This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (27 page)

Elsie was ninety-eight years old. She had been an activist all her adult life. She was a veteran of civil rights marches, nonviolent demonstrations, labor rallies in San Francisco, causes and events that stretched back before the Depression. She had lived through both world wars, rode in horse-drawn buggies, could remember when women first got to vote.

She was sitting quietly backstage in a chair in the shade of a tree. I walked over to her and introduced myself. She wore a straw hat that covered white curls of hair. A colorful string of beads hung around her neck. She wore sunglasses, red lipstick. She could have been anyone’s grandmother, or great-grandmother, for that matter.

She looked at me with a clear, discerning gaze. Her hands were clasped loosely in her lap, holding down a sheaf of papers, her speech. I had heard from friends that she had been practicing for weeks.

“Susan,” she said. “That was your name, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I moved closer. “We’ve spoken on the phone before. It’s so good to put a face with a name.”

“Susan,” she repeated. She turned to face me. “Tell me what you do.”

I hesitated. Should I tell her the truth or gloss over it? I didn’t want to distract her with other thoughts before she got up in front of the crowd. I didn’t want to face her reaction if she didn’t approve. I pulled over a crate and sat down close beside her. Nearby people scurried past, oblivious to the two women behind the stage. A jungle of cords and speaker wires surrounded us.

“I am a doctor,” I began. “I have been providing safe, legal abortions for women for nearly twenty years.”

A long silence. The sound of the crowd faded in the intensity of our focus. Elsie turned her face away, her gaze fixed in the distance. She stayed very still. I didn’t dare move or speak. Enough time passed that I wondered if she’d heard me. Or was she reworking her own memories? Perhaps she was measuring her response. Then she shifted, seemed to sit taller in her chair.

Her hand reached out and found mine. She pulled my hand to the arm of her chair, covered it with hers. Her soft, old hand gently patted mine.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s real good.”

Thank goodness I liked this book—that was my first reaction. If I hadn’t, no amount of faint praise would have convinced my mother that I did. I’ve never been able to lie, especially to her. And she’s never lied to me, except for my own safety. But she did hide things from me, it turns out.

It’s not that I was unaware of the events or facts about which you have just read, with the exception of Flower Grandma’s tragic secret. Growing up, I knew what my mother did for a living. I knew the moral questions raised by abortion. I heard many of the patients’ stories, and I knew about the abortion early in Mom’s life that inspired her convictions. I was well aware of the protesters and the death threats, the arson attempts and stalkings.

I also knew that Mom was on the front lines defending a new and still-fragile women’s right—that she was and is one of the brave few who live out their convictions through action.

What I did not know was the depth of her fear and uncertainty. I believed that through it all she was as strong as she pretended to be when I was around, as casual about the sacrifices as she always led me to believe. The disguises? I thought they were fun, and she played along. The midnight drives to Fargo? I thought she just didn’t like flying in small planes. The days when the protesters were thick as flies? She and I relived the humorous stories, like when a neighbor removed the muffler from his riding lawn mower, began to mow his lawn, and then left the machine running in the corner of his yard, right next to the protesters. He claimed the engine overheated.

It turns out that Mom made a point of collecting herself, planning her words and approach, before telling me things. That was the hardest part of reading this book: accepting the emotional turmoil of the person who was my model of strength and courage.

Over the past year, I have repeatedly discussed passages with her: “Did you really think you weren’t smart enough to be a doctor? . . . You couldn’t have been that scared to tell Flower Grandma about your work. . . . How come I didn’t realize you felt so unsafe, even inside the clinics? . . . Why were you so nervous about going back to work in Montana?” Mom’s fear of protesters was natural, but I never imagined that she doubted her path and had moments when she considered giving up her work. I have even more respect for her now that I know.

