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Intimate Wars: The Life And Times Of The Woman Who Brought Abortion From The Back Alley To The Board Room (2012)

by Merle Hoffman(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1558617513 (ISBN13: 9781558617513)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

The Feminist Press at CUNY

review 1: Okay, just because the author i a pro-choice crusader who set up an abortion clinic that did 20,000 abortions a year doesn't mean I have to dislike her. I went into this book with an open mind, but when she had affairs with three married man in the first 50 pages, I started to really have a hard time sympathizing with her. And then she describes doing unethical things at her clinic – she describes how she didn't pay her taxes, how she committed Medicaid fraud, and she shows no remorse for any of these things, and then when a woman dies at her clinic and another Doctor gets indicted for carving his initials into the womb of one woman he operated on (really) she makes excuses for that too. She admits the hiring doctors who had a history of substance abuse and malpractice, ... moreand justifies it by saying they deserved a second chance. She struck me as being a very selfish person, she really seemed only be out for her own personal gain. I did learn a lot from this book though – I felt like I got a good sense of what motivated her, and while she did have an ideological desire to provide abortions that were safe and healthy for women, she did seem to be motivated at least partly by money. She casually talks about making her first million dollars and having bought more than one mansion and a stable full of horses. I know she probably didn't pay her clinic workers anywhere near which she made of abortion. I'm still giving this book 4 stars though, because it was interesting and it to give me a good sense of who she was although wasn't a very positive portrayal of an abortion provider, regardless of what she intended when she wrote the book.
review 2: This felt like a memoir written by someone still loving or it - or with something to prove or reconcile and not the work of a writer with enough distance to have reflection. There is more I hoped to learn about the history of the reproductive health movement that this book did not touch. But the moments when she shared the details of running such a health center are interesting, and the overall history of the reproductive rights movement - from her particular vantage - unique. less

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