by Meg Stone, IMPACT Director
This weekend I read Susan Wicklund's incredibly moving memoir, This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor,which recently came out in paperback. In the book she and co-author Alan Kesselheim describe Wicklund's more than 20 years providing safe legal abortions to women in the Midwest and Montana. The raw and personal accounts of the circumstances that led women to this painful choice take a politically charged and too often abstract debate out of the realm of the theoretical with countless intimate portraits of women she helped to truly exercise their reproductive choice, whatever that choice was. Click here for a good interview with the author from last January.
What struck me most about This Common Secret was the intensity of the violence and harrassment that she experienced from members of Operation Rescue and similar anti-choice groups. Members of these groups followed her around airports calling her a "murderer," harrassed her teenage daughter at school, destroyed parts of her home, attempted to physically hurt her as she entered and left the clinic, and even dragged cement blocks across her driveway to keep her from leaving her home (of course she got out and got to the clinic anyway). Other abortion providers were targets of physical violence and even murder.
The IMPACT community holds and supports differing views on abortion, pro-choice, pro-life and everything in between. Yet on this issue and many others we are all united in our commitment to pursuing our political goals with respect and to activism that doesn't resort to abusive tactics.
In reading Wicklund's story I was surprised by how unsafe she was, and sad that I had somehow assumed that these dangers went away in the mid-1990s when they stopped getting media attention. Every day, health care providers doing their jobs, performing abortions or even routine care in clinics that offer abortions are made unsafe by those who insist on expressing their political views with abuse and violence.
IMPACT has renewed our commitment to give practical, useable, and customized self-defense skills to those who are in harm's way because of their extraordinary commitment to giving women the health care they deserve. Please contact us if you or anyone you know has been harrassed, assaulted, or in fear while working for for reproductive choice. We will do everything we can to get you the safety training you need.
Click here to purchase This Common Secret from Porter Square Books. A portion of the sale is donated to IMPACT.
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