This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

by Susan Wicklund

  “They have TOLD you this?” I couldn’t keep the outrage out of my voice.

  “In no uncertain terms,” she nodded.

  “Well, that’s certainly a Christian thing to do . . .” I caught myself too late. The words were out. I usually enforce strict neutrality on my interactions with patients, even if I am shocked and appalled by a statement. I bite my tongue a lot, but this time I slipped up. I felt my face go red with embarrassment, but when I looked at Ruth, she was just nodding sadly in agreement.

  Sometimes, when I catch myself judging others, I circle around and look at myself, the paths I’ve taken and the prices I’ve paid. I don’t spend a lot of time regretting things, but if I’m honest, I have to recognize the truth. My commitments have demanded a great deal from the people I love.

  Sonja is thirty years old now. She is one of the most kind, loving, competent young women I know. I am immensely proud of her. But I can’t escape the pangs of guilt I feel for the years I was absent, the things I missed doing with her. For much of her youth, Randy might as well have been a single parent. I worked one hundred hours a week, missed parent-teacher conferences, missed doing homework together, going to swim meets, helping Sonja through tough times with friends. Randy, and sometimes David, her stepdad and dad went to the conferences, stood on the sidelines at games. They were there together often enough that some of Sonja’s classmates thought she had gay parents.

  Those two men picked up the loose ends, they covered for me, and Sonja persevered and triumphed in spite of the challenges I threw her way. I know that my marriages, and to some extent, my relationship with my daughter, have suffered because of my commitments.

  It continues to this day, that compromise. Julie is still back in Wisconsin dealing with Dad. Her life is bound up with his care every day. I am involved with his medical treatment. I take care of his finances. We’ve been able to keep him living at home, the house he’s lived in more than fifty years. I have made the two-thousand-mile round-trip drive from Montana to Wisconsin more times than I can count, in response to every imaginable emergency, but I have also chosen to carry on with my life.

  Recently I drove to my family home again, across the plains of eastern Montana, through the badlands of North Dakota, into the forests and fields and humidity of the Midwest. At the end, weary with highway hours, I pulled in to the same leaf-strewn driveway where I learned to ride a bike, where I set up hay bales to practice parallel parking, where I galloped on horseback, my hair flying.

  Flower Grandma’s trailer had been pulled away years earlier, replaced by a poorly tended garden. The house needed paint. The bird feeder hung broken and empty. But the creek still whispered below the house. When I stepped out of the car, I heard the wind in the white pines, the sound that strips away the decades and makes me a young girl.

  “Hi Dad!” I strode up the steps to the door. I knew his hearing aid was likely missing or turned off.

  “Dad! It’s Sue. I’m home from Montana for a visit.”

  He looked at me blankly, and then recognition fired up his eyes. He opened his arms wide to hug me.

  “Hey, maybe we should go somewhere,” he said. He didn’t ask how I was, what my drive was like. I was a possibility for escape.

  “I thought maybe I could beat you in a game of cribbage,” I offered, instead.

  “Yep, by golly. Let’s do that.”

  But we couldn’t find the cards. He had moved them from the cupboard where they’d been for forty years. Looking around the living room I saw a note in Dad’s writing taped to the television. “You people get out of here and quit using my electricity!”

  Julie had told me he talks to people on the TV, waves to them. He sees himself in the mirror and thinks that it’s his brother, Elmer. He’s convinced that Elmer lives with him, but he gets frustrated with him because he won’t answer.

  “Someone came in here and stole those cards.” Dad was getting upset. I tried to push us into another direction, to change the mood. Finally, he turned to me. “Vera,” he said, “let’s have coffee.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. I thought of Mom, her name hanging in the air, and of her life energy that I still felt in the house. I poured a dose of that Scandinavian liquid magic into our cups and sat down across from Dad, wondering whom he saw facing him.

  Four days in Wisconsin, tending to some medication details, catching up with Julie, shouldering the load of Dad’s care briefly, then back to Montana in time for a Mother’s Day peace rally I’d helped coordinate.

  For months we had been making calls, sending emails, printing posters, organizing interviews, gathering support from around the state. Many other organizations joined up. Speakers were coming from around the country. We had music scheduled and expected a huge turnout for our march down the Main Street of Bozeman.

  On Sunday morning we were there early, setting up tables, water stations, information booths. The stage and sound system went up, along with the children’s tent. Ready to go. Great energy from everyone.

  My cell phone rang. It was Julie.

  “Just wanted to wish you luck today, Sis.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How’s Dad?”

  “Oh, you know. Same old, same old. We’re taking him on a picnic to the lake today.”

  “Have fun,” I said.

  A pause.

  “Hey, Julie?” I continued.

  “What?”

  “Thanks for being there.”

  I closed the phone, started up the entrance road toward the stage. People were streaming in to the rally. Families, old people, kids in strollers, couples with picnic blankets, people carrying handmade signs and posters about peace. Hundreds of people.

  I noticed a truck pulled up to the curb, someone erecting large signs on the back. Bloody pictures. Dead babies. Anti-abortion rhetoric. All the good energy I’d been feeling drained away, along with my feelings of well-being and hope. I stopped, stunned by the awful contrast, stricken by the old knot of fear.

