstinence-only programs in schools. The administration limited vital information about birth control, even removing literature about condom effectiveness from the Department of Health and Human Services’ website. Instead, they used the space to spread misinformation about abortion causing breast cancer and depression.

This was followed by a series of vastly restrictive acts: the charter of the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protection granted status as “human subjects” to embryos for the first time; the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation allowing health care entities to discriminate against any provider who even offered information about abortion; the president appointed anti-choice extremists to key FDA committees and to oversee Title X; and Congress prohibited the more than one hundred thousand women serving in the military and living on American bases overseas from obtaining abortion services in overseas military hospitals, even with their own money (to which Choices responded by offering abortions to military women at a reduced rate).

It was clear that the face of the war was changing once again. The combatants remained the same, but the nature of the attacks against women expanded into new territory. The Clinton era had seen a guerrilla war waged against abortion rights, with antis swarming abortion clinics, killing doctors, making overt threats, and ambushing patients on the streets. They had also begun chipping away at abortion rights incrementally with legislation and lawsuits in multiple states. These attacks were effective to a certain extent, but the antis lacked the main prize — the bully pulpit. When George W. Bush took office, they won that, too. The antis no longer felt disenfranchised or alienated; now, the re-criminalization of abortion was much closer on the horizon. They leveraged their new support in the White House to help Bush fight what could only be described as a total war against reproductive freedom.

Women of the United States began falling prey to the quiet, carefully planned “stealth strategy” that characterized the Bush era. Realizing that the goal of overturning Roe remained elusive, the antis focused on achieving that same end by making it very difficult, and in some states almost impossible, to provide the procedure. The strategy had its roots in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which declared for the first time that states had authority to regulate abortion clinics performing first trimester abortions (as opposed to only regulating those who provided second trimester abortions), as long as they didn’t place an “undue burden” on women’s access to abortions. The vague language of the ruling left states open to the antis’ creative applications. They found ways to create small hurdles for clinics to climb if they wanted to stay in operation. Relatively benign on their own, these little obstacles piled up, making it more and more difficult for clinics to offer services. The goal was to create an environment where, in the words of one anti-choice leader, “abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one.”

Their strategy was effective. Between 1995 and 2003, approximately 350 anti-choice measures were enacted, protecting pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions on moral or religious grounds, preventing physicians from performing most abortions, requiring state-controlled counseling and waiting periods for abortion, and mandating parental involvement in minors’ abortions. There was also a rise in bogus malpractice cases brought against providers claiming that women were “coerced” into having abortions, and that many women didn’t know they were actually “killing their babies.” Most cases were dismissed or withdrawn, but each time a doctor was accused of malpractice, the ensuing legal fees and damage to the clinic’s reputation did almost as much harm as if the cases had gone to trial.

One of the most maddening aspects of the stealth strategy was that it was conducted in the name of “women’s health” in order to garner public support. Stricter regulations for clinics and laws mandating ‘unbiased” counseling were characterized as protections for women. The antis had found a new defense against accusations that they valued the fetus’s life more than the mother’s: turning the argument back on its head, they retorted that the mother and fetus had a sacred bond, and in honoring the “baby,” they were also honoring the mother. They were slapping a women’s rights label on fetal rights so that they could proclaim themselves women’s rights activists, co-opting the language of feminism and thus pushing even more Americans to the anti-choice side of the reproductive rights continuum. Now, you could be “pro-life” and a feminist, too.

But the right to reproductive freedom is as fundamental as the right not to be a slave. When birth control finally became available in all its forms, women’s rights activists and feminists said that women were no longer slaves to their biology, that pregnancy would no longer be the guiding and primary directing principal of their lives. The legalization of abortion went even further toward freeing women from this constriction. In a sense it was a complete negation of the Freudian principle that “biology is destiny.” But the ruling meant to uphold this right was full of holes inflicted state by state, its strength leaking out the sides. Now “geography was destiny.”

Two days after the 9/11 attack I drove down to a site where I could smell the charred remains of the towers and see the black, dripping steel rising high from the smoldering ground. Already the hawkers with their souvenirs camped out on the sidewalks. Looking into the dazed faces around me, I sensed that we all shared the same reality. In the stores, on the trains, on the streets, everyone had a sense of connectedness that I had never experienced before. We were in a war zone and we had no idea what might be coming next. The immediate shock and fear of another attack was slowly replaced by searing grief, anger, and rage.

