THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF PROVIDING

AND OBTAINING LEGAL ABORTIONS

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (ngier@uidaho.edu)

Read also "Abortion, Persons, and the Fetus"

"Catholics May Have Good Reason for Abortion Reform"

As we celebrate the 35^th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the granting of reproductive freedom for America's women, it worth acknowledging the sacrifices of those who have made this freedom possible.

Dr. Susan Wicklund, who managed an abortion clinic in Bozeman, Montana until 1998, has just released her book This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor. Wicklund tells about how she was forced to buy a .38 Special and a bulletproof vest to protect herself from anti-abortion protesters.  Wicklund's daughter had to be driven to school in a police cruiser.

Before Wicklund went on 60 Minutes in 1998, she felt that she had to tell her maternal grandmother, who did not yet know about her controversial medical work.  Wicklund steeled herself for yet another anti-abortion protest. Instead, Wicklund learned that many years earlier, her grandmother, desperate to help a pregnant friend, tried to dislodge the fetus with a wire, and then watched in horror as she bled to death.  The grandmother was proud to know that her granddaughter was providing safe abortions that were not available in her time.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute has estimated that 4 million illegal abortions are performed in Latin America each year, and approximately 800,000 women are hospitalized because of complications resulting from unsafe techniques.  It is estimated that 1,500 Mexican women die each year because of clandestine abortions.

Wicklund tells the story about a 14-year-old girl who came to her clinic.  It took her some time to elicit the truth about who had impregnated her.  Wicklund immediately called police when she learned that the girl had been raped by her father, the person who had accompanied her to the clinic.

Access is a major problem.  There is only one clinic in Mississippi, and 89

percent of U.S. counties do not provide this fully legal service. Many women have to drive hundreds of miles to find a clinic, and then sometimes wait 24 hours, spending scarce resources on food and lodging, before the procedure can be performed. "It’s so incredibly insulting," Dr. Wicklund said in an interview. "The 24-hour waiting period implies that women don’t think about it on their own. To me a lot of the abortion restrictions are about control of women, about power."

Wicklund's policy is that she will not perform abortions after 14 weeks, and 91 percent of U.S. abortions are performed this early.  This number would be higher if it were not for a lack of access and a self-righteous pro-life culture that prevents many women from having safer abortions during the first trimester.

When she was on the Diane Rehm show on Jan. 8, 2008, Wicklund answered a call from a man who said he was surprised that she, unlike other abortion providers, was a caring person and didn't do it for the money.  Wicklund assured him that all the abortion doctors she knew were good people and that they could make much more money in any other area of medicine.

Wicklund did not defend herself very well when it came to questions about the proper cut-off point for abortions.  She was quick to cite the many studies that demonstrate that the early fetus does not experience pain, but she did not respond well to the challenge that there is brain activity very early on.  The best answer is that early brain activity occurs in all animal fetuses, but we don't grant a serious moral right to life to them.

The morally significant time is the explosive brain development from 25-33 weeks, the period that the Supreme Court decided that the state does indeed have a right to defend the rights of the fetus.  There is a compelling moral and legal symmetry between the end of a person's life (the brain-dead Terri Schiavo, for example) and the significant brain activity that signals the beginning of a person's life in the third trimester.

Our moral, legal, and religious traditions have always made a distinction between a biological human being and a moral and legal person.  Christian theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, followed the Greeks in holding that a person is a rational being, and the great Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas argued that such a being does not exist in the womb until late in pregnancy. 

In 1973 the good justices were eminently conservative in following a tried and true ancient tradition on the moral status of the fetus.