Abortionist’s Life Was So Empty She Didn’t Experience “Nonconditional Love” Until She Adopted a Child

Opinion   |   Dave Andrusko   |   May 22, 2018   |   9:07AM   |   Washington, DC

There is something about big-time abortion entrepreneur Merle Hoffman that brings out the worst in reporters—and by worst I mean a kind of worshipful bewonderment that the 72-year-old Hoffman could do all this in only one lifetime.

Writing for the East Hampton Star, education reporter [!] Judy D’Mello is fascinated by everything about Hoffman, beginning with her self-described origins story and her massive home in Northwest Woods. [She can afford it. In 2017 Crain’s New York Business described her as the “Millionaire Abortionist,” whose “Choices” abortion clinic had revenues of “about $10 million” in 2016.]

The thread that runs through this “modern day abortion rights crusader’s” 46-year career? Her story

begins with a solitary, bookish child devouring historical tales and creating warrior fantasies that eventually materialized into real-life battles, power struggles, evil oppressors, and noble causes

and is built around a “rescue fantasy that consumed her as a child” which “began to play itself out over her remarkable life” when she first began working for an abortionist in 1970.

Ever since then, more abortions (more girls and women “rescued”), more leadership positions, and, oh by the way, lots and lots and lots of money.

D’Mello tells us that “In 2016, Choices was one of only four clinics across the U.S. where a groundbreaking new experiment was launched, allowing women to obtain abortion-inducing drugs through the mail.” Not quite that simple or benign.

As Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC director of Education & Research, wrote last year, we’re talking about webcam abortions, which were initially sold as helping make “abortion services” available to rural women who didn’t have time or money to travel to the big cities. Hoffman was bringing webcam abortions not to some remote city in Iowa but to the streets of New York City.

“This makes it clear it was not the convenience of women but the convenience of the abortionist–and the expansion of the industry’s customer base–that was the real driver,” O’Bannon wrote.

“Hoffman’s clinic is part of the mail order abortion project that was initiated by Gynuity’s Beverly Winikoff in 2016 partnering with clinics in Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and New York.”

Back to D’Mello’s worshipful profile. We wrote previous about Hoffman’s memoir, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion From the Back Alley to the Boardroom, which, we’re told, “chronicles all of the above as well as more personal details, such as her own decision to have an abortion as a young woman, her decision at 58 to adopt a daughter, her affair with and eventual marriage to the physician she worked for, her experiences running Choices…”

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She why did Hoffman adopt Sasha, a 3 1/2-year-old girl from Russia? According to the New York Times

[W]hen she was in her mid 50s, her husband of more than two decades died. The emptiness was palpable. “I had experienced many facets of love: sexual, devotional, parental from myself to my mother, the love of a cause. But I had never experienced what so many people experience as being the ultimate nonconditional love,” she said. “I wanted to experience what it was to love like that.”

She discovered that the “cause”—unfettered access to abortion for any reason or no reason—wasn’t enough. Just guessing, “her grand weekend house in the tony Cedar Point Park” wasn’t enough.

She was empty, palpably so.

What to do? Hoffman opted to experience “the ultimate nonconditional love”—caring for a child.

The irony—or the unwillingness to see the inconsistency—speaks volumes.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.