Kudos & Awards – The Boston Globe

Kudos & Awards – The Boston Globe

By Jeanne Cooper (Literary Life Section)

With very few advertisements to clutter its pages (and nudge its editorial direction), ON THE ISSUES…is denser and more politically diverse than it first looks.

On the opening pages, Merle Hoffman explores the ethical issues — or rather, the ignoring of those issues — around xenotransplantation, the use of animals for organ transplants to humans, and related death-defying efforts. Phyllis Chesler brings a 19th-century crusader into long-deserved limelight: Elizabeth, who fought for the rights of women and mental patients after being imprisoned in an asylum for disagreeing with her husband’s religious views. Andrea Dworkin attacks the Bill of Rights as a guarantee of inequality, examining Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with slave Sally Hemings in that context and, inevitably, condemning freedom of speech as buttressing pornography. But Andrea Peyser, responding to the Oklahoma bombings, repudiates limits on free speech, even that of hate groups and paranoid militias, and notes, “The best way to defeat the enemy is to know his mind.”
Lighter entries include a feminist reading of Stephen King (answer: he is one), a celebration of artist Florine Stettheimer, a sexagenarian’s ode to her Harley (“Bike Lust”) and Mariah Burton Nelson’s account of being an “out” author.

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Merle Hoffman's Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto

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“Merle Hoffman has always known that in a democracy, we each have decision-making power over the fate of our own bodies. She is a national hero for us all.” —Gloria Steinem

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade and a country divided, Merle Hoffman, a pioneer in the pro-choice movement and women’s healthcare, offers an unapologetic and authoritative take on abortion calling it “the front line and the bottom line of women’s freedom and liberty.” 

Merle Hoffman has been at the forefront of the reproductive freedom movement since the 1970s. Three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade, she helped to establish one of the United States’ first abortion centers in Flushing, Queens, and later went on to found Choices, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities. For the last five decades, Hoffman has been a steadfast warrior and fierce advocate for every woman’s right to choose when and whether or not to be a mother.