Fighter for Right to Choose Has Made Her Own Choices : Activism: Dr. Carole Milligan hasn’t always taken the easy road. Her role in establishing a Planned Parenthood clinic is a case in point.

Carole Milligan has always made the unexpected choice.

As a premed graduate from Stanford, she dropped medical school plans to go to Kenya with the Peace Corps. As a new mother with a baby still in diapers, she enrolled in medical school.

And as a young radiologist new in town, with a husband running the bank named for his great-grandfather, Milligan chose to join Planned Parenthood’s push for a clinic in Ventura County a decade ago.

Before long, abortion foes had turned on her, lobbying the Catholic-run St. John’s Hospital to dismiss her from the staff and picketing the Bank of A. Levy, where her then-husband, Michael Milligan, was president. They protested daily outside the original Oxnard clinic.

Today Planned Parenthood of Ventura is hosting a brunch to recognize Milligan for the work she did and the obstacles she surmounted.

“She has been a really strong supporter who has been with us since before we opened our doors,” says Deborah Mason, the group’s development coordinator.

She is also a doctor who fills her days caring for cancer patients, then spends a weekend riding her bicycle down to San Diego. She has won tennis championships at the Pierpont Racquet Club and baked hamburger buns from scratch for her daughter’s birthday party.

“Did you ever meet someone who stops you dead in your tracks?” asks Hope Avery, a friend who rides bikes with Milligan. “She has definitely done things differently than most women give themselves permission to do.”

Milligan, 49, now divorced, leans forward on the sofa of her spacious Ventura beach house as she tries to explain her life. Her 25-year-old daughter Kimberley, a law student working this summer for the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, is an activist dedicated to the cause.

Yet Milligan herself wasn’t.

In fact, she meant to leave her career goals behind to do things the easy way, she says. She could have settled into the life of a banker’s wife, playing tennis and rearing her daughter.

She was even taking sewing lessons in an adult-education program. But one day in class, she ran into a high school friend. Milligan told her about her premed degree from Stanford and her two years in the Peace Corps. She told her about the husband she had in law school and the toddler waiting at home. She told her how it didn’t seem to be enough.

“You should go to med school,” her friend said.

Milligan liked the idea. Her family didn’t.

“Their goals for me primarily had to do with getting a good education so I could find a husband,” Milligan recalls. “When I decided to go to medical school after I was married and had a small child, neither family was exactly thrilled.”

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She also found that in the early 1970s, society wasn’t quite ready for the working woman.

“It’s not that child care is an easy thing now,” she says, “but there was no child care then. There was no day care. Nursery schools went from 9 to 12, three days a week.”

Her husband filled in helping with the housework and child rearing.

During her residency, he would bring their daughter to the hospital with a pizza and have a family dinner in their Dodge van.

“There was a long adjustment period for me,” Milligan says, “knowing I wanted a career, knowing I was capable of having a career, but feeling guilty at the same time.”

She overcompensated with her cooking--making her own jams, pickles, even baking hamburgers and hot dog buns from scratch.

She also pursued her athletic interests, playing tennis, hiking, biking and camping in California’s canyons.

After moving back to Ventura for her husband’s career, Milligan began working as a radiologist-oncologist, treating cancer patients first at St. John’s and later at her own outpatient office in Mission Oaks.

“I was very lonely at first,” she says. “I did not easily fit into the medical social life, being a woman. One of the things that became a real focal point for me was Planned Parenthood.”

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Allene Craig of Ventura remembers asking Milligan to join the effort to establish a family-planning clinic. “We just tried to pick young people who we thought would be interested,” she said. “I thought she would be a leader.”

Craig was right. Milligan chaired the group’s advisory committee for three terms. Her volunteer work began influencing her professional life, as angry abortion opponents wrote to the St. John’s administration.

But the hospital administrators and the nuns working there never pressured her to drop her work.

“They were very supportive of me doing what was important to me,” she says.

Her interest in Planned Parenthood, she says, had less to do with abortion than with the education the group provides to women.

The local clinic, now in the city of Ventura, spends barely 5% of its resources on abortions, said Deborah Mason, the group’s development coordinator. The focus is primarily on birth control, gynecological exams and counseling women on their options.

“I don’t know, honestly, how I would feel about having an abortion personally,” Milligan says. “I really think this is a right women should have.”

Her friend, Avery, remembers Milligan’s advice when Avery and her husband were contemplating having a baby.

“All she said, so simply, was, ‘The one thing to remember is that we are all human. Not having children would be missing out on what it is to be human, the human experience,’ ” Avery recalls.

Avery now has a 6-year-old daughter.

“People think that once you’re involved with Planned Parenthood, you’re pro-abortion, but that’s not it,” she says. “It’s about choosing.”