“How could this have happened?” I never asked that question. My body and mind were used to living in a constant state of functional anxiety, and as I absorbed this blow like the others that had come before, I wondered at myself for not reacting with more emotion.

Merle Hoffman is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine. She is the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center. She is the author of an upcoming book, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room from The Feminist Press.

Photos Credit ©Anna Jurinich
This piece was cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine

On Thursday, the New York Times’ Sophia Kishkovsky published a piece about alarming news that’s been buzzing in reproductive rights circles for the last couple of weeks – Russia has embraced  their very own anti-choice movement, and it looks strikingly like ours here in the U.S.

This is not news to me as I encountered the nascent Russian anti-choice movement 20 years ago when I attempted to open the first feminist medical center in Moscow, Choices East. My desire to create a Russian version of Choices in New York was sparked when I was confronted with a 35-year-old Russian woman who came to me for her 36th abortion.  At that time, abortion was the major form of birth control in the former Soviet Union, and many immigrants had ten or twenty before coming to Choices.  I listened in mute rage to one story after another of lives blighted by sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence and hopelessness. For these women, the issue of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life.  My patient regarded her multiple abortions pragmatically, as a way of “just getting cleaned out.”

Like so many of her compatriots, she was violently opposed to using birth control. Most Russian gynecologists promoted the idea that the pill caused cancer, and preached the virtues of repeat abortions. Of course, the fact that many of them subsidized their three-dollar-a-month salaries by doing abortions on kitchen tables might well have had an influence on their thinking.

The only contraceptive devices locally produced were condoms, but these were so poorly made that they were called “galoshes,” and few men consented to using them.The two most popular forms of birth control for women were douching with lemon juice and jumping on cardboard boxes when their periods were late.

The slogan of many pro-choice activists in the US—“Abortion on demand and without apology”—was a reality in Russia, but it had little to do with freedom and privacy, and a lot to do with state oppression and coercion.

I visited obstetric wards empty of patients, and was told that one out of three women who sought second trimester abortions in hospitals died from infections stemming from illegal abortions. One woman confided that the brutality of the state maternity wards was Russia’s most effective means of family planning.

When I attempted to bring birth control pills, condoms and insert the first Norplant, I was violently attacked in the press. Calling my plans to set up a women’s clinic in Moscow  with state of the art abortion care an “anti-Russian ploy,” Alexander Sterligov, former KGB general and leader of the Russian National Assembly, was quoted as saying, “We will not put up with Russians having more coffins than cradles.”

By the early 1990s, mirroring the growth of the American anti-choice movement, tapes of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart had already  aired on Russian television, while a right-to-life conference in Moscow boasted five hundred attendees.

Twenty years later, these sentiments have metastasized into new attempts at legal restrictions, American-style pickets at clinics and appropriation of the English word, “pro-life”. It’s evident that Russia has caught onto Americans’ anti-choice tactics in its continuing assault on women.

The current Russian anti-choice campaign touting the protection of “life” is a smoke screen for the same old State/Church philosophies insuring power and control over women’s bodies. When Stalin criminalized abortion in 1936, a fetus’s right to life was not the agenda; the agenda was to populate Russia with soldiers to counteract Hitler’s rising militarism. In all of these calculations, women are the losers. True reproductive freedom is never under consideration. And so women make the choices they have to make.

Unfortunately, I never got to build my medical center. There were some brave Russian feminists who worked with me on presenting an open statement to Boris Yeltsin decrying the state of women’s health — but the real work of saving women’s lives and bringing choice and dignity to Russian women had to be put on hold, to be documented in my forthcoming memoir, Intimate Wars.

I hope Russian feminists will take heed and stand up against the anti-choice movement before it destroys the health and lives of current and future generations of women.

George Tiller was a friend, comrade and associate of mine for over a quarter of a century. I would share time and ideas with him at conferences, refer patients for his services and exchange holiday gifts with his staff. He, like so many abortion providers, was a person of courage, integrity and commitment to women’s reproductive rights.

I am sobered, deeply saddened, but not surprised by his murder. Like all of us, he knew that THERE IS NO CHOICE WITHOUT PROVIDERS. Facing ongoing legal and violent harassment, he continued to work for women on a daily basis in the middle of this war zone that all providers share.

As I write in my current editorial, "Higher Ground, Not Common Ground," in On The Issues Magazine "reproductive freedom is the front line, the bottom line and the everlasting line in the sand of any definition of women’s transcendent rights that must be continually defended."

