This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Wicklund and Alan Kesselheim.

 

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

 

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BOOK DESIGN BY JEFF WILLIAMS

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Wicklund, Susan.

This common secret : my journey as an abortion doctor / Susan Wicklund with Alan Kesselheim.—1st ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58648-480-4 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-58648-480-X (hardcover)

eISBN : 97-8-158-64862-7

1. Wicklund, Susan. 2. Physicians—United States—Biography. 3. Abortion—United States. I. Kesselheim, Alan S., 1952- II. Title.

 

[DNLM: 1. Wicklund, Susan. 2. Physicians, Women—United States—Biography. 3. Abortion, Legal—United States—Biography. 4. Abortion, Legal—history—United States. 5. History, 20th Century—United States.

6. History, 21st Century—United States. WZ 100 W6375 2007]

 

R154.W47A3 2007 610.92—dc22

[B]

2007016594 First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Unless events are matters of public record,
names, dates, and locations have been
altered to protect patient confidentiality.

A woman’s life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience.

WALLIS SIMPSON
DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
(1896-1986)

W
hen I drove into Grandma’s driveway, all I could think about was how she would react. I had started out to tell her many times over the last few years. On so many visits I had meant to have that conversation but had never found a way. Something had always intervened. Some other errand had always come up. I had found a way not to face her judgment.

It didn’t matter that I was rock solid in my resolve and in my chosen profession. This was my grandma. My Flower Grandma. What she thought of me mattered a lot, and I had no idea how she’d take it.

It was February of 1992, a Saturday afternoon. The next day the
60 Minutes
segment I’d done with Lesley Stahl would air. Grandma never missed
60 Minutes
. I had to tell her before she saw it—before she saw her oldest grand-daughter talking about the death threats and stalking and personal harassment my family and I were enduring.

The harassment wasn’t the issue that mattered now. It was the fact that I was, as a physician, traveling to five clinics in three states to provide abortion services for as many as one hundred women every week, and that I had been doing this work for four years already.

I wasn’t at all ashamed of my career. In fact, I always considered it an honor to be involved in reproductive choices, this most personal and intimate realm for women. I just never felt the need to make it public. Very few of my family and friends were aware of what I did.

Within a day, however, everyone I had grown up with, everyone who knew my family, and every member of my family would know the truth. Would I be isolated and ostracized? Would I get support or condemnation?

I pulled off the highway and into the drive leading to the house I’d grown up in. Mom and Dad still lived in the white, two-story, wood-frame home.

Dad had worked as a precision machinist in the town of Grantsburg, ten miles away. His love had been the gunsmithing, hunting, and fishing he did in his free time. My three siblings and I had always been included. We were as competent with firearms, field dressing a deer, or catching a batch of sunfish as anyone in the area. Dad was retired now and not feeling well. It was painful to watch him, the strong man who starred in my memories, struggling with simple tasks.

Mom was retired too, from her elected position as clerk of court for our county. She was the one everyone—especially women—turned to for advice and support. Mom had been instrumental, many years earlier, in starting a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. In her job she had seen so many situations in which women and children had nowhere to go for help. It was just like Mom to tackle a need that everyone else ignored.

I grew up in the unincorporated village of Trade Lake, Wisconsin, a small gathering of about six houses, several of which were the homes of my relatives. The only business left was one small gas station/grocery store. When I was a kid, there had been a feed store and creamery and a meat market, but those had been gone for better than thirty years. Only rotten shells of buildings remained.

Even now, Trade Lake is a very rural place. People still raise chickens in backyards, drive tractors to the little grocery store. Chimneys puff wood smoke in the winter.

The small river that wound its way through our yard came into view. Behind it were the woods where I’d built forts and climbed oak trees with my sister. She and I each had a horse and spent the bulk of our summers out of doors. Grandma and Grandpa had lived just down the road. We picked mayflowers every spring with Grandma. In the summer we fished with Grandpa for sunfish and crappies using cane poles baited with worms dug out of the garden.

Mine had been a good childhood. This was a safe place. Turning into the driveway had always been a good thing—a coming home. This time was different.