  “Susan Wicklund!” A rough man’s voice shouting from near the truck. A man pointing at me. “Susan Wicklund! Stop killing babies. Stop the murder!”

  People turned to look at me. Instinctively, I wheeled away and started walking fast. I wouldn’t look back, but I felt like a target, waited for the sound of a shot. I reached for my left side, where I would sometimes carry the .38 Special. Not there. I hadn’t worn the gun in months. A decrease in clinic violence had lulled me into believing that I had a normal life. I pulled out the walkie-talkie and paged one of the rally organizers.

  “Margie,” I said, urgently, “the antis are here. They have identified me. They’re putting up signs and—”

  “Get out of there right now,” her voice cut me off. “Go to the area behind the stage and stay there. Go now! You have to stay out of sight.”

  Crestfallen, I followed directions. I knew she was right. The old brew of emotions rose in me like bile, bitter and angry. That old dread that used to boil up every time I turned the car key in the ignition, every time the phone rang, every time I stepped off of a plane. Damn! Why today?!

  In the area behind the stage, though, it felt comfortable, protected. There were details I could help with, questions I could answer. I saw people I knew. We waved to each other. I ignored the bad taste of confrontation, regained some of my positive momentum.

  “Sue, are you okay?” Margie popped in to check on me. “We’re about to start.”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I told her. “Let’s make this a great day.”

  “Listen,” Margie continued. “Would you mind sitting with Elsie Fox? We’ll be bringing her on stage in a bit. I think you’d enjoy talking with her.”

  Elsie was ninety-eight years old. She had been an activist all her adult life. She was a veteran of civil rights marches, nonviolent demonstrations, labor rallies in San Francisco, causes and events that stretched back before the Depression. She had lived through both world wars, rode in horse-drawn buggies, could remember when women first
got to vote.

  She was sitting quietly backstage in a chair in the shade of a tree. I walked over to her and introduced myself. She wore a straw hat that covered white curls of hair. A colorful string of beads hung around her neck. She wore sunglasses, red lipstick. She could have been anyone’s grandmother, or great-grandmother, for that matter.

  She looked at me with a clear, discerning gaze. Her hands were clasped loosely in her lap, holding down a sheaf of papers, her speech. I had heard from friends that she had been practicing for weeks.

  “Susan,” she said. “That was your name, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I moved closer. “We’ve spoken on the phone before. It’s so good to put a face with a name.”

  “Susan,” she repeated. She turned to face me. “Tell me what you do.”

  I hesitated. Should I tell her the truth or gloss over it? I didn’t want to distract her with other thoughts before she got up in front of the crowd. I didn’t want to face her reaction if she didn’t approve. I pulled over a crate and sat down close beside her. Nearby people scurried past, oblivious to the two women behind the stage. A jungle of cords and speaker wires surrounded us.

  “I am a doctor,” I began. “I have been providing safe, legal abortions for women for nearly twenty years.”

  A long silence. The sound of the crowd faded in the intensity of our focus. Elsie turned her face away, her gaze fixed in the distance. She stayed very still. I didn’t dare move or speak. Enough time passed that I wondered if she’d heard me. Or was she reworking her own memories? Perhaps she was measuring her response. Then she shifted, seemed to sit taller in her chair.

  Her hand reached out and found mine. She pulled my hand to the arm of her chair, covered it with hers. Her soft, old hand gently patted mine.

  “That’s good,” she said. “That’s real good.”

  epilogue

  Thank goodness I liked this book—that was my first reaction. If I hadn’t, no amount of faint praise would have convinced my mother that I did. I’ve never been able to lie, especially to her. And she’s never lied to me, except for my own safety. But she did hide things from me, it turns out.

  It’s not that I was unaware of the events or facts about which you have just read, with the exception of Flower Grandma’s tragic secret. Growing up, I knew what my mother did for a living. I knew the moral questions raised by abortion. I heard many of the patients’ stories, and I knew about the abortion early in Mom’s life that inspired her convictions. I was well aware of the protesters and the death threats, the arson attempts and stalkings.

  I also knew that Mom was on the front lines defending a new and still-fragile women’s right—that she was and is one of the brave few who live out their convictions through action.

  What I did not know was the depth of her fear and uncertainty. I believed that through it all she was as strong as she pretended to be when I was around, as casual about the sacrifices as she always led me to believe. The disguises? I thought they were fun, and she played along. The midnight drives to Fargo? I thought she just didn’t like flying in small planes. The days when the protesters were thick as flies? She and I relived the humorous stories, like when a neighbor removed the muffler from his riding lawn mower, began to mow his lawn, and then left the machine running in the corner of his yard, right next to the protesters. He claimed the engine overheated.

  It turns out that Mom made a point of collecting herself, planning her words and approach, before telling me things. That was the hardest part of reading this book: accepting the emotional turmoil of the person who was my model of strength and courage.

