Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom

As director of one of the nation’s first ambulatory abortion clinics, activist and journalist Hoffman implemented “Patient Power” to ensure that the staff did not demean women seeking abortions. Characterizing abortion as “often an act of love, and always an act of survival,” she eloquently chronicles more than three decades of struggles to keep abortion legal. Although replete with intimate details, such as her erotic teenage attachments to teachers, an affair with the married physician she persuaded to leave his wife for her, and her decision in her 60s to adopt a child, her memoir lacks introspection. Readers will wonder why she is so aggressive, competitive, and self-centered—referring to “my clinic,” “my counselors,” “my staff,” and describing how she “imperiously” entered a formal dance with her married lover and “answered for him” when he was asked about his wife’s absence. Hoffman’s arrogance contrasts sharply with her compassion for patients. Hoffman’s lack of self-observation mars the book, but readers will learn much about her drive to recast “reproductive freedom as a positive moral value.” 24 b&w photos. (Jan.)