This Common Secret

I've been wanting to write for some time now, but I broke my leg a few days after writing the welcome post and it's resulted in me spending a lot of time at home, playing video games, occasionally catching up on TV series. Throw in some momentous personal events, and I've skipped a few books I read since I decided I needed to do some blogging to keep my sanity.

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor is much like as it is named; Susan Wicklund's story of being an abortion doctor in the 90s and early aughts, dealing with the growing violence of the "pro-life" and her on-going compassion for the women she helps. It is a chilling, powerful read. She was inspired to enter medicine by a family friend, and inspired to enter women's health, and abortion services, by a legal-but-impersonal abortion she had when younger. Galvanized by her own grandmother's tale of a botched abortion, she waded amidst the sea of crazy that makes up the anti-abortion movement, providing help to women who needed it.

Since I could articulate it, I have maintained that I am pro-choice because my mother. She has three sons, one a year earlier than they planned. But she was also in college from 1967-1972, getting her Masters in Education (and meeting my Dad). While there, she saw the lengths that some women went to in order to end pregnancies. Bathing or douching with lye, coathanger abortions... the violence and pain they endured because they could not be pregnant. Wicklund relates this on every page; stories of women whose pregnancies must end, stories of women who don't want them to end but can't say it, and women who have scrabbled to make their one day off count... only to be told that the law requires them to wait 24 hours to have an abortion after being told a legally-mandated collection of half-truths.

Wicklund talks of the terror of anti-choice zealots barricading her and her family in their homes. About her decision to carry a gun after the "pro-life" assassinated people. Of being followed and harruanged by those who view women as incubators more valuable than a few ounces of tissue they host in the first trimester. Because the "pro-life" movement isn't about life. They don't want every child to be loved and wanted. They just want to control women, and ensure that their lives are circumscribed by their capacity to bear children, regardless of their own desires for life.