Recommended Reading Lists > Staff Picks > March 2008

Recommended Book

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

ISBN: 158648480X

Title: This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

Author: Susan Wicklund

KDL Description:

Describing her twenty-year career at the forefront of the abortion war, a female physician describes growing up in working-class, rural Wisconsin, her personal ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy and its influence, her dedication to helping women through the abortion experience, the dangers she confronts, and her thoughts on the abortion debate.

Amazon Description:

One doctor’s raw and riveting memoir, contrasting the headline-grabbing political rhetoric with the contours of her life, and the lives of her patients.

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, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy — and how hidden this common experience remains.

This is the story of Susan’s love for a profession that means listening to women and helping them through one of the most pivotal and controversial events in their lives. Hers is also a calling that means sleeping on planes and commuting between clinics in different states — and that requires her to wear a bulletproof vest and to carry a .38 caliber revolver. This is also the story of the women whom Susan serves, women whose options are increasingly limited.

Through these intimate, complicated, and inspiring accounts, Wicklund reveals the truth about the women’s clinics that anti-abortion activists portray as little more than slaughterhouses for the unborn. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion America has ever seen, this raw and powerful memoir shows us what is at stake.