Free This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund Page A

safe or peaceful. Fourteen years old and brave. Am I asking too much of her? Should I send her to live with her Dad? Should I quit? Will she hate me for all this when she is thirty?
    Yesterday I felt anger and determination and strength. Today I feel sad and scared and confused. Had to pull my arms away from Sonja at 5:15, shower and dress and head for the airport. The tears haven’t stopped.
    More than three weeks into this nightmare, Randy, Sonja, and I were at the house on a Wednesday night. I was due in Fargo the next morning for clinic at 9:00 A.M. The three of us only wanted a quiet family evening before I left again. Just one night to have supper together and gather our thoughts.
    A great many protesters began collecting outside. We saw a motor home pull up at the end of the drive and then groups of men moving huge cement barrels into place to block our way out. This can’t happen, I told myself. I called the police and pleaded with them to come and help. I was told that it was too dangerous for the officers to come in the dark and try to remove the barrels or make arrests. The fifty or sixty protesters far outnumbered the few officers in our entire county.
    If the “problem” was still there in the morning, backup help from other counties would be called, and they would start to clear the way once it was light. They said the process could take three to four hours. It meant I wouldn’t get out in time to make the four-hour drive to Fargo.
    Prisoners in our own home! What if there was a fire or if one of us needed emergency medical help? These people were allowed to break the law and hold us hostage because it was dark outside and they outnumbered the police!
    I began pacing around the house. I will not let this happen, I repeated over and over. I had fifteen patients scheduled for the next day, and I was determined to get there. Many of those patients would be traveling four to six hours themselves, missing work or school to go to the appointment, having to arrange child care or a ride or deal with any number of other obstacles. Besides, missing clinic would be a major victory for the protesters. That was not an option.
    I made a phone call to a woman in town who had given me her home number and offered help. This would be an extraordinary request, and I woke her up to ask for it, but she agreed.
    For the protesters’ benefit we played out our normal nightly routine. I didn’t tell Sonja anything, but saw her to bed as usual, holding her much longer than normal to say good night, fighting back the lump in my throat. I prepared the coffee pot for the morning. Randy and I brushed our teeth and had lights out by 9:30.
    We were lying on top of the bed covers, talking quietly about the details of my plan. I’d be on foot and would meet my friend at a set point on a nearby town road. She’d drive me to our pickup truck, which was parked at a nearby stable where we boarded a few horses. Once I got to the truck, I would drive through the night to Fargo, perhaps catching some sleep at a rest area.
    After talking through the details one more time, we lay quietly in the dark. Throughout all of this Randy had been unwaveringly steadfast, completely supportive. He never questioned my commitment, never even hinted that I should quit my work. But I felt the rush of his anxiety when I asked him to get the pistol out of the drawer.
    In a lifetime around guns I had never carried one for self-defense. I had never even loaded a gun inside a house before. But I loaded this one.
    For a brief moment as I was leaving the bedroom I wondered how crazy I must be, how insane my life had become. But my momentum carried me out the bedroom door and down the stairs to the back door, ready to step out into the night.
    Randy had followed me. He stopped me and quietly wrapped his arms around me. We held each other fiercely, silently.
    “Call me when you get to Fargo,” he whispered.
    I stepped back, slung my clothes bag over one shoulder, and