We fought for Roe and we’re fighting again: Meet the senior activists battling for the right to choose

The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery Veteran feminist Merle Hoffman says fighting for reproductive rights again is like “Groundhog Day" Hoffman, and others monitoring the country’s rising political temperature, rightly worried that it wasn’t. “And I said: ‘Nobody should have an experience that wasn’t as easy as mine was’.” She went to Planned Parenthood in Orlando, where she was living at the time, and “got the training, escorted there for a couple of years, and then they actually hired me as a medical assistant … That was my last working job before I retired.” It was four and a half years ago that she relocated to Virginia, where she first became involved with State Line Abortion Access Partners. open image in gallery Barbara Schwartz, 71, had an abortion at 23 and admits she ‘went on for years without realizing that things were being incrementally chipped away;’ she now volunteers as a clinic escort on the border of Virginia, where abortion is legal, and Tennessee, which enacted some of the strictest laws in the nation “My husband and I had really gotten over Florida – the meanness, the politics, the heat, picking ticks off our pets,” she says. “I knew that this was definitely possible and that it was coming,” she says, frustrated by “the fact that so many people in the pro-choice movement didn’t – that they actually trusted that nothing could stop Roe vs Wade, it was law … that’ll never fall.” Hoffman knew better, she tells The Independent, as she noted everything from the passion of the “extraordinarily creative” opposing movement to the murder of abortion-provider friends like George Tiller, a Kansas doctor gunned down by an extremist in 2009.