I felt myself sweating under my coat. My racing heart pushed against my throat. I had to reveal something to my dear grandma that could change everything she believed and loved about me.

Grandma had moved into a trailer house in the backyard of the family home. Grandpa had died fifteen years earlier, and Mom wanted her mother even closer—just steps across the yard. I saw the clothesline hung with rugs, the twine still strung up on the porch to hold the morning glories that filled the railings in the summer.

Flower Grandma. My daughter, Sonja, gave her the name when she was three and there were too many grandmas to keep track of. Sonja spent many days baking cookies with her great-grandmother and playing outside, just as I had as a young girl. She ran back and forth constantly between the houses of her two grandmothers. This grandma always had flowers growing in every nook and cranny, inside and out.

Flower Grandma she became, and Flower Grandma she stayed. Before long my entire extended family called her Flower Grandma, and even her friends at the local senior center fell into the habit.

I coasted to a stop at the bottom of the slope. I sat there long enough to take a deep breath and fight back a few unexpected tears. I didn’t know where the sadness came from. The car engine ticked. I was alone, vulnerable, aching. Was I longing for those simple childhood days, whipping down the hill on my sled? How far I’d come from that.

I peeled myself out of the car, shed my coat, and left it on the seat. It was unusually warm for February in Wisconsin. The hardwood forest was all bare sticks and hard lines. I knew it would soon be time to tap the maple trees and cook the syrup we all loved on Grandma’s Swedish pancakes.

I turned and deliberately moved up the steps to the trailer house. I was terrified of what Grandma would say, but there was no avoiding this moment.

The big door was already open by the time I got to the top step. Out peeked her welcoming smile. She was giggling.

“Hi, Grandma!”

“Oh my goodness! What a surprise! What a sweet, sweet surprise! Did I know you were coming today?”

I hugged her in the doorway, held her tight, stepped inside.

“Did you somehow know I was making ginger snaps?” she teased as she set a plate full on the kitchen table. She poured me a glass of milk, and I sat down on the wooden chair next to hers. I tried to bury myself in the smell of her place, a mixture of ginger cookies, Estée Lauder perfume (the one in the blue hourglass bottle always on her dresser), and home permanents. She and Mom always gave each other perms, trying to get just the right curl in their hair. The smell never left the place.

I think she sensed that I had come to talk about something important. I started talking a few times about other, inconsequential things; then, finally, I plunged in.

“Grandma, you know I work as a doctor.”

“Of course. And we are all so proud of you.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you know the whole story. I’m a doctor who works mostly for women, helping women with pregnancy problems.”

Flower Grandma hesitated just a second, pushed back her chair, stood, and held out her hand for me to follow. She went to sit in her rocker, the same one sitting in my living room today. The rocker I have sat in so many hours since. The rocker I sit in right now, writing this down and trembling as I do.

She seemed distant. I moved to the old leather hassock beside her. She took my hand and placed it on top of one of hers, then covered it with her other one. Our hands made a stack on the arm of the rocker—old skin, young skin. We sat in silence a minute. She turned to look directly at me. Her eyes, framed by gentle wrinkles, were full of some deep trouble.

After a moment, she stared straight ahead and started to speak. Slowly. Deliberately. In a very quiet voice. At the same time she began stroking my hand. It was as if the gentle stroking was pushing her to talk.

“When I was sixteen years old, my best friend got pregnant,” she said. A chill went through me.

“I always believed it was her father that was using her,” she went on, “but I never knew for sure. She came to my sister, Violet, and me, and asked us to help her.”

While I listened, thoughts whirled through my head. Stories I had read of women self-aborting and dying of infections when a safe, legal option was not available. The women who came to the clinics where I worked, many of whom still had to overcome huge difficulties to end an unwanted pregnancy.

It isn’t uncommon to have patients confide in me that prior to coming in for an abortion, they had used combinations of herbs to try to force a miscarriage. These home remedies can be extremely dangerous and have caused the deaths of many women.

I felt myself tighten and withdraw, anticipating what Flower Grandma was going to tell me. I wanted to see her eyes, but she kept them straight ahead. And she kept stroking my hand. So soft. I only wanted to think about those hands. Hands embracing and caressing mine—strong, gentle, soft.