Facing Mom’s demons as I read the book naturally led me to relive my own fears, such as a vivid nightmare from the very early years: crowds of people in front of the Fargo clinic, parting neatly for Mom until one man with a gun, in slow motion, steps out, shoves aside the security escort, shoots her three times while camera bulbs flash. I woke screaming. I was fourteen years old, shocked by the image of my mother lying in a pool of her own blood. Mom ran into my bedroom to comfort me, assured me that it was just a dream.

The anti-choice activists were picketing the clinics and our home at that time, following her to work, trying to shame our family, intimidate our friends, but they wouldn’t kill someone. They wouldn’t go that far, she said.

Of course, they did go that far, more than once, and I fell apart whenever a shooting occurred. I would feel the ground shift under me when I heard the news, find my way dizzily home, and cry for hours, curled up on my bed, so shocked by every new act of violence. I was devastated for the victims and their families, of course, but it was the fear we would be next that paralyzed me.

The harassment, the “wanted” posters, the crowds of protesters during high school—they were all stressful, but I had an excellent network of family, friends, teachers, and neighbors who protected and reassured me. Even the local Baptist minister encouraged his largely anti-choice congregation to come to our aid. In a way, the public harassment and the incredibly supportive reaction of our community just proved to me that people are overwhelmingly good, kind, and caring. My only real fear was that an act of violence might claim Mom. The possibility terrified me. I didn’t want to be the weak link, though. I knew that I was the only person in the world who could actually convince her to quit her job, but I also knew that I could be strong and play my small part by standing up to the pressure.

Yet just this year, I insisted that I had no lasting trauma from those times.

“Surely it still affects you, at least a little?” Mom’s coauthor, Al, asked me as we sat discussing the soon-to-be-published book after dinner one evening. I considered his question. It was the middle of a vacation from my teaching job. Mom and I had spent the day running errands, talking nonstop about the usual—the antics of our neighbors, my graduate school applications, a cousin’s new baby, upcoming camping trips.

“Our lives are not extraordinary,” I insisted. “I hardly think of the times when the protesters were really after us.”

“Nothing has stuck with you from those experiences?” Al asked again.

And then I remembered. I had glanced into the back seat while slamming the car door on one of our many stops that day.

“Mom,” I yelled as she walked toward the store, “unlock the car—the mail is face up, and I can read your name.”

Never leave names or personal information visible through a window: just one of a hundred permanently ingrained security routines. I turned the mail face down and went inside. I guess a baseline of fear will always be present.

This book has refreshed good memories along with the bad, especially of holidays and summers spent in Montana. In the winter, I brought friends with me, and we went skiing up in the mountains. In the summer, Mom took long weekends off, and she and I hiked, rode horses, and canoed the Yellowstone River. During the week, between babysitting jobs and going to the swimming pool, I loved to stop by the clinic. I said hi to the staff, made sure Mom ate lunch, read the myriad thank-you cards from patients (with names blacked out, of course), and witnessed the care taken with each woman’s physical and emotional well-being, from reception area to recovery room.

Once, a patient granted permission for me to watch her abortion. I was curious and needed to know firsthand that the horrible bloody-baby posters carried by the protesters were a lie. The procedure was just as Mom had always described it—quick and anticlimactic, producing a small amount of cloudy-looking tissue and a visibly relieved woman. I remember wishing I could take each protester one by one with me on these visits. I was convinced that a day in the clinic, hearing the honest dialogue with patients, witnessing the reality of an abortion procedure, would help them thoughtfully reconsider their beliefs and actions.

Or maybe the anti-choice protesters could just ask questions within their own families and then listen carefully to their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. It’s taboo in our society to discuss abortion on anything less than a political level, but I know the truth. Someone close to each and every one of us has had an abortion. The experience is common, but I do not believe it is taken lightly. Women who have exercised their right to choose never forget.

Hardly a day goes by without a woman greeting Mom warmly in a store, at the gym, or on the street. A shy hello or meaningful squeeze of the hand accompanies looks and words of sincere appreciation and warmth. These women are former patients, representatives of the millions of American women who have an abortion at some point in their lives. They are forever grateful to the loving doctor who helped them see their difficult decision through with dignity.

