This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund

Author:Susan Wicklund
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

chapter ten

I fired up Betty at five AM on a Thursday, aiming for the starting blocks at the Cambridge High School pool a thousand miles away. I had twenty hours. I figured that if everything went smoothly, Betty could manage a fifty-mile-an-hour average, which would put me there on Friday afternoon with about an hour to spare. Betty and I wheeled into the parking lot with more like ten minutes of cushion.

Sonja was delighted. Her hug just about erased the road fatigue, and before I was ready, I was suited up and aligned with the rest of the sacrificial parents waiting for the start pistol. That the parents lost was a foregone conclusion. That I was there for Sonja was the triumph. Randy sat poolside, cheering for both of us.

Within days I was back on the same highway, driving into the sunset. I often drive without music or news on. I let the land flow past, the miles accumulate in my wake, and my thoughts roam. This is when I do some of my best thinking, sorting things out, and occasionally, stumble across a revelation. The warmth of my visit with Sonja and Randy faded in the distance. North Dakota spread ahead for hundreds of miles. My thoughts centered more and more on the many obstacles that get in the way of my direct interaction with patients, layers and layers of obstacles.

Legal and political distractions are a constant, energy-sapping aspect of my medical life. Right from the start of my career, and on an almost daily basis, I have been interrupted, distracted, and sometimes prevented from going about my work by legal skirmishing and political meddling in patients’ lives.

A significant part of my work routine is tied up with phone calls to lawyers, appearances in court, and strategy sessions devoted to interpreting laws and coping with the latest challenge. Some of it is intensely personal and threatening, like testifying against letter-writer Michael Ross and even having to read his letters out loud to the jury. Much of it is so petty and ridiculous that it would be comical if it weren’t such a nuisance and if it didn’t have the effect of making the choice to end a pregnancy so fraught with roadblocks.

Protesters routinely take pictures of patients coming to a clinic, for example. Once, a friend of mine was visiting and decided to go outside and see how the protesters felt about her taking their pictures. The protesters called the police and the newspaper. The next day the local paper ran a story featuring the mystery woman taking pictures outside the clinic. Of course, the story never mentioned the picture-taking habit of the protesters.

While I worked in the Fargo clinic, protesters blatantly defied a court injunction banning them from being on the sidewalk in front of the doors. Once, out of frustration, the director turned on sprinklers to spray the walk. The protesters had the gall to call the police and report us. Worse yet, the police had the gall to cite us.

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