From the front line of the abortion wars

Susan Wicklund explores abortion and her role as a provider in a memoir that often surprises.

from the February 26, 2008 edition

Page 2 of 2

Page 1 | 2

"My schedule required daily flights or drives of two hundred miles or more. At least three nights a week I was in a motel room," Wicklund recalls. But far more draining than the travel was the almost constant presence of antiabortion protesters intent on persuading – or coercing – doctors to stop providing abortions in the far-flung locales that made up Wicklund's weekly circuit. "At every airport I had to run their gauntlet," and she donned outlandish disguises in order to pass unrecognized.

Wicklund's one refuge was her home, in a rural setting at the end of a long, dead-end road, but one morning in October 1991 she was awakened by the cry "Susan kills babies" outside her bedroom window. The protesters also blocked her driveway with cement barrels to prevent her from traveling. Armed with a loaded pistol, Wicklund sneaked through the woods in the early morning darkness to rendezvous with a friend and then drive to Fargo in time for that day's scheduled abortions.

In February 1992, Wicklund was featured on CBS News's "60 Minutes" and her appearance buoyed her spirits. "Never again would I feel as alone or exposed as I had before I spoke out publicly."

Two years later, enactment of the powerful new federal "FACE" statute – protecting Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances – curtailed obstructive protests and intimidation with its threat of significant prison sentences. By then Wicklund had opened her own clinic in Bozeman, Mont., but she later closed it in order to care for her mother during a terminal illness.

Wicklund resumed work, first at the St. Paul clinic, then at several in Montana, but her frank account of how the St. Paul clinic now "prioritized billing protocol over patient well-being" ends with Wicklund herself being "fired for putting a patient first" after she treated a woman who could not pay in advance.

That story, like Wicklund's blunt confession of her aversion for second-trimester abortions, makes this gripping, deeply moving book a compelling memoir rather than a dogmatic pro-choice tract.

• David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of 'Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.'

1 | Page 2