  Over the past year, I have repeatedly discussed passages with her: “Did you really think you weren’t smart enough to be a doctor? . . . You couldn’t have been that scared to tell Flower Grandma about your work. . . . How come I didn’t realize you felt so unsafe, even inside the clinics? . . . Why were you so nervous about going back to work in Montana?” Mom’s fear of protesters was natural, but I never imagined that she doubted her path and had moments when she considered giving up her work. I have even more respect for her now that I know.

  Facing Mom’s demons as I read the book naturally led me to relive my own fears, such as a vivid nightmare from the very early years: crowds of people in front of the Fargo clinic, parting neatly for Mom until one man with a gun, in slow motion, steps out, shoves aside the security escort, shoots her three times while camera bulbs flash. I woke screaming. I was fourteen years old, shocked by the image of my mother lying in a pool of her own blood. Mom ran into my bedroom to comfort me, assured me that it was just a dream.

  The anti-choice activists were picketing the clinics and our home at that time, following her to work, trying to shame our family, intimidate our friends, but they wouldn’t kill someone. They wouldn’t go that far, she said.

  Of course, they did go that far, more than once, and I fell apart whenever a shooting occurred. I would feel the ground shift under me when I heard the news, find my way dizzily home, and cry for hours, curled up on my bed, so shocked by every new act of violence. I was devastated for the victims and their families, of course, but it was the fear we would be next that paralyzed me.

  The harassment, the “wanted” posters, the crowds of protesters during high school—they were all stressful, but I had an excellent network of family, friends, teachers, and neighbors who protected and reassured me. Even the local Baptist minister encouraged his largely anti-choice congregation to come to our aid. In a way, the public harassment and the incredibly supportive reaction of our community just proved to me that people are overwhelmingly good, kind, and caring. My only real fear was that an act of violence might claim Mom. The possibility terrified me. I didn’t want to be the weak link, though. I knew that I was the only person in the world who could actually convince her to quit her job, but I also knew that I could be strong and play my small part by standing up to the pressure.

  Yet just this year, I insisted that I had no lasting trauma from those times.

  “Surely it still affects you, at least a little?” Mom’s coauthor, Al, asked me as we sat discussing the soon-to-be-published book after dinner one evening. I considered his question. It was the middle of a vacation from my teaching job. Mom and I had spent the day running errands, talking nonstop about the usual—the antics of our neighbors, my graduate school applications, a cousin’s new baby, upcoming camping trips.

  “Our lives are not extraordinary,” I insisted. “I hardly think of the times when the protesters were really after us.”

  “Nothing has stuck with you from those experiences?” Al asked again.

  And then I remembered. I had glanced into the back seat while slamming the car door on one of our many stops that day.

  “Mom,” I yelled as she walked toward the store, “unlock the car—the mail is face up, and I can read your name.”

  Never leave names or personal information visible through a window: just one of a hundred permanently ingrained security routines. I turned the mail face down and went inside. I guess a baseline of fear will always be present.

  This book has refreshed good memories along with the bad, especially of holidays and summers spent in Montana. In the winter, I brought friends with me, and we went skiing up in the mountains. In the summer, Mom took long weekends off, and she and I hiked, rode horses, and canoed the Yellowstone River. During the week, between babysitting jobs and going to the swimming pool, I loved to stop by the clinic. I said hi to the staff, made sure Mom ate lunch, read the myriad thank-you cards from patients (with names blacked out, of course), and witnessed the care taken with each woman’s physical and emotional well-being, from reception area to recovery room.

  Once, a patient granted permission for me to watch her abortion. I was curious and needed to know firsthand that the horrible bloody-baby posters carried by the protesters were a lie. The procedure was just as Mom had always described it—quick and anticlimactic, producing a small amount of cloudy-looking tissue and a v
isibly relieved woman. I remember wishing I could take each protester one by one with me on these visits. I was convinced that a day in the clinic, hearing the honest dialogue with patients, witnessing the reality of an abortion procedure, would help them thoughtfully reconsider their beliefs and actions.

  Or maybe the anti-choice protesters could just ask questions within their own families and then listen carefully to their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. It’s taboo in our society to discuss abortion on anything less than a political level, but I know the truth. Someone close to each and every one of us has had an abortion. The experience is common, but I do not believe it is taken lightly. Women who have exercised their right to choose never forget.

  Hardly a day goes by without a woman greeting Mom warmly in a store, at the gym, or on the street. A shy hello or meaningful squeeze of the hand accompanies looks and words of sincere appreciation and warmth. These women are former patients, representatives of the millions of American women who have an abortion at some point in their lives. They are forever grateful to the loving doctor who helped them see their difficult decision through with dignity.

  That doctor is my mother.

  Sonja Lynne Wicklund

  afterword

  This Common Secret began at my kitchen table more than a decade ago. During the year that Sue lived with my family, staying in a basement room of our small house in Montana, she shared a great many stories. Incredible tales. On Saturday mornings over coffee, or late at night after a long day, Marypat and I would sit and listen to Sue talk.

  At some point I said, “Sue, we have to write some of this stuff down.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “But I’m not a writer, and I’ve never found the time.”

  “Well, I’m a writer,” I said, “and these stories are important.”