Merle Hoffman
A
pioneer in women's reproductive health services since 1971...
The publisher/editor-in-chief of On The Issues Magazine and one of the most outspoken advocates for progressive and feminist issues.
Merle established Choices Women's Medical Center to provide abortion services shortly after New York State legalized abortion in 1971. Today, Choices has grown to become one of the most comprehensive and nationally well respected providers of a full range of gynecological services for women, including abortion to 24 weeks of pregnancy, birth control and pre-natal care..
In 1983 Merle began On the Issues Magazine as a newsletter of Choices Women's Medical Center to communicate with other health care providers, pro-choice activists and the reproductive health care community generally. Within a few years it had developed into On the Issues, the Progressive Woman's Quarterly, gaining accolades as a motivating, challenging and controversial magazine of ideas and action. After ceasing publication in 1999, On the Issues Magazine was reborn as an online publication in Spring 2008 and publishes all-new, themed editions quarterly with new articles added weekly.
Read Merle's editorials, play the videos of her speeches, and open your mind and heart to her passionate, provocative ideas and analyses.
"On The Issues Magazine" Winter 2010:
Passion, Freedom & Women
The Courage of No
Children are natural resistance fighters. From the time they realize that they have the agency (if not the power) to push back against parental authority, they begin to use it. They do not discriminate against particular types of authority, but understand organically that all power can, and in some cases must, be resisted.
The creation of the self defines its boundaries in the struggle and the negotiation with others.
One could almost say that the process of education consists in the slow, relentless process of learning to assent and to conform. Because institutional power, by definition, seeks survival and expansion, conformity has become a secularly sacred value.
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