abortion rights

Abortion-rights advocates prepare for more out-of-state patients

Abortion-rights activists expect more than a quarter of a million women to come to New York seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

She Ran an Abortion Clinic Before Roe v. Wade. She Has Some Thoughts.

In 1970, three years before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, four states, New York among them, repealed their anti-abortion statutes. At the time, Merle Hoffman was a concert pianist who had recently given up her professional ambitions. The world of classical music was too hermetic, but the sweeping political currents of the ’60s had not drawn her in either. She settled on graduate school in psychology, supporting herself with three jobs, one of them in the office of a doctor who wanted to open an abortion clinic and asked her to run it.

Choices Women's Medical Center's Out of Town program is featured in Thomson Reuters story published on August 15,2019.

As U.S. restrictions tighten, women seeking abortions hit the road

Nearly a half century ago, women with unwanted pregnancies would cross state lines seeking abortions that were legal in New York but banned in many other states across the country. Now new restrictions on abortion access are forcing women in several states to take similar measures and travel far from home to end pregnancies, health-care providers and supporters said. “We’ve had patients from Texas, from Georgia. We’ve had a patient from Alabama,” said Merle Hoffman, who runs Choices Women’s Medical Center, which provides abortions, in New York City.