Susan Wicklund

Susan Wicklund (born 1954) is an American physician. Until her retirement, Wicklund was the sole provider of abortions in some areas of the midwestern United States and was a prominent target of violence and harassment from opponents of abortion rights.

Early life and education Wicklund grew up in rural Wisconsin. After graduating high school, she worked low-wage part-time jobs and earned community college credits while receiving welfare and food stamps. When she became pregnant, she had an abortion in 1976, three years after the procedure became legal: Wicklund says that the poor treatment she received inspired her to make sure that other women would have better and more respectful reproductive health care. She trained as a midwife, having becoming interested in midwifery while pregnant with her daughter Sonja whose birth was supervised by a midwife. An acquaintance who learned of Wicklund's desire to improve women's reproductive health care recommended that she become a physician. Finishing college,

Practice In 1988, Wicklund completed her training and began practicing medicine at the hospital in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, near where she had grown up. Hospital regulations that did not allow doctors to perform elective abortions left Wicklund frustrated at her inability to care for patients seeking them. By her account, she would receive a patient after hours and insert laminaria into the patient's cervix, inducing a miscarriage that would necessitate a therapeutic dilation and curettage in the hospital emergency room the next day. but in January 1998, she closed it and donated the equipment to nonprofit health centers. In the meantime, she had been fired from the clinic in St. Paul after treating a patient who could not afford to pay.

Wicklund performed abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy. Although she supports the legality of late-term abortions, she decided not to provide them after witnessing an abortion at 21 weeks as a medical student. No North Dakota doctors perform surgical abortions, so the clinic in Fargo, the state's only one, must fly physicians in. Besides patients from Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, the states in which she worked, she also saw patients traveling from Wyoming, which has two abortion providers, and South Dakota, which has only one.

Anti-abortion violence and harassment Wicklund has often faced death threats, assaults, stalking, and harassment from abortion rights opponents, obliging her to adopt measures to protect herself: wearing disguises such as wigs and heavy makeup, carrying a loaded revolver, wearing a bulletproof vest, employing a security guard, owning a guard dog, taking roundabout routes home so that protesters would not know where she lived, and varying her routine so that they would not be able to predict where she would be. Wicklund describes the necessity of taking such measures in order to go to work to perform a legal procedure in the United States as "absolutely absurd."

In October 1991, protesters from the Lambs of Christ, shouting "Susan kills babies!" surrounded Wicklund's home and camped outside for weeks. It also prompted a permanent restraining order prohibiting several groups and individuals, including the Lambs of Christ, from following Wicklund. In 1993, she would also receive 62 letters over two months, threatening her with torture and death, from an abortion rights opponent who was subsequently convicted of felony intimidation and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. The Guardian named Wicklund one of its top 100 women in March 2011, in recognition of her work in the face of violence.

Book Wicklund's book, This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, was co-written with Alan Kesselheim and published by PublicAffairs in 2007; it is a memoir that includes her own life and some of her patients' stories. The title refers to the procedure of abortion, which is "common" in that almost 40% of American women have an abortion at some point in their lives— making it more prevalent than wisdom tooth removal or tonsillectomy—and a "secret" in that individual women are often ashamed of or reluctant to speak about their abortions. Wicklund said that she hoped the book would foster discussion of abortion on a personal level.

Among the patients whose stories are included are a regular anti-abortion protester at the clinic who turned to Wicklund for help when she had an unwanted pregnancy; a rape victim who found out only after terminating her pregnancy that she had conceived by her husband before the rape; and a woman who lost her job because the state mandated a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, obliging the patient to miss several days of work for multiple visits. Wicklund also describes the experience of revealing to her maternal grandmother that she was an abortion provider, a disclosure that she expected would receive her grandmother's disapproval. Instead, her grandmother told Wicklund that she was proud of her work, saying that when she was sixteen, her best friend got pregnant and bled to death from an unsafe self-induced abortion.