George lived on that line, defended it and paid with his life. I am profoundly grateful for that life, lived with courage, conviction and honor.

I ask all of us to pledge our passions, strength, power and continued commitment to the struggle for women’s reproductive freedom in his memory.

Merle Hoffman
President, CHOICES Women’s Medical Center
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, On The Issues Magazine

FLASHBACK:
 
In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was the first abortion provider assassinated. Shortly afterward, Merle Hoffman wrote in "Praise the Lord and Kill the Doctor," her prescient editorial:
 
"There is a method to their madness. They know that without providers there is no such thing as choice; legal abortion is merely theoretical if there is no one willing and technically capable of doing the procedure."
 
Our current theme, "Lines in the Sand," could not be more timely.

New stories in The Cafe also reflect on this line.
 
Loretta Ross’ piece, "Repeal Hyde: Even Republicans Know It’s Wrong to Politick With Women’s Lives," calls on Obama to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits public funding for abortions for poor women. Interestingly, Ross points out that both Presidents Nixon and George H.W. believed in financially supporting family planning. 

"Poem Honoring Slain Abortion Doctor- Again," a poem by Judith Arcana, written for Barnett Slepian and re-dedicated in memoriam and with gratitude, to George Tiller, is also in the Cafe.
 
The doctor went into the kitchen
where if you can’t stand the heat
you don’t stand by the window
 
ALSO: Check the site to stream an episode of Blog Talk Radio featuring Merle Hoffman, Gloria Feldt and Loretta J. Ross on "Lines In The Sand."

Photo Credits:

1. George Tiller, 1941-2009 
2. Union Square Rally/Vigil/Speak Out, New York City, June 1. Photo by g. sosa/trust2020 media
3. ©Meredith Stern

Oscar Wilde, writing in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”

Unsurprisingly, women have been assigned supporting roles in even the most expansive male-imagined Utopias. Yet, modern day feminists seem to have lost the art of visionary mapmaking altogether.

The first voyager to Utopia was Plato, who in The Republic created a society that utilized the energies of all people. Women’s reproduction did not keep them from playing a citizenship role (children were to be raised communally). Plato insisted that women were capable of the same tasks as men, although he assumed they would be inferior in performing them.

Thomas Moore, writing hundreds of years later in Utopia, took the Platonic position of utilizing all citizens’ skills for the good of society. His vision was less progressive than Plato’s, but women were fully functioning members of society. Women farmed, learned trades, fought battles along with their husbands and were educated—a radical concept in 16th century England.

While women fared well-enough in these imaginative landscapes of male Utopias, their real-time lives continued to be subservient and powerless. War, poverty, violence, early death, discrimination and terror continued to create the contours of their existence.

When visionaries did manage to “land on Utopia,” it was usually a crash landing with multiple casualties.

The first major landing was the French Revolutionaries, who, in attempting to create a new world with “Reason” as their God left a landscape of headless corpses. The American Revolution, taking much of its philosophy from the French Enlightenment, made “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the troika of its Utopian vision. Unfortunately, in Jefferson’s “workshop of liberty,” women and enslaved Blacks were completely left out.

Views of Feminist Revolution

*Picture 1: Liberty Leading the People by Euguene Delecroix 1830; picture 2: Is She a Feminist?

Some early visionaries of the “feminist revolution” of the 20th century had a concept of a gender-neutral egalitarian society where women would be able to “be all they could be.”

Indeed, the rhetoric of the movement often stressed that a successful landing on this Utopia would be soft and benefit not only women, but also men and male institutions. Men would learn or be taught to welcome a radical change in their personal and political power positions.

The vision outlined in Betty Freidan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, said to have sparked the “second-wave” of feminism, was one of freedom from the “problem that had no name.” She saw the freedom to become a fully-engaged person as the “personal” and the goal of a gender-neutral society that would have no barriers to women’s self-fulfillment as the “political.”

Unlike the Civil Rights struggles of the 20th century that were triggered by attacks and assaults against African Americans, leaving a sordid trail of bloodshed, the feminist revolution did not emerge from violence, although terror and poverty crushed many women’s lives. Women’s biological and historical inheritance of bloodshed — through wars, rapes, domestic violence, botched childbirth and illegal abortions – remain a continual, though unanswered, scream for radical action.

Now, after so many years, we still have no collective vision of what feminism is or is not. If one can’t even name the boundaries or contours of the vision, or agree on what a feminist is, then we are left with feminism as a product. In a society where everything from sex to war and revolution is commodified, branded and packaged to sell, feminism is another box on the shelves.

