ClinicQuotes

Former Clinic Worker: Nita Whitten

Nina Whitten, former clinic worker, discusses what she observed in an abortion clinic run by Dr. Curtis Boyd.

“I was hired by Curtis and Glenna Boyd in July 1980. The reason I went to work for Curtis and Glenna was sort of a long and complicated one. I grew up in a Christian home. My father was a preacher when I was a child. He retired from preaching and he became an engineer, and we lived a fairly normal life. I was, however, rather radical along the feminist lines. My mother was too, and to some extent I still am because I am a preacher, and there aren’t a lot of men who think women ought to be preaching, but I am preaching to you today.

When I went to work for Curtis and Glenna, they made really sure that I was all in favor of abortion. What was so funny was that I lied right through my teeth. I didn’t know anything about it, I really didn’t. I didn’t know anybody who had one; I had never seen one; I had never been around it. All I knew was the word “abortion” and that I was a liberal person. I was very liberal, and so therefore I could work there. I told them that it wouldn’t bother me and that if I got pregnant I’d probably have an abortion. That’s what I told them. They believed me and they hired me.

I was a competent secretary and still am pretty good at being a secretary. But the funny thing about it is when you’re involved in abortion, your whole perspective about life changes. At least mine did. I was really shocked at the reaction that my family and my friends had when they found out that I worked at an abortion clinic. I couldn’t tell my grandmother what I did, so I lied to her and I told her that I worked for a doctor who took care of women. She thought we delivered babies, I guess. She didn’t know and she didn’t find out until just a few weeks ago, and she sent me up here with her blessing. I think that’s wonderful.

Several of the people who I worked with were very unusual. The woman who was instrumental in hiring me, Elaine Clark, and I pray for Elaine every day… I really want the Lord to deliver Elaine because when I knew Elaine she was on her way to quitting the clinic. She wanted to leave and the reason she wanted to leave was she said, and I believe all of them will eventually say this, she couldn’t handle it any more. It was too much.

….

Elaine was hooked on Valium when I was there. I don’t know what she’s doing now; I’ve heard reports that she’s better now and, of course, she’s not working there so obviously she’s better. But she was really, really traumatized by what she saw every day. She was traumatized by the insensitivity to not just unborn babies’ lives, but to life in general. Because that’s how this clinic was run. It wasn’t good. It was hard to work there. It was hard to work for Curtis and Glenna, and it was hard to work in a place where there was no love, and there wasn’t any love. They’ll tell you that they’re doing this for the woman’s sake, and, you know, Curtis was involved in civil rights back when the black people received their liberation. He was all involved in that. But it’s a lie when they tell you that they’re doing it to help women, because they’re not. They’re doing it for the money.

Money was the big deal. We made a lot of money. Curtis and Glenna lived in a very nice home. They had another nice home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

They owned expensive things and lived like rich people do. They wanted to live that way and they weren’t embarrassed to live that way. They made all their money on abortions. When I worked there, they did abortions up to 19 weeks, and we had babies bigger than 19 weeks (in Texas at the time, you could only go to 24 weeks), Robert Crist would fly in and do our big, big babies on Saturdays once in a while when we could get him in there.

One of the most interesting things that happened when I worked there was that I was trained by a professional marketing director how to sell abortions over the telephone. This man came into our clinic and he took every one of our receptionists, all of the nurses, anyone who would be on the phone, and he took us through an extensive training period where we learned how to sell abortions over the telephone so that when the girl called, we hooked a sale so she wouldn’t go down the street and get an abortion somewhere else, and so that she wouldn’t adopt out her baby or so that she wouldn’t change her mind. We were doing it to get her money. It was for the money.

One of the things that our clinic was very afraid of was bad press. Glenna had nightmares, and it’s interesting to hear about these dreams because I’m going to tell you about my dream in a few minutes. But Glenna had nightmares. There was a woman who had died at our clinic from amniotic embolism of the brain…The woman who died in the abortion clinic caused a lot of press coverage in Dallas. They descended on that clinic. Glenna even gave a big speech at the National Abortion Federation meeting about it; how she worked it out in psychological terms, and how she was so traumatized by this, but how we all were, etc. It won her great acclaim. It in no way saved that woman’s life, and it didn’t do anything for that woman’s husband or her family which she left behind. I think that it’s time that we call it what it was. That woman was murdered, not just that baby. Amniotic embolisms can happen at any given moment, but it certainly wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t had the abortion.

I’m going to tell you some gory details that happened at the clinic that I remember specifically. There was a woman who came in the clinic who was forcing her daughter to have an abortion. This wasn’t uncommon at all; it happened all the time. Since I was on the front desk a lot of times, filling in for the receptionist, or if they were out sick, I got to see this firsthand. I wasn’t really as adept as some of the other girls because I wasn’t always up there. I was usually in the back typing, filling out papers, and basically paying the bills, doing the things that secretaries do.

This woman forced her daughter to come in there and she was a second trimester, probably about 15 weeks. They had inserted the laminaria the day before, and she was in there and quite miserable. The poor girl was really upset and she kept going to the bathroom, and obviously there was something wrong with her physically, and when she went into the bathroom the next time, all of a sudden she started screaming at the top of her lungs. “It’s a baby; it’s a baby; mama, mama, mama!” She was screaming in the middle of our clinic. So I’m freaking out and trying to figure out what’s going on. I called Holly, her counselor, and said, Holly, she’s aborted the baby in the bathroom and you need to get the doctor right now. Well, he was in a procedure and couldn’t come then. None of the nurses knew what to do, so they got her back there real quick and took care of her.

…..

You see, when the girls come into these clinics, they don’t know, nine times out of ten, what’s going to happen to them. They get a package deal–it’s like going to get your teeth fixed or something. This is what we’re going to do to you; it won’t hurt very much; it’s going to cost this–pay cash. They don’t tell you what the baby looks like; they don’t tell you how long it’s going to take; they don’t tell you it’s going to hurt. And it hurts; it’s a baby; and it’s a waste of your money.

