This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor Read online

  Sonja’s dad, David, and I had gone our separate ways, having fundamental differences in lifestyles. I had yearned for the rural life again and wanted Sonja to grow up knowing her grandparents. David was a jazz musician who needed and craved the big city life. When it came down to it, I couldn’t live on the road following a musician around, and he couldn’t imagine a life full of chopping wood and hunting deer. Our breakup had been amicable, and David continued to be very committed to Sonja even after I moved back to the Midwest in 1979.

  On Easter Sunday 1980 I was invited to a gathering of people on the West Bank of Minneapolis. The host roasted a lamb in an open pit and provided traditional Greek wine. It was the first really warm day of spring. I was wearing a piecework skirt I had sewn, a pink V-necked T-shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. I fit right in. Sonja, nearly three, was having a blast running around with all the other kids.

  I began talking with a man perhaps twenty years older than I. We sat on the grass drinking red wine and soaking up sunshine. An occasional dog streaked through the chaos.

  It was one of those conversations that avoided the common superficialities. Hal questioned me about my interests and skills and background. He wanted to know what made me happy, what frustrated me. Did I like travel, or was I a homebody? He wanted me to tell him about Sonja’s birth and about the training I had as a midwife. He asked about what I liked to read. What my parents did. What my fears were, and my dreams.

  I told him how much I loved the contact with women and what satisfaction I got from teaching birthing classes. I felt I could communicate the information effectively and in a way most of the women understood. My collection of books on pregnancy and birth and midwifery and early childhood development was growing rapidly, and I was devouring them. I missed the chance to be involved in home births now that I was back in the Midwest.

  I also talked about my dreams of somehow making a difference, a real difference, in peoples’ lives. I didn’t know what or how or when that might happen, but I knew I would not be content to work in the local grocery store or VFW all my life. I wanted more diversity. More challenge. More adventure.

  It seemed as if we’d been there most of the afternoon when Hal looked at me and said, “It is clear that you need to go to medical school. You would be a great doctor.”

  “Me?! Be a doctor?”

  I hugged myself across my belly, tipping over into the grass and laughing until I cried. He had to be out of his mind! Sonja came running up and jumped on me. I curled up tighter, still laughing.

  The idea was preposterous. The logistics alone would be impossible.

  We went on with the day, enjoying the sunshine and good food and music. Local musicians kept pulling out instruments and playing them late into the night. It was only much later that I learned Hal worked as a career counselor at a nearby federal prison.

  Crazy as it was, in the weeks following the party, Hal’s suggestion kept echoing in my thoughts. I knew my life was on hold, waiting for some nudge, some direction. By mid-May, Sonja and I had moved into a tent in a goat pasture. We were helping some friends with a building project. Living right on site seemed like a good idea.

  Summer went on, full of building fences, tending gardens, moving rocks for a foundation, but the seed Hal had planted that Easter Sunday wouldn’t go away. The idea of college and then medical school seemed far out of my reach. I had absolutely no money to pay for tuition or child care for Sonja. I didn’t know if I could even handle the academic challenges. Imagining myself in the role of a doctor was outrageous.

  The biggest mental and emotional hurdle I was struggling with was wrapped up in becoming part of the medical community. True, my childhood family doctor had always been kind, someone I looked up to. But he was almost a neighbor, and he was a man. Men were doctors. Women were nurses.

  That stereotype wasn’t insurmountable, but there was something else I had to deal with. Something much more visceral and daunting. The memory of my own abortion, in 1976, in Portland, Oregon.

  When I became pregnant, politics and Roe v. Wade were the furthest things from my consciousness. I didn’t engage with the political and social issues.

  At that time I rented a house with four roommates, including David. I had no money and juggled three jobs: waitressing, cleaning horse stalls, and growing alfalfa sprouts. David played local gigs with jazz musicians in bars and clubs. No part of me was ready to be a mother, and I felt no emotional connection to the pregnancy. I learned from a community health clinic that I could get an abortion just blocks from where I lived.

  I called the clinic and made an appointment, but learned that the abortion cost $350, an impossible amount of money, more than I made in a month. All of my roommates pitched in to help me come up with the necessary cash.

  The doctor’s office was on the second floor of a large building. David came with me. Protesters outside carried signs, tried to talk to us. I was so preoccupied, so anxious, that I only remember them as an annoyance, a hassle.

  The first thing they wanted in the tiny office was my money. Pay in advance, all of it, in cash. I was so frightened and unaware. What was supposed to happen? No counseling took place, no explanation of procedures or options; no one tried to understand my circumstances or answer my questions.

  In another tiny room a nurse told me to undress and lie down on the table.

  “What are you doing?” I wanted to know.

  “Just be still,” she said. She sat in front of me and put a cold speculum into my vagina. I could feel tugging and pulling, but no real pain. She was done quickly, took out the speculum, and then told me to get dressed.

  “Am I done?” I asked.

  “Done?” she slapped the words at me. “No. I just put something into your cervix that will make it open up for the abortion. You should leave now and come back at three this afternoon.”