Lost in Black Holes

Rather than vision, public discussion of feminism seems to be back in black holes of discussions about glamour and whether or not one can be a feminist and still wear high heels and lipstick. This is a conversation that can only exist in a society that has lost recognition of the role of visionaries: indeed, the greatest casualty of the feminist revolution may be the feminist vision itself.

A December 2008 article about feminism by Gemma Soames in England’s The Sunday Times quotes the founder of a feminist zine as saying “You can’t not buy shoes and wear dresses. Plus all of that stuff is fun — it doesn’t take away your power as a woman.”

Feminist Utopias have become personal spaces — spaces for lipstick or not; high heels or not; glamour; children, and dreams small enough to be accomplished by shopping, exercising or getting the right man or the right sperm.

According to Ellie Levenson, author of the soon-to-be-published The Noughtie Girls Guide to Feminism, quoted in the same article, “In the past, you had to subscribe to a whole set of beliefs to be a feminist, including how you should look and behave. But Noughties women have made it their own. It’s like a pick and mix feminism, where you can choose what you care about yourself.”

Ahh, the pleasure of the power of choice in a cafeteria of issue feminism where one works on what makes one happy – issues that are “relevant” to her. But the question remains: To what end do we empower ourselves and others? And, if, indeed, we have any “power as a woman,” what exactly is that to be used for?

Gender role and feminism revisited; a follow up study, published in 2006, showed that the majority of women and men identify themselves as feminists but they are unwilling to accept that label.

What does it mean when individuals say that they want women to have equal pay for equal work or have leadership positions by women, yet refuse to identify these goals as a part of the feminist vision or themselves as feminists? Or when the F word has so much power that women are loathe to use it. And this is on topics that are basic feminism 101: equal rights-equal pay.

What about true revolutionary goals of changing the power structure? Of changing the world from “what is” to “what should be”? If only the F word, which retains so much power to threaten, had the power to deliver the revolution at its core.

What’s in a name? A lot in this one, it seems.

The new cover of Ms. Magazine’s inauguration issue has Barack Obama in a Superman pose, opening his white shirt to reveal the tee shirt saying “This is what a feminist looks like.” And he is not even wearing lipstick or high heels!

Phoebe Feingold, editor of the “feminist fashion zine” Pamflet, told The Sunday Times that “There are so many people out there who wouldn’t describe themselves as feminists, but they blatantly are in their actions. They’re just scared of the word.” But what are the actions she is describing? Are they airlifting victims of male terror out of Africa? Setting up rape crisis shelters or rescuing girls from forced sexual slavery? They don’t dare call themselves feminists, so how could we possibly tell that they are?

Kate Roiphe is quoted in the same column as saying, “One of the most unappealing things about the feminist movement right from its inception was its tendency to judge other women.” Apparently, calling oneself a feminist might signal to the world that the person has a judgmental standard of right and wrong, and feminist and non-feminist. And why not pass judgment on a “new brand of feminism” whose agenda is a heady brand of consumerism and adolescent self-involvement.

It appears that by calling yourself a feminist, you may have people believe that your concerns transcend the presentation of self to a vision of others and to politically important issues. You may even appear to want to have real power, not merely the celluloid kind with the trappings of celebrity and fame.

There is still a great deal of work to do. Even the initial goals of the early feminists for a gender-neutral egalitarian society, equal rights, and equal pay for equal work have not been achieved, while legal abortion continues to be under assault. We have a very long road to travel to even come close to building a new society or overthrowing male privilege.

In this year of 2009, as we celebrate ourselves for overcoming one of our nation’s birth defects with the election of a Black president, the question remains: What is feminism and what is the feminist vision?

At the very least, any feminist vision depends on critical judgments of oneself and society. It means the creation of a collectively-imagined country, if you will, that we all want to land on — one in which immigration is not limited to those in high heels. If, in this Utopia, all discrimination against women is abolished, we might be forced to think of the good of the whole instead of the one, and accept the reality that power will change hands, minimizing or abolishing altogether male privilege and entitlements.

But we need visionaries who must hold us to those higher standards and take the longer view than what is immediately available or possible. We must learn to want to do the impossible. The visionary is one who dreams of the world that “should be,” mapping the landscapes and focusing our sights. We also may make a crash landing — but we have to get off the ground first.

Merle Hoffman is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine. She is the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center.

Cross-posted with permission from On The Issues Magazine.