One of the things that happened a lot of times is that women would be referred by their doctor because they didn’t want to have that particular baby. There was one woman who came in and she was pregnant with twins. She had a family; she was a normal person; she could have that baby; there was no problem having babies; she got pregnant on purpose but when she found out it was twins she decided to have an abortion because there were twins. She did it on purpose. Her doctor referred her to us because there was twins. So she came into the clinic and I remember when they took the little fetuses, the little babies, back to the lab room and they were looking at them. Everybody came in to look. I went in to look. I wanted to see what twin babies looked like.

That was really the first time I really looked at the babies. I had never really looked; I hadn’t been in the procedure room; I didn’t know. I knew what they said. Curtis made films and stuff, but I didn’t pay much attention to that because I wasn’t a doctor and I wasn’t a nurse. I was a secretary, and I kind of wanted to avoid thinking about those little babies. Because you see, in my heart, I knew they were babies, and I knew it was murder, and I knew it was wrong.

One thing that happened at the clinic that I worked at that was incredibly devastating, right before I left. Dr. Boyd had made an agreement with a doctor, and I cannot name this doctor because I just don’t think it would be wise to name him today, but he was the Director of Fetal Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at that time. He had made an agreement with this doctor to give him our large babies for him to do fetal research on. They did this, and I believe at the time, it was against the law. I don’t know if it is now, and I’m not familiar with the legal terms because I’m not a lawyer, but I remember we were told not to tell anyone, and they only came in secret to get the babies.

What happened in the clinic, though, was the thing that sort of made me start thinking about getting out of there. They brought their research assistant in because Curtis is so interested in technology and all these weird things he liked to do. He had them come in and they dissected a baby for us in our lab room so we could see what they were doing with the body parts. They did that right there and everybody filed in and looked. I looked at it. I pretended like I was being brave and walked out. It made me sick.

One of the things that happened as I worked at the clinic was that I became extremely depressed, extremely despondent, and basically hooked on drugs. I had done “fun” drugs before I started working at the clinic because, you know, when you’re that age, peer pressure, I thought it was fun and I enjoyed that. But when I worked there I had to take drugs to cope. I took drugs to wake up in the morning; I took speed while I was at work; and I smoked marijuana, drank lots of alcohol, and took anything else I could buy with the money that I made. This was a daily thing. I’m not talking about on weekends; I’m saying that this is the way that I coped with what I did. It was horrible to work there and there was no good in it.

In January, right before I left, I started having problems with my period, and I was on birth control pills and assumed that there was no way that I could get pregnant. Basically, what happened was that I developed amenorrhea, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was pregnant. Now this nurse who I worked with was just a regular nurse; she wasn’t an OB nurse; she wasn’t trained. And the nurses did ultrasounds on the large babies before the doctor did the procedure, and he would look at the picture, and they thought they knew what they were doing. They had no idea what they were doing. You have to be a technician to really run an ultrasound machine the way you’re supposed to. They had no training in ultrasound machines other than what Glenna Boyd taught them. That was it. Glenna Boyd isn’t even a doctor or a nurse. They did an ultrasound on me and did pregnancy tests and couldn’t find out what was wrong. They decided I was pregnant and they inserted a laminaria in me. I went home with a bottle of valiums; I had 10, 10 mg. valiums, and my husband now but who I was living with at the time, said that I took the whole bottle that night. I took them one at a time. I started at 5:00 in the morning and by the time I got back to the clinic the next morning at about 9:00 1 had taken the whole bottle and don’t remember that very well because after you take a couple you don’t remember things. I was in such severe pain I could not think. It was the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life, and only by the grace of God can I even tell you about it. I went into the clinic the next morning and at our clinic they used nitrous oxide, pericervical blocks, and Sublimaze, and that’s how they did the procedures. So they hooked me up to all this and my counselor was one of the girls I worked with and she was there to help me cope with this situation. They were going to do this abortion on me. They got in there and discovered that I wasn’t even pregnant in the first place. I was just totally baffled by all this. Why did they do this to me if I wasn’t pregnant? I worked for them; they ought to know better; how come this happened? Well, when I went home that day I was still in a lot of pain, so they referred me to the little doctor that they always have on call. I went to him and he told me I had a severe pelvic infection and couldn’t believe that they did this to me. He gave me some antibiotics and told me I would be all right.

I wasn’t satisfied with his answer so I went to my mother’s doctor, and he said the same thing, that basically they did a terrible thing; they made a big mistake; I wasn’t pregnant. Why did they do this? They couldn’t imagine why and I was really sick with this pelvic inflammatory disease. They gave me some more medicine. I took the medicine and got over that, but I took off work for six weeks. While I was off of work, they still paid me and they had to call me to get the directions on how to pay the salaries. I was the only one who knew how to fill out the checks and do all the accounting part of it.

It’s funny, because the girl who was the director of the clinic at that time, named Marty, is a Catholic. I was sort of baffled by her. She was an unusual person. She called on the phone and I told her that I never wanted to talk to her again. You did this to me and I wasn’t even pregnant. Don’t you know any better? What’s wrong with you? Why would you do this to me? She just said, calm down, it’s not the end of the world. I was still taking my illegal drugs and my legal drugs, trying to cope.

I finally got back to work, and while I was there, in the spring, Marty and I were there. I came in about 9:00 and there were fire trucks all around our clinic and I couldn’t imagine why. The funny thing is that we were struck by lightning. I am serious. It burnt out every major electric appliance, including the abortion machines.

After they did this abortion on me when I wasn’t pregnant and after we got struck by lightning, my husband (who wasn’t my husband then) a mathematician, decided to go back to college and get his Master’s Degree, and I praise God because he was willing to say, okay, we’re moving. I really wanted to get out of the clinic and I said, I’m getting out of the rat race. I hated living in Dallas.

