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Barbara Earl Thomas stands before the Northwest African-American Museum’s gallery,
“Journeys,” which traces the routes by which Blacks were taken to North America and
migrated to the Pacific Northwest.
Photo by Mark Sullo |
It’s a good thing Susan Wicklund is rock
solid about the work she does. Otherwise,
she’d have never put up with a career in
which she’s been harassed, stalked, had her
driveway blockaded, her home broken into,
her life threatened, and had to send her
daughter to school in a police car.
Those are just a few of the things that the
good doctor has lived through in 20 years
of providing abortions — an odyssey that
Wicklund shares in This Common Secret:
My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (Public
Affairs, $25), a riveting new memoir that
traverses the moral dilemma of abortion
and the hypocrisy of its foes through the
eyes of a doctor who’s been there, in more
ways than one.
At the age of 22, while still single and
juggling three jobs in Portland, Ore., Wicklund
became pregnant and made a decision
she would never forget — not out of
regret, but because of how she was treated.
During the abortion, she asked the doctor
about the pain she was feeling. He not only
barked at her to shut up, but called nurses
to hold her down.
Wicklund chose to enter medical school
and train in obstetrics and abortion so that
other women wouldn’t have to go through
what she did. For years, she worked a day
here and a day there at clinics that she
flew or drove between in the Midwest
— sometimes wearing disguises to fool
right-to-lifers waiting for her at airports
and clinic entrances — then opened her
own clinic in Bozeman, Montana. But, from
the get-go, she faced a resistance that her
book makes grievous in the many facets
of its irony.
As a resident, for instance, Wicklund
argued with her hospital board to perform
abortions, but was told that the community
didn’t need them — by men with wives or
daughters whom she knew had had abortions.
There are also stories of the staunch
pro-lifer who came in and demanded an
abortion, the fake patient who tried to infiltrate
a clinic where Wicklund worked, and
the anti-abortion doctor she had to browbeat
into giving prenatal care to a woman
who didn’t actually want to terminate, but
had no money for a doctor.
Through it all, Wicklund has never lost
sight of why she provides abortion, something
that was only reinforced in 1992,
the year she finally told her grandmother
what she does for a living.
Wicklund was about to
appear on “60 Minutes,”
a TV program her grandmother
never missed,
but when she sat her
grandmother down to
break the news, the old
woman had some news
for her.
At the age of 16, her
grandmother and a girlfriend
had gone into the
bedroom of a friend who
was pregnant and used
something sharp to start
her bleeding. The girls
stuffed rags inside her to
no avail: she died right in
front of them on the bed
— an incident she’d keep
secret for 72 years.
“I know exactly what
kind of work you do,”
Wicklund’s grandmother
told her, “and it is a good
thing. People like you do
it safely so that people
like me don’t murder
their best friends.”
After reading the book, I was shocked by
all you’d been through. What do you consider
the worst incident with the right-tolife
protesters?
The most frightening for me personally,
because it was the first time that I came
face to face with them, was in a parking
garage in the St. Paul/Minneapolis airport. I
was alone, it was at night, I walked to an upper
floor where my car was parked and was
walking towards it and people got out of a
van and approached me and started yelling
and screaming at me to stop providing
abortions and to stop killing babies. It was
the first time I’d been directly confronted
when I was alone. There was nobody
around to help me…. Just like a cornered
cat, you know, you kind of come unglued,
and I came unglued, out of fear, out of
absolute pure fear — and anger, knowing
that they’d also been to my home, they’d
been to my daughter’s school. It’s like they
had violated every part of my life that they
could. I felt this just intense anger and
intense fear [so] strongly, and just started
yelling [and] screaming at them how dare
they do all this to us. And then they got to
their van — I’d backed them right up back
to where they’d come out of, and I went
into my car and got my camera and then
went back to them and I was like, “Show
your face!” because this guy was trying
to hide his face, and I was like, “If you’re so
damn proud, put your face up!” I was pretty
much out of control, quite frankly, as far as
just being angry, and then got back in my
car and got out of the parking lot, and got
out to a safe place away from the airport
and pulled the car over and got out and
just vomited and cried.
Where did you gather the strength to put
up with all of this?
From the patients. I had been providing
abortions for almost two years before the
severe protesting was directed at me, so I
understood what it was like for the patients
to have someone who was treating them
with respect and helping them leave the
clinic feeling empowered instead of beat
up.
What creates that empowerment?
It’s reinforcing for women that, first of
all, it’s their decision and not somebody
else’s, that nobody can tell them whether
they can or can’t have this abortion, or
whether they can or can’t have a full-term
pregnancy. Not a husband or a mother or
a partner or anybody else can decide that,
and I think just letting that sink in, first of
all, is so strong for women. Sometimes they
will come in and say, well, I have to do this
because so-and-so says I have to, and just
taking the time to sit down with them and
making them really realize they have to
own it themselves, this is their decision; and
then throughout the process giving them
information, as much information as they
can possibly absorb about their decision
process, what abortion is, how it’s done,
what to expect afterward, birth control, all
of that. Information is power in itself.