  I still had no idea what to expect.

  “What’s happening?” David kept asking when we left. “What are they going to do?” I couldn’t deal with his questions. I had no answers. I had been told nothing, knew only that I had to hold on to my resolve until this was over.

  I dropped David off at the house and drove on in our VW bus to work for a few hours, spraying flats of alfalfa seeds and bagging sprouts. I kept cramping, fighting against the pain and anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me. The time dragged.

  When we returned, the same woman took me back to the small room, again had me get undressed, and used the speculum to examine me. She removed something she had put inside me earlier, but was impatient with me when I asked questions.

  I was moved into a much larger room. It seemed huge, filled with machines and trays of exposed instruments and syringes and needles. Two other women came in. They had me strip naked, lie on a table, and put my feet in stirrups. They put a paper sheet over my upper body and told me to lie still. Then all three of them walked out. No advice, no preparatory explanation, no squeeze of the hand. For a long time I lay there in that vast, cold room, utterly exposed and as vulnerable as I’d ever been in my life.

  Finally, the door opened, and a very large man, the doctor, came toward me. I remember looking down over my legs at him, aware of how physically exposed I was.

  He said nothing, didn’t even tell me his name, asked no questions, but abruptly started to work. An emotional claustrophobia enveloped me. I could feel myself starting to panic.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “Please tell me what you are doing!”

  I could feel instruments inside me, a harsh invasion and pain I hadn’t expected. “Is it supposed to hurt?” I pleaded.

  “Shut up and lie still!” His voice was rough, angry, as if I had no right to intrude. I started to squirm away from him, trying to make him stop long enough to talk to me.

  “Please,” I pleaded. “Please just tell me what you are doing. Stop. Talk to me. Please!”

  He called for nurses to come hold me down.

  The claustrophobia grew and grew, the pai
n kept coming, and I writhed and fought as nurses grabbed my arms and shoulders. I heard myself scream. Tears ran past my ears and into my hair. Then they injected something into my arm, and I faded away from the nightmare.

  When I woke, my face was stuck to a Naugahyde couch. I was in a very small room, alone. I struggled up groggily and went to the door. Locked. Panic rose up again, but all I could do was sit and cry until someone let me out.

  “If you have problems, go to an emergency room,” was the sum total of advice I was given as I went out the door.

  Something terrible had been done to me. I felt abused and violated and beaten. I did not feel that I had made a bad choice, that I had done a bad thing. But I knew something bad had been done to me. All I wanted, then, was to escape.

  I remember sitting on the dark staircase in our house that weekend and calling my mother, telling her what had happened. “I wish I could be with you,” she kept saying. I could hear her voice tremble over the phone, almost two thousand miles away. I wished I had talked to her earlier. I wished I had allowed her to support and comfort me.

  After David and I were married and had moved to California, I became pregnant again. He was still playing sax, and I was waitressing, but this time was different. As much as I hadn’t felt attached to the earlier pregnancy, this time I felt an immediate connection. I knew I wanted this baby.

  My problem, and it grew more and more worrisome as the pregnancy advanced, was that I was terrified of doctors and clinics and hospitals. My abortion experience had scarred me. I simply couldn’t relinquish control over my body to someone who might treat me as badly as I had been treated in Portland. The thought of being in a sterile hospital room with my feet in stirrups and no one I loved nearby was horrifying.

  Friends talked about the possibility of having a home birth with a midwife. As soon as it sank in that this was a real alternative, I jumped on it. The connection I made with our midwife, Nan, was immediate and wonderful.

  The pregnancy and the birth were both completely normal. In stark contrast to my abortion experience, during Sonja’s birth I was surrounded by people I loved and who loved me. I was in my own bed, in my own home, the tiny apartment we rented. And I knew exactly what was happening, both because of my own research and because my questions were honored and answered.

  Desperate Measures

  Used to End Unwanted Pregnancies:

  » use of sharp object like coat hanger or knitting needle

  » scalding water baths

  » massive doses of herbal concoctions, such as black cohosh teas

  » douches with lye, cleaning fluids, boiling water

  » excessive exercise

  chapter three

  Now, three years after Sonja’s home birth, I was considering the possibility of entering a medical career, a profession that held real terror for me, as well as fascination and challenge. It would mean I could attend home births as a physician and educate women about alternatives. It would mean that I could support Sonja.

  Since the breakup of my marriage, providing for Sonja had become a major preoccupation and necessity. I knew that public assistance was a temporary boost, but I didn’t want that to become my permanent solution.

  In the end, what tipped the scales was the realization that if I actually pulled this off, I could make sure my patients were treated differently than I had been—with respect and decency. The memory of my own abortion troubled me, but it also hardened my resolve. I refused to let one bad doctor dictate a decision over my life direction.

  By the beginning of July going to college was sounding like a challenge I wanted to accept. I made a trip to the University of Wisconsin at River Falls and went to the financial aid office to see what the possibilities might be. I was greeted by encouraging, knowledgeable people who helped me through the landscape of forms and formalities needed to apply for college and for student loans.