There were a lot of medical things that they did that I don’t agree with. Like Dr. McMillan brought out, if they’re such good doctors, how come they don’t report their complications? How come they don’t turn it in to pathology? I moved to Nacagdoches, Texas and God put me where I went. I got a job at the hospital there, at Nacagdoches Memorial Hospital, praise God! It’s funny because I told them where I worked and I had this funny notion that good patient care was what I had seen. There wasn’t good patient care, but I thought it was, sort of, in my mind. I couldn’t justify what they did to me, but I thought this was just the way it was.”

Q. If a girl had a problem and came back what would happen?

A. That’s the saddest thing you could have asked. Basically, if there was something really serious they sent them to the little doctor on call. But other than that, they didn’t do anything, and they certainly didn’t do anything to help her emotionally or mentally. There weren’t many cases of that happening because most of the women, like has been said, wanted to forget it. They didn’t want you to know that they had had an abortion, and they weren’t about to do anything about it. I believe Curtis was involved in some sort of litigation where he was being sued for some sort of malpractice deal. I don’t know whatever came of that, but I do remember filing the papers for it. There were always instances where something could happen because it was bad medical care, especially at that clinic. It was pretty pathetic.

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Former Clinic Worker: Lorraine LaNeve

LaNeve gives her testimony:

“I started my job functioning in all the duties of a nurse. First, by preparing the clients in the waiting room by medicating them with Valium and then influencing my captive audience to write letters to the elected officials pleading that abortion should remain a woman’s right.

Then into the procedure room where I assisted the physician with the gory practice of killing the unborn child while demeaning the client. Upon completion of the procedure, I placed a sanitary napkin on the client and walked her to the recovery room where she sat in the chair, was given medication, and was timed to leave in approximately 40 minutes or sooner depending on the case load and the demand for the chair. As a surgical nurse I had the responsibility to prepare the room for the next client then take the fetal parts to the lab and check and count them. This was called a GROSS and afterwards I prepared them for disposal. I started working two days a week but became so engrossed with the feminist lie that abortion on demand was an entitlement, having been indoctrinated into my weakened psyche as “my body my choice”. I was sent to various seminars and conferences sponsored by NARAL, (The National Abortion Rights Action League) and NAF (National Abortion Federation).”

Soon afterwards. I graduated and added to my resume that of vigorously engaging in public relations with the help of the blossoming abortion industry. From there, I went on to lobbying elected officials in Washington and many states. I was sent to several states to set up new clinics and train personnel in the art of legally killing. Eventually I wound up with a full-time position in the management office in New York.

Having been employed in this malevolent industry for 5 1/2 years and sharing the responsibility to help to legitimize the abortion industry gives me the responsibility of bearing guilt for the deaths of many future citizens. We all are the losers because we will never know how greatly these murdered children would’ve contributed to the well-being of society.”

The full testimony can be found here.

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Former Clinic Worker:Jennifer Eastberg

Jennifer Eastberg, who worked at one of the biggest abortion clinics in the country, Lovejoy Surgicenter, testified before a committee in favor of a proposed law requiring parental notification of minor’s abortions. Eastberg, who has seen many young women come in for abortions at Lovejoy and who also has a degree in mental health, is uniquely qualified to know about minors and abortion. Here is her testimony:

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, for the record my name is Jennifer Eastberg. I am a LCSW, been have been in the mental health field over twelve years and I am currently in private practice.

I truly appreciate this opportunity to share my experiences and repeated observations which will illustrate why I am a strong proponent of this parental notification bill. Because feelings run so deep on both sides, it has become extremely difficult to have rational discussions regarding these issues. Assuming that helping and protecting women, especially adolescents, is the ultimate goal for all of us, then we must be willing to listen to each other.

I am a former employee of Lovejoy Surgicenter, one of, if not the largest, abortion facility in the Northwest. I came to Lovejoy after graduating from college and after years of exposure to numerous circumstances, through which I developed an intense feminist perspective. One particular, horrific experience during college, solidified this conviction. I was determined that no man, and especially the government, was ever, ever going to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my body!!! I was on a mission to do whatever I could, to change what I saw happening to women.

This is important for you to know, because when I say I’ve seen this issue from all sides, I really mean it. While working at Lovejoy, I was exposed to the truth – the grim realities of abortion – that broke through and shattered my belief that I was protecting and helping women. Over time, my conclusion was that I was not helping, but was actually participating in a deceptively, exploitive phenomenon of women today.

Let me qualify this statement, however. I am not implying some conspiracy against women is occurring in the abortion industry. I do believe that most people who work in the industry are genuinely caring, well-intended and genuinely committed individuals. My point is, however, as a front line mental health therapist, my original suspicions and conclusion about the short and long-term effects of abortion have been reconfirmed repeatedly. I continue to see an escalating number of women (especially adolescents) who are struggling with physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational repercussions of having an abortion. I don’t go looking for this stuff. On the contrary, this is an in-my-face reminder of the phenomenon I participated in, that has produced what I am now attempting to remedy.

No one told me to quit. There was no political change or religious conversion. I left the industry because of what I saw. I left because of the creeping realization to abortion’s insidious implications.

Let me address a few of the reasons why passing this bill is so important …. First of all, adolescents face much higher psychological risks than adult women tend to experience from receiving an abortion. To fully grasp the psychological and emotional implications of a young girl having an abortion, one must understand the specific developmental state the teen is working through. Adolescence is a time of intense change- a time of marked physical and internal development – internal development including emotional, intellectual, academic, social and psychological. It is also a time of massive cultural indoctrination. This cultural pressure comes from schools, magazines, music, television, advertisements, movies and peers. They are struggling with the critical challenge of forming their identity. They’re grappling with developing a healthy self-concept and of finding intrinsic value within themselves. Girls are making choices that will have implications for the rest of the lives.

Almost any references regarding adolescent development would include the emotional intensity and fluctuations of this stage. Given the likelihood of increasingly more volatile emotions, a major task is to gain an understanding and tolerance for one’s emotionality. This is a tremendous task in and of itself – not to mention superimposing a traumatic abortion experience onto this fragile period of development. Also, keep in mind, a child’s ability to process and integrate this experience is contingent on how successful she was in working through previous developmental tasks.