If a woman gets the information. If it
weren’t for your book, I wouldn’t have
known that the so-called “pregnancy crisis
centers” run by right-to-life groups have
gotten $30 million in federal funding. I
was shocked.
It’s atrocious, because these places are
not honest. They’re not real medical clinics.
[But] the way some of them advertise,
some people think they can get an abortion
at these clinics, and in fact they don’t
get that at all. They just get very inaccurate information and pressured and coerced
and oftentimes harassed after they leave
because people have given their phone
numbers and their addresses. And there
are people from these clinics who will go
to the homes of the minor and tell the
parents that the minor has been in there
talking about abortion [or they’re] going to
husbands and telling them that their wives
have been in there. … It’s very frightening.
Basically they’ll do anything they can to
delay having an abortion until [the woman
is] too far along. And some of these groups
promise them help with the baby, [but]
once they‘re past the point of not being
able to have an abortion, they drop them.
It’s not their concern anymore.
But you actually browbeat a right-to-life
doctor into providing prenatal care. Talk
about that.
There was one physician in Bozeman
who always wrote these letters to the editor
that were just inflammatory against abortion
and against me [saying] anybody who
has an abortion is killing a baby. And there
was a woman who came in who obviously
didn’t want an abortion, but she had had
some prenatal care before, with another
birth she had at a local OB/GYN, but hadn’t
paid her bill. She didn’t have any money;
she didn’t have insurance, and they would
not even see her for a prenatal visit. … So
I said if you really want to have this child,
let’s try to find you some prenatal care. And
she was game, she wanted to do that. So
I called this local crisis pregnancy center
and, of course, I’ve been the devil incarnate
to them all this time, and the woman who
answered said, “Hello,” and I said, “Hi, this
is Dr. Wicklund,” and there was this dead
silence on the other end, absolute. And I
said, “Hello? This is Dr. Wicklund.” Still silent.
[I said], “This is Dr. Wicklund. I need your
help.” [And the woman said] “Really?” … I
finally got to talk to [the doctor] and said,
“Well, let’s put your money where your
mouth is. If you think it’s so important that
women don’t have abortions, then do this.
Save a life.” And he ended up doing it. He
did the prenatal care and the birth, but [the
patient told us] he complained the whole
time [about the free care]. I never turn
patients away. I mean, I
had more tomatoes, car
parts and hay for my horses than anybody
in the county because I just never turned
anyone away, ever.
In Seattle, Aradia Women’s Health Center
never turned patients away, either, but
now it’s gone because the number of
non-paying patients grew so high that it
overwhelmed the clinic’s resources. The
right-wing spin, of course, is that clinics
have been forced out of business. Which is
the bigger issue — the economics or the
protests?
Many of the smaller feminist women’s
health centers have closed because they
can’t keep going, because of just what you’re
talking about. I think that is definitely an issue
around the country ... There’s also a lack
of providers. We had 2,200 doctors in the
country doing abortions in 1980. It’s about
1,800 last I heard.
Are people retiring or why is that number
going down?
Retiring is definitely one part of it … and
not enough physicians are being trained
and going into it. I mean, it’s not an area of
medicine where you are going to make a lot
of money, number one. It’s not encouraged
by anybody in the medical community.
Doctors who provide abortions, especially
in the outlying areas, are pretty much marginalized.
And [doctors] coming right out of
medical school and then residency [have] a
lot of student loans to pay back…and are
told by the anti-abortion people ahead of
time: If you go into this… we will expose you,
we will harass you, we will harass your family,
we will make your life
miserable.
Are they still making
lives miserable? What
is the level of intensity
today?
It depends on where you live and how
exposed the clinic. For instance, in my
book tour, I’ve talked to physicians all over
the country. In San Francisco, a lot of the
clinics are within the university system
or right in the hospital. There’s a number
of doctors who’ve never had a protester
because they’re so insulated within the
system. Then you get somebody who works
in a little clinic in a small town in Northern
California, or an outlying place, and it’s just
the opposite. They’re more exposed; it’s a
free-standing clinic, anybody who comes
in and out of that building is associated
with abortion care in some way, and the
protesters — it’s a ready target for them.
And they’re still getting harassed.
Is there still violence?
There hasn’t been a doctor murdered for
quite a few years, thank goodness. There’s
definitely still violence. We have protesters
on a daily basis at some of the clinics that
I [work at]…. There was a clinic burned to
the ground in New Mexico in December.
There were two other clinics that had arson
in December. We just don’t hear about it
on the news anymore. But it’s going on; it’s
definitely going on. |
