A tense read
THIS COMMON SECRET:
My Journey as an Abortion Doctor
By Susan Wicklund
268 pp. PublicAffairs $24.95
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
Abortion. A loaded word. It slashes like a scalpel, leaving a raw gash across the country.
Even today, 34 years after the United States Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, legal abortion continues to be a hotly debated issue, so multi-faceted and emotionally fraught that it’s impossible to suture the split between opposing philosophies.
Susan Wicklund took a firm stand on the pro-choice side more than 20 years ago when she became a doctor and began doing abortions. She was not always the outspoken pro-choice activist she is today. Early on, she kept secret from her family and friends the fact that she performed abortions.
Abortion had been legal for 15 years when Wicklund joined the staff at Wisconsin’s Grantsburg Hospital, but policy forbade elective abortions. Wicklund disguised the procedure as a D and C, but operating in the “surreptitious, underground fashion” grated on her. She chose instead to travel endless miles to work in the few clinics, widely scattered throughout Wisconsin, Montana and Missouri, that allowed her to operate openly.
Only after she agreed to appear on a 60 Minutes segment did she finally tell her grandmother what her doctoring entailed.
Instead of the censure she expected, her grandmother shared a long-held secret: at sixteen, one of her close friends bled to death in her arms after she helped abort the baby. Chilled to her core, Wicklund let her passion for providing abortions to those who needed them solidify into a lifetime obsession to the exclusion of nearly all else, leaving her isolated, lonely, and in fear for her life.
This Common Secret is Wicklund’s story; her travails, both emotional and physical, are at the heart of the book. Straightforward and sequential, the book subjects Wicklund to intense scrutiny, but she makes no apology for her pro-choice stance. It is the women who pass through her hands, for better or worse, who provide a solid scaffold for her profound belief that women must be free to make reproductive choices.
The force of Wicklund’s personality strikes like a slap, albeit one from a caring hand. “I like being in control,” she writes. “The very traits that were essential for my career— stubbornness, single-mindedness, independence, being firmly in control— were detrimental in my marriage.”
During the years she lived with her second husband and her daughter, Sonja, she sneaked out the back door of her home in the dead of night to foil the pack of protesters perennially camped in her driveway. In the morning, hidden under a blanket, Sonia was escorted to school in a police cruiser that rolled through the angry crowd.
Wicklund often wore a bulletproof vest, strapped a .38 special in a shoulder harness, and slept with a loaded pistol. “There are people stalking me, threatening me,” she writes. “I don’t like it one bit, but I have to be thinking about that all the time.”
Her family suffered through her long absences from home. It’s hard to watch Wicklund put career before family and not worry about the effects on her daughter, who found herself a target of anti-abortion activists. Sonja’s perspective at the back of the book reflects strength equal to her mother’s, as much a relief to the reader as it is to Wicklund.
Wicklund’s own abortion at 20, legal and safe, was performed by a doctor so devoid of compassion that she uses him as a template of how not to practice. Abortion is not a black-and-white issue for Wicklund. She works daily in the fuzzy, grey shadows where the better choice might be to continue the pregnancy, where laws bump against common sense and women’s well-being, where decisions need to be made in a hurry, but must, by law, be delayed. It isn’t a simple case of you ask for an abortion, you get one.
“I am the one who ends a potential human life,” she writes. “I am the one who lives in fear of performing an abortion on one who will later regret it. I am the one asking the woman to lie back so I can begin the procedure. I had better be listening to her unspoken fears and paying attention to her body language. I have to be tuned to the questions that signal ambivalence.”
Individual views for or against abortion are often based on beliefs, religious or otherwise, about when human life begins. Wicklund believes the tissue she aspirates from a first trimester uterus is just that—tissue, no soul, not a human yet. She sets limits however; she will not perform abortion beyond the first 12 weeks. Still, in the grey shadows, she once stretched her limit on behalf of a woman because the result, in her opinion, necessitated it.
This Common Secret is a tense read; women’s stories, sex and unwanted pregnancy, tears and fears, threats and harassment, protester blockades, danger and disguise, allies and enemies, shootings, violence and murder, police protection, arrests, abortion statistics, abortion laws, exhaustion, frustration, triumph and trauma all combine to fuel Wicklund’s determination to continue to practice abortion. Wicklund paints a slice of life most of us shield our eyes from. It may not be pretty, but it’s real.
Abortion is legal in the US, but the battle to change legislation continues. Pro-choice and anti-choice activists face off across a gulf that may never be bridged. “The professional protesters are the ones I fear,” Wicklund says. “They are mostly men, and for them, protesting is a full-time obsession. ... They bring their hate-filled slogans, their planes that fly over towns and cities pulling banners depicting bloody babies, their confrontational tactics. When they come to town I wear my bulletproof vest and carry my gun. Unfortunately, their views have infiltrated the laws and policies of our country and the lives of my patients.”
This Common Secret is a timely book, with abortion legislation pending as you read. It will confirm your thoughts or challenge them and nudge you one way or another along the abortion continuum. Because abortion is a common secret, none of us can say with certainty we have not been touched by the issue.
Ruth Douillette is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.
See her blog at Upstream and Down~.
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