The probability of an adolescent internalizing feelings of guilt, shame, confusion and aloneness due to an abortion is overwhelmingly evident. In addition, many of these internalizations are left untouched, without any opportunity for appropriate intervention from family or professional counsel. This will likely lead to (at minimum) some degree of sadness and depression.

Other symptoms may include anger, flashbacks, delayed or long-term grief or anniversary reactions. They may experience memory repression, recurrent, intrusive distressing memories or dreams of the event. They may also struggle with feelings of detachment from others, difficulty keeping close relationships and even suicidal ideation and/or attempts. Pro-choice advocates often claim, as was stated in the April 16th hearing, that C. Everett Koop had issued a report there were no adverse psychological effects of abortion on women. This is simply not true! Dr. Koop stated after the report, that as a physician he knows abortions are dangerous to women’s mental health. What he said in the three page letter he sent to the president, was that the available studies were flawed because they did not examine the problem of the psychological consequences over a long enough period. Based on his own knowledge and personal experience, he said, any long-term studies will add more credibility to those people who say there are serious detrimental health effects of abortion. The realities often remain unnoticed by those not on the front lines.

It is also critical to consider that this adolescent girl will probably struggle with this experience in isolation. Our current laws contribute and actually sanction this. This isolation and secrecy lends credence to the adolescents’ feelings that they have done something wrong. Whether this comes from the mixed messages in society or from her intrinsic feelings about abortion – intervention must happen!!! I consistently hear, “I was all alone … I went through this all by myself … Telling a close friend or two didn’t even cut it … I can’t describe the loneliness I experienced.”

Without some help, ideally parental involvement, the loss of wholeness, self-confidence and self-direction can last well into adulthood. It is important to consider that adolescent’s surface behavior often conveys very little about the struggle within. In fact, these behaviors are often designed to obscure that struggle. Another statement made in the first round of testimony was that these PAS symptoms I just mentioned virtually do not exist. If there really isn’t the existence of PAS, then it would seem reasonable for the abortion industry to incorporate into their informed consent form, something like this: “In the event you experience at least three of these psychological symptoms within one to five or ten years of your abortion, then we will provide some type of appropriate professional counseling/intervention as needed.”

The schizophrenia about our current parental involvement laws has been presented repeatedly in the first Senate hearing. How can we expect any young girl, by herself, listening to adults who don’t even know her, make a good decision about this crisis?

Not to mention the likely possibility of not being fully informed about this procedure and without the guidance of parents who are generally far more sensitive to their child’s physical and emotional well-being. (Can you imagine your daughter, without your knowing, having a surgical procedure that even you may not be fully informed about?!)

These adults, of whom I used to be one, will talk to her for approximately 30-60 minutes prior to scheduling an abortion. In most cases which I observed, the adolescent will not meet the physician prior to the abortion. Most likely, the doctor will never have consulted with this child’s pediatrician – a standard and critical practice of performing good, quality medicine.

As our current laws reflect, we appear to understand how crucial parental involvement is in most areas of an adolescent’s life. Whether this child has shoplifted, received an M.I.P., skipped or is failing in school, has possession of a weapon or is dealing with a crisis pregnancy – in all these cases, we are talking about an adolescent in serious trouble. An adolescent in crisis. If we think about the need for parental involvement regarding abortion the same way we do with the other potentially damaging and destructive adolescent behaviors and activities just mentioned, then this bill would be a moot point- parents involvement would be an assumed expectation.

Conversely, if we are to follow the logic of our current abortion laws (not requiring parental involvement in adolescent antisocial behavior) then the absurdity becomes obvious. For example, the school would not contact you if your child had been absent for a week without your knowledge. The police would not notify you if your son or daughter had been arrested for burglarizing or driving while intoxicated. The legal right to secrecy regarding abortion reflects abortion is being treated as a unique circumstance of an adolescent in trouble/crisis. You can’t logically advocate this position without also including parental involvement in abortion issues as well. Parents who do not have sufficient information about their child cannot adequately know how to guide them.

Will there be parents who will potentially abuse their daughter as a result of finding out about this crisis pregnancy? Yes. (You can be sure, however, the abuse has gone on long before this crisis pregnancy.) Will a child experience more stress as a result of the parental involvement? Yes. However, the same reasons for which parents could be abusive in this abortion circumstance, are no different than how they could react to other adolescent troubles. I don’t deny the reality of increased stress a teenager would experience as a result of a parent knowing the truth. As I just mentioned, there are other situations that could create even more of a potentially abusive reaction from the parent finding out about the circumstances. Parents should have a negative reaction. However, they must intervene with love, adequate communication and, if need be, professional counsel.

Dr. Elizabeth Newhall testified that she had never seen nor heard of a death related to a safe and legal abortion. She had heard of two deaths as a result of parental involvement (parental notification laws). The death of Becky Bell and Spring Adams are horrible, tragic deaths.(Webmaster’s Note: The Becky Bell Story has been debunked- see article here- apparently Eastberg is not aware) They should have never happened! Neither should the deaths of hundreds of women who had safe and legal abortions (see here.) I have in my hand copies of numerous newspaper articles about women who have died from abortions. One death as a result of abortion is too many! It concerns me however, that apparently physicians aren’t aware of these deaths as well. This is crucial to know because this could provide the necessary opportunities, information for physicians to improve the quality of their medical procedures. Examining all these cases to understand what went wrong is good medical practice.

As was stated in the first round of testimony on April 16th, apparently 75% of adolescent girls do actually involve their parents. This was reported as the norm – which is great even if it was half that percentage. Therefore, we cannot allow the exceptions to this norm (the dysfunctional families) to dictate how we are going to shape/develop our laws. Laws need to be based on the norm of how families are supposed to function.

