This Common Secret: My Journey As an Abortion Doctor - Rilegato

Wicklund, Susan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 158648480X ISBN 13: 9781586484804

Casa editrice: Public Affairs, 2007

Riassunto

Wicklund was twenty-two years old and juggling three jobs in Portland, Oregon, when she endured a difficult abortion. Partly in response to that experience, she later embarked on an improbable life journey devoted to women's reproductive health, attending both undergraduate and medical school as a single mother. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women share the ordeal of unwanted pregnancies - and how hidden this common experience remains.
Hers is an emotional and dramatic story covering twenty years on the front lines of the abortion war. For years Wicklund commuted between clinics in different states and disguised herself from protestors - often wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a .38 caliber revolver. Her daughter, Sonja, experienced seeing wanted posters with her mother's face on them and riding to school in police cars to get through the human blockades at the end of their driveway.
Wicklund also tells the stories of the women she serves, women whose options are increasingly limited: counseling sessions in which women confide that they had used combinations of herbs - or worse - to attempt a miscarriage; or patients who have been protesters, but then find themselves bearing an unwanted pregnancy; and women who claim to want an abortion, but nothing they say or do convinces Wicklund that the decision is whole-hearted.
This Common Secret brims with the compassion and urgency of a woman who has witnessed the struggles of real patients. It also offers an honest portrait of the clinics that anti-abortion activists portray as little more than slaughterhouses for the unborn. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion that America has ever seen, Wicklund's raw and revealing memoir shows us what is at stake.

Su questo libro

Recensione

"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

L'autore

Susan Wicklund has worked in the field of women's reproductive health for more than twenty years. For much of that time she has been on the front lines of the abortion war, both as a doctor and as a spokeswoman for women's rights. She has been interviewed by numerous leading media outlets, including 60 Minutes and "Fresh Air." Alan Kesselheim is a full-time freelance writer from Bozeman, Montana. This Common Secret is his ninth book.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Public Affairs
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 158648480X
• ISBN 13: 9781586484804
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 268