This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor - Hardcover

"This is shocking stuff, and goes a long way to explaining (Susan Wicklund's) extraordinary sense of being a woman on a mission. She has never wavered in her belief that women are entitled to choice, but she has paid a high price in terms of her private life. Her book leaves a vivid impression of the damage inflicted on civil society when one side in an important debate resorts to terrorist tactics." --The Times

Reading Wicklund s story, you can t help but marvel that she kept going... The book teems with fascinating, often tragic stories... Wicklund s book is a compelling account of the hypocrisy and secrecy that surround this subject, an arena so politically charged that the provision of safe, legal services is fatally undermined, meantime that even in our modern, sophisticated, medically advanced country , as Wicklund describes the US, some women are still using coat hangers and sticks and toxic concoctions to end unwanted pregnancies. --The Guardian

This raw and riveting memoir gives an intimate first-hand account of the perilous state of women's choice in America. In "This Common Secret", Dr Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Susan had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realised how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy - and how hidden this common experience remains. This is the story of a profession that means listening to women and helping them through one of the most traumatic and controversial events in their lives, but which also requires its doctors to wear a bullet-proof vest and carry a.38 calibre revolver. In it, Susan and her patients share their own anguished, complicated yet inspiring stories. Through these accounts, Wicklund reveals the truth about the women's clinics that anti-abortion activists portray as little more than slaughterhouses for the unborn. In America the abortion debate is reaching a new pitch, with the Supreme Court tilted against women's choice, and state legislatures passing bills to outlaw the practice of abortion. Based on real situations, real women and real dilemmas, this raw and powerful memoir shows what's at stake.