Because some parents are failing, are we going to maintain laws that can actually enable their dysfunction to continue? What brings dysfunctional families into counseling or to seek some appropriate type of intervention, is crises. It could be a crisis resulting from a mother’s alcoholism, a father’s unemployment, an acting out teenager or their daughter’s crisis pregnancy. The dysfunctional family needs to be given the opportunity to function as they should at least be given the chance to explore this crisis in an appropriate, safe forum. While the goal of not mandating parental involvement is to provide protection, this will most likely enable the dysfunction to continue. By not structuring abortion laws to be conducive to family or other appropriate involvement, we are also directly contributing to the potential impairment and fragility of the adolescent’s continued development.

There is so much more to be said that supports the passage of this bill. I do though, very much appreciate this opportunity to share my observations with you.

Credit: Eternal Perspectives Ministries Summer 1995 issue

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Former Clinic Worker: Joy Davis

Davis went from working at one abortion clinic to directing six clinics and eventually began to perform abortions without a license. She originally got into the abortion business to help women. Here is her story:

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“Fourteen years ago, I was offered a job in an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. I thought about the offer for some time and came to the conclusion that it was a good opportunity to help women and the money was real good (keep in mind I was a single parent of two children, Jeff and Allen). So I accepted the job.

A very short time after working there, I realized one thing — we were not there to help women. We were a business — a money-making organization….The conditions in the clinic that I worked at were very, very poor. We had no life support systems. Our people were not very well trained — most of them did not even have a medical background. The doctors rotated in and out. We never had the same doctor…

It was a real bad experience. But because the money was good and because I had two children to take care of, I put it all out of my mind. I didn’t let it make me feel guilty. I met a doctor at the clinic. His name was Tommy Tucker, and he came up to me one day and said that he wanted to open his own clinic. He said he wanted to do things right. He wanted to have the best equipment possible. He wanted to have highly trained and qualified people working at the clinic. He wanted to do general anesthesia and have anesthetists come in and put these women to sleep so they wouldn’t suffer, because in the clinic we worked at they did suffer a great deal.

I thought that this was a wonderful idea and I accepted Dr. Tucker’s offer. I became the regional director of six abortion clinics in Mississippi and Alabama. We had the best equipment, a highly trained, qualified staff, and we would only see a very few women a day because we didn’t want to rush them through like cattle. We wanted to take time and give them the kind of medical attention that they needed.

But we still lied to the women, it was just something we had to do to make money.

But that didn’t last long. After just a few months, his greed took over. He wasn’t making enough money, so the first thing to go was the anesthetist, because they made a lot of money. Through just the few months of watching them put patients to sleep, we started putting patients to sleep ourselves and we had no idea what we were doing. We just knew what we had seen them do, so we started doing it.

Then our registered nurses that worked in our recovery room were the next people to go. Then our lab technician and on and on.

I started interviewing people that had no medical background at all, bringing them in to do the job of anesthetist, lab technicians, nurses and even physicians. The people that I looked for when I was interviewing would always be one thing and that was a single mother. If they had a husband that made a good living, I wasn’t interested in them. I wanted the women that needed us and needed the money. That way I knew that I would have their loyalty and that they would stick with it no matter how tough it got. So I brought in people off the street with no medical background and trained them.

We were seeing approximately ten women a day in the clinics, but that wasn’t enough. We started seeing as many as we could get in every clinic.

The doctor’s schedule would start out in Birmingham, Alabama, on Monday morning. Monday afternoon he was in our clinic in Montgomery. Monday night he was in our clinic in Tuscaloosa. Tuesday morning he was back in the Birmingham office, then he would catch a plane, fly to South Haven, Mississippi. He would see patients there, then fly to our clinic in Jackson, Mississippi. And it would just keep going on and on.

We soon ran into another problem: there was not an airline fast enough or efficient enough to get the doctor to all of the clinics. So he trained me to be a physician.

I never spent the first day in medical school. I was just an ultrasound technician. I really knew nothing about medicine, other than what I had seen other doctors do, but

I started doing abortions. I started actually performing surgery on women. I did norplants, cryosurgery, pap smears, pelvic exams — anything he did, I did.

And I was real proud of that because I felt I did it better than he did. All of the employees would say, “Oh you need to see Dr. Davis today,” because they felt that I was better than he was. I never had any problem patients. I never put a woman in the hospital, and he was putting them in the hospital almost every month, in very critical condition — hysterectomies, retained tissue, everything that could go wrong with his patients, did go wrong.

So I really had a big head. I thought I was great, because I didn’t have those problems. I took my time and I gave all this love to those patients. So they really loved me. But the truth is, I wasn’t giving those patients love. I was risking their lives very negligently. Out of the thousands and thousands of patients we saw, I couldn’t remember one name or a face because they were just a number to me. I would refer to them by how much money they paid, “Oh, that’s a $400 case,” or “Oh, that’s a $5000 case.”

Then one day a young girl came to us for a late second trimester abortion. You see, we did pregnancies all the way up to term. We’ve terminated up to 38 weeks of pregnancy. And this young girl came to us and she wanted an abortion. She was a single mother, working, going to school and she found herself pregnant again. She was ashamed of what had happened to her and she did not want to tell her family or her friends that she was pregnant again. So she came to us. I evaluated her and realized that she was very sick. She was running a fever. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but one thing I did know was that she was not healthy enough to go through a late second trimester abortion.

So I turned her down. I told her that we couldn’t do it, that she needed to go to a hospital where they could take care of her and find out what was wrong with her. Dr. Tucker found out that I turned her down and came in and insisted that I put her through. He said she had paid an $1800 deposit and that he was not going to give her the money back.

I argued with him. I told him my reasons for turning her down, but it just wasn’t good enough. He insisted that I put her through.

Her procedure took two days and in those two days, I grew very close to her. Not because I really wanted to get to know her, but because I was mad at Dr. Tucker for overriding my decision. And I felt sorry for her. I found out that she was so much like me. She was struggling so hard, being a single parent, working a full-time job, going to school, trying so hard to make it in this life and she just couldn’t handle another child.

The doctor came in and did her abortion. I monitored on ultrasound while he was doing the abortion. And as soon as he was through he walked out of the room. She was still under general anesthesia, that a non-qualified person had administered As she started coming to, she started having difficulty breathing. Her blood pressure bottomed out. Everything was going wrong. I sent for the doctor to come back in the room. There was a lot of panic, a lot of confusion. We were running around, trying to resuscitate her, trying to do everything we could to stabilize her. And the other patients that were waiting to have abortions were in the very next room.