  I enrolled in August. I hadn’t declared any long-term intention, but I was at least going to get started. Sonja and I gave up our wall tent and moved two hours south, into a trailer house next to the river just blocks from campus. Our first morning I set her in a red Radio Flyer wagon piled high with books and extra clothes and snacks. I dropped her off at the day care on campus and began college full-time.

  My declared major was sociology. I still didn’t know if I could handle the hard sciences. I hadn’t studied physics or chemistry in high school. How dare I have the audacity to think I could even be a doctor?

  The first quarter was all it took to boost my confidence. I took chemistry and math, along with biology, psychology, and English, and came out with a 4.0 GPA. By the end of the first year I was on a roll and loving every bit of it. I went to summer school to do the equivalent of a year’s worth of physics and continued with excellent grades and increasing optimism.

  Sonja went with me everywhere. In warm weather I pulled her around campus in the red wagon. During the winter months she burrowed into a nest of blankets in a box mounted on a sled. She came with me to biology lab and counted fruit flies through the dissecting scope. She loved the poster of the human skeleton and learned the names of all the bones with me. When she fell off the porch and broke her arm, she walked beside me into the emergency room holding her arm.

  “I think it’s the radius,” she told the doctor, and she was right.

  The second winter we lived in a drafty farmhouse outside of town. It had no running water, and our electricity was limited to one extension cord that ran in the door from a junction box outside, but it was rent-free. The owners wanted someone there to keep vandals out. Every evening Sonja would sit on the couch, cuddled up in a sleeping bag and cutting out paper snowflakes, while I built a fire in the wood stove. I would stoke that stove for hours, using the wood my father and sister had hauled down from home, 120 miles away. Even at that, it was all I could do to get the heat up to fifty degrees. By the end of winter, every inch of wall space was covered in paper snowflakes.

  But I was happy being a student. Chemistry, biology, physics, all the course work I had feared—from photosynthesis to physics in everyday life, I kept having ah-hah! moments. I aced course after course.

  I was happy, too, because I’d met a man named Randy. Actually, I’d known Randy slightly back in high school. He had been a senior when I was a freshman, and I remembered him for his successful crusade to abolish the student dress code. We met again when I was home visiting and working at the local food co-op. He was working as a heavy equipment operator.

  We started spending weekends together whenever possible. I loved Randy’s genuine honesty, his dependability, and his solid commitment to people and the causes he believed in. He was the only person I trusted with my true medical aspirations.

  Most important, Randy fell head over heels in love with Sonja. The feeling was mutual. Almost from the start, Sonja started calling Randy “Randad.”

  It wasn’t until I’d finished two years of school, and was fueled with newfound confidence, that I felt able to articulate my ultimate goal to my family and friends: I was going to be a doctor.

  My mother was encouraging and proud and promised to do all she could to help. There was no money to help with expenses, but she could pitch in with child care. My father was skeptical but knew enough not to say it out loud. Maybe he was worried about where he’d have to haul wood to next. I could feel the sideways looks of aunts, uncles, and cousins, very few of whom had gone past high school.

  Higher education had never been a part of our extended family expectations. Mom would have loved to go to college and law school, but the times and circumstances did not allow it. Dad had only finished eighth grade, but he had enrolled in machinist school on the GI bill after serving in World War II. He had earned a GED many years later, along with some of his brothers. Dad and all five of his brothers served in the war.

  After three years I earned my bachelor of science degree in biology and was accepted into medical school. Another move for Sonja, but this time we
joined a married couple with two kids. The husband was in the same program I was, and the wife was in nursing school. We shared childcare responsibilities, along with meals and bedtime stories. And, as Sonja pointed out, you just had to turn up the thermostat to make it warmer.

  Most weekends we drove down to be with Randy. I studied nonstop, but Randy and Sonja had their standard routine. They’d make a trip to the dump, buy groceries, do chores, then head off on the round of family visits to grandmas and aunts and uncles. Randy built Sonja a sandbox in the yard, where she played for hours.

  It didn’t take long in medical school to see that even though women were allowed in, it was a system run by and for men. Most of the lecturers and attending physicians were men. All the deans and department heads were men.

  There were times when it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut. Other times I was not able to contain myself and took actions that almost got me expelled. One incident that put me toe to toe with the medical school hierarchy still makes me shudder.

  It was the first morning of a third-year medical student rotation in obstetrics and gynecology. We met in a lecture hall for a discussion of pelvic anatomy with the attending physician. He told us that the best way to learn pelvic anatomy was to do an exam on a relaxed pelvis and that a woman under general anesthesia was ideal. We were led to the operating room suite and were told we would all be performing pelvic exams on five or six women and then discussing our findings.

  It dawned on me that these were women admitted for a variety of operations or procedures. A gallbladder surgery, perhaps, or breast lumpectomy or knee surgery. I suspected that the patients hadn’t been told they would be undergoing pelvic exams by eight or ten medical students while under general anesthesia.

  My suspicion was confirmed. I was absolutely appalled and walked up to confront the attending physician.