Hoffman has been in the abortion industry since 1971 and is the cofounder of the National Abortion Federation. She has a new book out, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom. In it she writes, “the anti-choice movement claimed that if women knew what abortion really was, if only the providers had told them the truth, they would never have killed their babies. . . . But women did know the truth, just as I knew it, deep down, when I allowed myself to recognize it. Mothers saw the sonogram pictures, knew that sound bites assuring them that abortion was no different from any other benign outpatient surgery were false—knew that, as the antis say, ‘abortion stops a beating heart.’” But, according to Hoffman, these women were making a “decision so vital it was worth stopping that heart.”
Hoffman says, “I wasn’t immune to the physicality of abortion . . . but I quickly came to realize that those who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives but also the power—and the responsibility—of taking life in order to do that . . . acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women’s reproductive freedom.”
Dostoevsky wrote: “‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 589.
Hoffman is Dostoevskey’s observation personified. When a person ceases to believe in a transcendent lawgiver and the law He has given, she is free to replace it with anything. Hoffman replaces “thou shalt not murder” with “it’s OK to murder innocent babies as long as your politics are right.” And in her godless world who is to say she is wrong or that such a thing as “wrong” even exists as a concept that means anything more than “I personally disagree”?