When the doctor walked in the room, he got angry, because we were making so much noise. He told me to get that patient out of the room and take her to the back recovery room so the other patients could not hear her or us.

I took her to the back recovery room. I stayed with her and did everything I could do to stabilize her, but then she started bleeding. She was bleeding uncontrollably, I couldn’t stop it. I ran back to the doctor and I said “You’ve got to help me. She’s bleeding and I don’t know what to do.” He said to take her to the examining room, examine her, find out why she’s bleeding and stop it. “It’s that simple.”

So I did. I took her to the examining room and tried to find out what was going wrong, but there was so much blood. I did everything I had been trained to do. I used petosin, petresin, I packed the uterus. I did everything that I knew to do, but she kept bleeding. I then called an ambulance so we could get her to the hospital and they could help her.

When the doctor found out that I called the ambulance, he was furious. He canceled the ambulance. He told me, “I’m the doctor here. I’ll make those decisions. We cannot send this patient to the hospital in this condition. They’ll hang us. Now try to stabilize her.”

And I did. I tried. At this point she couldn’t talk. She was in such serious condition that all she could do was just look at me with very frightened eyes — just look at me. And I tried so hard to help her. Blood was just pouring out of her like a faucet and I couldn’t stop it.

So I ran back to him and said, “Please help me. If you don’t help me she’s going to die.” He said, “Fine. Call the ambulance. I have a plane to catch.” And he left the building.

I called the ambulance. It took twenty minutes for them to get to the clinic. During that twenty minutes I realized that I was not a doctor and it scared me to death to realize that I was put in that position — that I let myself be put in that position — to try and save a life that I was not qualified to try and save.

The other thing that ran through my mind was the doctor. He was my hero. He brought me up from nothing to making approximately $100,000 a year and doing real well. But at that moment I finally saw him for who he really was. He was a coward and he had run out on a patient that needed him.

So they transported her to the hospital. I felt relieved that she was just gone and that the responsibility had been taken off of me. I then received a phone call from the hospital, which informed me that she had died. At that point I started having nightmares. Every time I would close my eyes I would see her face. The guilt and the anger that I was experiencing was overwhelming, it almost destroyed me.

The medical board then subpoenaed her records. Tucker went one step further and change her records to make it look like he was not as negligent as he really was. He gave me the original records and ordered me to go to the basement and burn them. He said, “We can’t go to court like this. They’ll hang us. We’ve got to cover this up. Go burn those records right now.”

I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t burn those records. I put them in my briefcase. I couldn’t lie for him on this one. I couldn’t cover for him any longer…I went to the medical board; I went to the D.A. — I turned over all the information of all the negligence that we had done. I turned myself in for practicing medicine without a license and gave them the proof that I was doing so.

They told me that they wanted me to stay employed with him. They wanted me to continue to gather information for them. They said they had a clear-cut case of negligent homicide, but they wanted more. So I continued to work for him and continued giving them information. But this kept going on and on, nothing was being done.

Then one day, Dr. Tucker came back to Alabama, where I was. He had been working in Mississippi. He said, “I had a real hard time in Mississippi, we had a problem and you need to go out and try to calm down the employees.”

I said, “What happened?”

He said, “There was a girl who came in for an abortion. I thought she was eighteen weeks. She ended up being closer to term. I inserted the laminaria and she went into labor. She went into labor and delivered a live, healthy baby.”

I said, “What did you do?”

He said, “What could I do? I killed the baby. But all the employees are really upset, so you need to go and take care of this.”

I caught a plane and went to Mississippi. But before I caught that plane, I called the District Attorney in Mississippi and told him what had happened. Before I could get to the clinic, he was there questioning the employees. The case went to the grand jury, but they couldn’t prove that Tucker had killed the baby, because they did not have a baby. The baby disappeared and they couldn’t prove it. So the case did not go on any further, even though the employees testified that it did happen. They still couldn’t prove the case.

I went back to the medical board in Alabama and I said, “Why aren’t you doing anything? Why haven’t you done something about the death of this girl?” They said abortion was a hot political issue and they really didn’t want to touch it…You see the abortionists don’t care about the women and they certainly don’t care about the baby. Women and babies are dying. Fr. Pavone showed me a list of women who had died in this country form abortions. And as I looked at that list, I couldn’t believe the names of hundreds of girls that have died.

And you know what I found right beside each name? It was a number. And that’s how we used to see them, as just numbers. The girl that died in our clinic. I will never, ever forget her. I’ll never forget her face, her smile. She was not a number. None of them are just numbers. I encourage you to get a copy of that list from Fr. Pavone and just read the names. And know that they were just like you and I.”

This is the story of just one abortion death due to negligence. There are many more. Read about a few here.

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Former Abortionist: McArthur Hill

Now I’m going to stand here and tell you that I am a murderer. I have taken the lives of innocent babies and I have ripped them from their mothers’ wombs with a powerful vacuum instrument. And when they were too big to do it in that way, I’ve injected a concentrated salt solution into the bag of waters to slowly and painfully poison them, and then to cause labor to follow.

This is how I got involved–and I want you to listen to this because this is how many people get involved. I began my residency in July 1971, and on July 7, 1971, one and one-half years before Roe v. Wade, I went into the operating room where my chief resident sat down on a stool, he performed an abortion, and then he said that I could do the next one–there were several lined up for that day. In medical circles that’s called “see one, do one, and teach one.” Simply stated, I’d seen one, I did one, and then I taught others to do them later.

