NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2010
Anti-choice terrorism
This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, by Susan Wicklund with Alan Kesselheim (Public Affairs, 2008).
Susan Wicklund helps us understand the realities of abortion and what doctors go through to provide this service. When she became an abortion doctor, she did not realize how extremely stressful it would be. Self-proclaimed "sidewalk counselors" caused fear and guilt in her patients, which she had to dispel through counseling. As the protesters learned to recognize her, they began waiting for her at the airport to yell threats like "You deserve to die!" They stopped cars coming into the clinic by jumping on them or lying in the road. Wicklund even tried wearing disguises and driving five hours instead of flying. She said, "Trying to stay one step ahead of the protesters became a game of nerves."
They leafleted her town with propaganda and "wanted" posters. They surrounded her home, yelling threats and videotaping her daughter, who needed a police escort to get to school. When 50 protesters barricaded her driveway with cement barrels at night, the police said it would be too dangerous for them to come and make arrests or remove the barrels in the dark. To get to work, Wicklund walked through the woods in the dark to meet a friend who gave her a ride.
Wicklund relates how her stress escalated when protesters killed or injured other doctors or burned down their homes or clinics. At one point, she received many threatening letters from a protester who signed his name and broke into her apartment, leaving anti-choice propaganda. The police refused to arrest him. The county attorney was appalled that he had not been arrested for the federal offense of felony intimidation. Wicklund began to wear a bulletproof vest and carry a gun.
Her patients and the many reasons women need abortions, as well as the drastic lengths to which they go to get one, kept Wicklund going. She wanted all reproductive healthcare to be a positive experience for women, so she counseled them herself. When the patient was a victim of incest, she had the perpetrator arrested.
Wicklund says that most of the medical establishment distances itself from abortion providers. But she received thanks from women who had been her patients and from women who lived during the time when abortion was illegal. Her own grandmother told her how, at the age of 16, she had accidentally killed her best friend by trying to give her an abortion.
This Common Secret records acts of domestic terrorism by right-wing, theocratic hate groups. Their criminal activities are too often ignored by law enforcement. Our society's devaluing of the lives of women and the lives of those who help women has allowed terrorism to grow. With the recent increase in militias and hate groups and death threats towards elected officials by "tea party" activists, right-wing extremists already have a model of how terrorism has been successful.
As Wicklund says, the anti-choice activists are "able to recruit protesters from younger generations who have never known a world without safe, legal abortions." The true stories of women having abortions, of what it was like before abortion was legalized, and of abortion providers who care about their patients are essential in dispelling simplistic anti-choice lies.
--Adele
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