That doctor is my mother.

This Common Secret
began at my kitchen table more than a decade ago. During the year that Sue lived with my family, staying in a basement room of our small house in Montana, she shared a great many stories. Incredible tales. On Saturday mornings over coffee, or late at night after a long day, Marypat and I would sit and listen to Sue talk.

At some point I said, “Sue, we have to write some of this stuff down.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “But I’m not a writer, and I’ve never found the time.”

“Well, I’m a writer,” I said, “and these stories are important.”

When we began our collaboration, we would sit in the living room after the kids went to bed. Sue curled up in a big reading chair, wrapped herself in a blanket, and started talking while I scribbled in pencil on yellow legal pads as fast as I could. Sometimes Sue would shake with the emotion as her stories poured out. Later we met at a local coffee shop, where we worked for hours at a round table. Sue reeled off patient situations, protester confrontations, legal quagmires, counseling scenarios, personal turning points. It was exhausting—and amazing.

For her, it was a way to reckon with the emotional toll, work through her feelings, and record events. For me, the accounts were intense, vivid, and revealing. Sue’s memory for detail and her simple, authentic presentation made the writing job easy.

Almost always, at some point in the telling, there were tears. More than once we had to take a break to regain our composure, get another cup of coffee, before we could carry on.

“This is not about me,” Sue insisted, from the beginning. “I want this to be about the women, not about me.”

I honored her sentiment, knew it was genuine, but I also knew she was wrong. Of course it is about the women she has seen over the years, all of them: their symbolic dilemmas and dramatic situations, what they represent in the larger debate. It is about Flower Grandma, Martina Greywind, the fourteen-year-old victim of incest, the young woman raped on the way home from a movie. But all of that hangs on the framework of Sue’s tale—her commitment, her stubborn allegiance, her sense of morality, and her fortitude—beginning with the choice to go to medical school and continuing to this day in her career as an abortion provider.

“I understand, Sue,” I said, “and I respect you for it. But this stuff is only a collage of disconnected snapshots without your story.”

“I don’t want the women to get lost,” she insisted.

Sue is a big-boned, straightforward woman with a hearty laugh. She has a rural sense of etiquette, a spontaneous flair for fun, and genuine warmth. Meeting her on the street, you’d never think of her as a warrior. You wouldn’t expect her to be controversial in any way. Rather, she is engaging, intelligent, humorous, open-minded, strong-willed. She could be a rancher or teacher or veterinarian.

The fact that Sue is a warrior is a matter of circumstance, not of intention. She is a woman who has followed her heart, who has not been swayed by intimidation or difficulty. In her case, that course has led straight into a firestorm of controversy and danger.

Sitting at our kitchen table over the course of that year, Marypat and I were educated. Like most people, we’d had our experiences with pregnancy decisions. Like most people, we thought we knew the issues and the politics and where we stood. It turned out that, in fact, we had no idea. The power of this project, and the potential impact on readers, is that many will turn the first page thinking that they understand the parameters of the abortion issue in America. They will be floored, as I was.

Having Sue in our home gave us a hint of the wary tension she maintains as a matter of course. I have no doubt that the antis figured out where she’d moved within weeks. I also assumed, perhaps naïvely, that they would never attack her in the midst of a family with young children, that our home offered her the immunity of our embrace.

Her security escort would pull in to our driveway every morning and drop her off again after work. The phone rang at all hours. We had more than the usual number of disconnected calls, sometimes in the dead of night. Some of them were sinister. The presence of someone on the other end was palpable—you could even hear the breathing—then the line would go dead. I found myself scrutinizing people walking past on the sidewalk, taking note if a car slowed down as it drove by our house. When Sue says she knows what it’s like to be prey, I have a faint inkling of how that feels.