After I performed the abortion, here are the words which I dictated, and this is what I want you to listen carefully to:

“The patient was prepped and draped in a sterile fashion in the dorsal lithotomy position with an IV with 15 units of pitocin and 1,000 ccs of dehydrogenase lactate running. Under satisfactory general anesthesia, the cervix was grasped with a thyroid clamp and dilated to a #10 hanks dilator. After sounding to a depth of 4 inches, a #10 curved curette was introduced into the uterine cavity and utilized to empty the uterine contents. Five units of pitocin were given IV at this time. A large, sharp curette was then introduced into the uterine cavity and the small amount of remaining tissue was curetted from the anterior uterine wall. The total fluid and tissue obtained was 125 ccs. Estimated blood loss for the procedure was 50 ccs with 200 ccs of dehydrogenase replacement. After insuring that there was adequate hemostasis on the cervix at the site of the thyroid clamp application, the anesthesia was terminated and the patient taken to the recovery room in satisfactory condition.” (End of Dictation)

In about as little time as it took to read this operative report to you, I had become a murderer….I did not consciously select the words I used in dictating the operative report, but my subconscious mind was obviously at work trying to protect my conscience mind through denial. As you were listening to what I said, you heard me say the words “uterine contents,” you heard me say the word “tissue,” “fluid and tissue,” and “procedure.” They are all words which denied what really happened that day.

The pathology specimen that we sent down was labeled, “Products, of Conception.” The operation performed was called a vacuum curettage. But on the operation request and report, under special circumstances, were found the words “living fetus.” The gymnastics which my mind performed that day in dictating that report could not totally erase the fact that something living was killed that day.

When I was in medical school, abortion was illegal; it was criminal; it was regarded as murder. I graduated from medical school in 1968, and we already had in 1968, however, the beginnings of the erosion of that Pro-Life ethic. In 1967, the State of Colorado passed a law which made it legal to perform an abortion under some circumstances. New York and California followed, and since I was in California during my training, abortion was legal under conditions which threatened the mother’s health, mental health and her life. In our institution there was actually some confusion about what steps we should take to justify the abortions, since we clearly had not come to the point of legally, at least, abortion on demand. So we sent some patients to the psychiatrist before they were aborted; some we did not. But we finally settled on a terminology which we put in the chart, and it went something like this: “Continuation of this pregnancy would be detrimental to the physical and emotional well being of this patient.”

In spite of these words, it was clear that most, if not all, of the abortions which we performed were done so that the patient’s life would not be interrupted by the pregnancy and delivery of a baby.

Early in my training I also had an experience in which I became acutely aware of the fact that there were a lot of patients who came in holding stuffed animals. I began to refer to this as the “teddy bear sign.” As these active-duty officers and active-duty enlisted, and dependent wives and dependent daughters would arrive at our hospital, not just a few of them, but many of them would be carrying some stuffed animal with them. It was not difficult for me to associate this with insecurity and immaturity on the part of these patients. This was in sharp contrast to the patients who were coming to the hospital for other types of surgery.

Another observation was that many of them came back for their second and their third abortions. I can stand here and tell you that during my time in training I never did encounter a true therapeutic abortion situation. One patient who had a therapeutic abortion for kidney disease was aborted at about 32 weeks. The baby weighed over 3 lbs. and even in that day would have had about a 70% chance for survival if the labor had simply been induced and abortion not performed.

In my training program we really made no attempt to counsel the patients concerning their abortions. Most of them had spent many hours and, in some cases, days being transported to the hospital. We limited our discussion with them to the medical aspects of the abortion procedure itself in order to obtain their consent. I recall one patient, however, who decided against having her abortion after she came. Somebody had talked her into having the abortion, and as we got her into surgery and the pentothal was injected, I was standing at the end of the table, and she raised her arm as she was going to sleep and waved it several times, and stated, I protest! At that point I ripped my gloves off, walked out of the room, and told them to wake her up. I wish I could stand here today and tell you that I decided to stop doing abortions in a single instant. But it didn’t happen that way. As you will see, my decision was, and perhaps still is, an evolving one, and we can get into a discussion about that. I did not feel right about doing abortions, but I made no effort to distinguish legal from moral at that time. My justification was that it was legal, the patients wanted it done, and they came from all over the world to Travis Air Force Base in California to have it done.

It was easy for us to do the first trimester abortions because we were using the same procedure that you use if you remove the placental tissue after a woman has a miscarriage. The vacuum machine is used, and the vacuum tubing empties into a tidy little cheesecloth sack. That little cheesecloth sack is about this big and in it are the products of conception. That’s what we called it. We sent those down to pathology.

In my second year of residency I spent two months on a pathology rotation, which is an interesting thing, and I had to come face-to-face with the contents of those sacks. We were studying the embryology of the ovary. I was in an obstetrical gynecology residency and we were obviously interested in the embryology of the ovary. I, personally, then had to search through the jumbled-up mass of tissue to find the fetal gonads, to be sure to include them on the slide so that we could study them. The jumbled-up mass of tissue was easily identifiable as the torn and shredded body of a tiny human being. It was very obvious when we viewed the slides that we were also studying the embryology of the testes, because half of the aborted fetuses were males….Even though these discoveries made me uncomfortable, I continued to do abortions. There were times when I personally sat there and opened up containers, five, six, seven containers at a time, and would open them up and stand and look at the [contents].

Many of them [abortionists] had nightmares about their participation in the abortions. In my nightmares I would deliver a healthy newborn baby and I would take that healthy newborn baby and I would hold it up, and I would face a jury of faceless people and ask them to tell me what to do with this baby. They would go thumbs-up or thumbs-down and if they made a thumbs-down indication then I was to drop the baby into a bucket of water which was present. I never did reach the point of dropping the baby into the bucket because I’d always wake up at that point. But it was clear to me then that there was something going on in my mind, subconsciously.

unbornbaby16w-01 — second trimester – 16 weeks

I actually stopped doing the second trimester abortions at that time. There was no great clamor about my refusing to do the abortions, but it was interesting to me that there was a subtle understanding that my actions were causing the other residents to do more than their share.”

******

Dr. Hill eventually stopped doing abortions due to the influence of his wife. He later became a Christian and joined the pro-life movement.

This was from a speech at a conference sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League

Please also visit the Pro-Life Action League’s abortion providers page for more info.

