Susan 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, going to medical school while raising a daughter. 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.


This Common Secret is an emotional and dramatic story covering twenty years on the front lines of the abortion war. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion that America has ever seen, this raw and revealing memoir shows us what is at stake.