[1] After graduating high school, she worked low-wage part-time jobs and earned community college credits while receiving welfare and food stamps.
When she became pregnant, she had an abortion in 1976, three years after the procedure became legal: Wicklund says that the poor treatment she received inspired her to make sure that other women would have better and more respectful reproductive health care.
[5]: 40 At the April 1989 March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C., which she attended with her mother and daughter, Wicklund "felt a personal call to action" and soon sought out clinics where she could work as an abortion provider.
[8][9]: 189 When she had to leave Montana in order to take care of her dying mother in Wisconsin, she hoped to sell the practice to another abortion provider or arrange with other doctors to keep it running on a temporary basis,[10] but in January 1998, she closed it and donated the equipment to nonprofit health centers.
[7] Wicklund placed a high importance on counseling in her practice, and if she believed that a patient was not completely secure in her decision to end her pregnancy or that she was bowing to pressure from others, she asked her to think it over and return another time.
[18][19] Wicklund has often faced death threats, assaults, stalking, and harassment from abortion rights opponents, obliging her to adopt measures to protect herself: wearing disguises such as wigs and heavy makeup, carrying a loaded revolver, wearing a bulletproof vest, employing a security guard, owning a guard dog, taking roundabout routes home so that protesters would not know where she lived, and varying her routine so that they would not be able to predict where she would be.
[1][2][6][15][17] Wicklund describes the necessity of taking such measures in order to go to work to perform a legal procedure in the United States as "absolutely absurd.
[5]: 1 [23] In 1993, she would also receive 62 letters over two months, threatening her with torture and death, from an abortion rights opponent who was subsequently convicted of felony intimidation and sentenced to ten years in federal prison.
[25] Wicklund's book, This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, was co-written with Alan Kesselheim and published by PublicAffairs in 2007; it is a memoir that includes her own life and some of her patients' stories.
[3] Among the patients whose stories are included are a regular anti-abortion protester at the clinic who turned to Wicklund for help when she had an unwanted pregnancy; a rape victim who found out only after terminating her pregnancy that she had conceived by her husband before the rape; and a woman who lost her job because the state mandated a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, obliging the patient to miss several days of work for multiple visits.