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Former Clinic Worker: Kathy Sparks

This is the speech Kathy Sparks gave at the convention “Meet the Abortion Providers.”

“Right after the birth of Shannon, [her daughter] I knew that I needed to go back to work. We were in very bad financial shape and one of the people who lived in the apartment downstairs worked at the abortion clinic on the other side. At this particular abortion clinic there are two sides: the OB/GYN side where women go in to have babies, and on the other side they abort them. Let me tell you, it is very contradictory. She told me that there was an opening for a medical assistant on the abortion side of the clinic down at Hope and suggested I go down and apply for the job. I thought about it and talked to Mike about it, and when I asked her how much money they paid, she told me it was excellent. I thought this was great; I’d be in the medical field; I didn’t necessary have to have my degree.

So I went down and had a very intense interview. Let me tell you, as all of the former abortionists will tell you, that they really want to make sure that you are pro-choice before they hire you, and I really was. I did not have to convince them; it was obvious. They did put me through a second interview, however; they wanted to make doubly sure that they were hiring someone who was pro-choice.

….

8weeks 0000 — eight week-old unborn baby

In the beginning, they trained me to answer the telephones and to make appointments…In this particular abortion clinic, when the girl set up her appointment, if the girl sounded even the least bit anxious to make the appointment for that day, they did not want her to have an opportunity to change her mind or to have someone talk her out of it, or the possibility of her going to another abortion clinic.

As you will see as I tell you about this clinic, I believe the love of money was the root of evil that happened at this particular abortion clinic (this is only my opinion).

We did between 40 and 60 a day at this one clinic; they were very busy and they did abortions approximately four days per week. We would just stay there late and work sometimes two hours overtime to get those extra girls in. Sometimes they were more than content to wait until the next day, or perhaps the next week; other times they had to have it done then, and, indeed, they would get their abortion that day.

So, I answered phones and set up trays in the morning. We would put the instruments in a big sterilizer and set them all up; about ten at a time; then we’d set more up.

Then I was trained to do all sorts of fun medical things, like take blood pressure. I just really loved it; I really liked it; I liked my job. I got to wear a white uniform. All the desires in my heart to be a nurse were being somewhat fulfilled, as evil as it was. I did not see how evil abortion was. It did not bother me at all. When I saw my first abortion procedure, I didn’t see it any differently than dissecting a frog in biology. I had blinders upon my eyes, as I believe many people involved in the abortion industry do. I believe that many of them, giving them the benefit of the doubt, didn’t really see the evil that they were partaking in.

In my opinion, the most important part of this particular abortion clinic was the counseling. I was able to sit in with one particular worker who had eight years of college; she was so very good. She could sit down with these girls during counseling and she could cry with them at the drop of a pin. She would immediately start drawing them out, asking them all kinds of good questions. She would find out what their pressure point was. What was driving them to want to abort that child, and whatever that pressure point was, she would magnify it. If it was the fact that her parents were going to “kill” her, and she didn’t know how she was going to be able to tell her parents; then the counselor would proceed by telling her, you don’t have to do this; that’s why abortion is here; we want to help you; this is the answer to your problems. Oftentimes, if it was money, she would tell them how much baby items cost. You know, it does cost $3,000 to have a baby now, and, you know, baby shoes are $28; sleepers are $15. You know, that’s what’s wonderful about abortion; we can take care of this problem and you don’t have to worry about it until you are financially prepared to have a child. So that’s what the counselors would do.

The counseling at this particular abortion clinic was so effective that 99 out of every 100 women would go ahead and abort. So that’s very effective counseling; a very important part of that abortion clinic.

After they were counseled, they were put back in the waiting area to wait for their turn to go and have the procedure.

I do want to interject here about sidewalk counseling because some people have talked about that. Dr. Hill said that he did not see picketers; we did have picketers. But back then, and this was ten years ago, we didn’t have very nice picketers. So I would like to share a little bit about what I believe might be a good and effective way to picket, because I believe picketing is very, very important; it’s essential; very important. The type of picketers we had did things like egg the cars and put garbage on the doorstep, and threw broken bottles in the parking lot. The people who worked inside the abortion clinic, as well as the women who were waiting to have the abortion, they all think they’re “nuts;” they think they’re “loony” because of this criminal damage they’re doing. A few times they would take a car key and scrape up the sides of the car; this was before they had security guards to protect the parking lot and all of our vehicles.

So I would suggest that is not a good form of picketing. It’s not very effective. At that time, abortion had only been legalized for approximately four or five years. It was relatively new and I think the Pro-Life Movement was just getting on its feet, and we didn’t hear a whole lot about the Pro-Lifers, other than the fact that they all thought that we were murderers. I’m just telling you how I felt about Pro-Life people back then.

After a while, I would sit in during the recovery room phase before I learned how to assist the doctor in the procedure room. The recovery room is an incredible place at this particular clinic. I don’t know how it is now, but back then they would do so many abortions. They had recliners, like most abortion clinics do, and some girls, if they were far along in their pregnancy, would be on a stretcher. But oftentimes, there were so many girls and not enough recliners that they would be sitting on the floor. After this medical procedure, here they are sitting on the floor with a blanket around them. They would be given a couple of cookies and perhaps a soda, and as soon as they were even somewhat ready, they were out the door because they had more patients to get through. It was really sad.

During that whole time, I didn’t think a thing about it. It didn’t bother me at all that they were sitting on the floor. We would keep moving out of the recliners and move more in, and just keep going.

I worked in the clean-up room, in my opinion the worst part of the clinic because it was so messy. You had to wear rubber gloves and it was like washing dishes. That’s where the babies were brought back. At the time I worked there, they only did first trimester abortions; they didn’t have facilities to do second trimester. But, oftentimes, second trimester abortions were performed and these babies we would not put in the little jar with the label to send off to the pathology lab. We would put them down a flushing toilet. They had a toilet that was mounted to the wall, and it was a continually flushing toilet; it didn’t have a lid or a handle. That’s where we would put these babies. They knew that they couldn’t turn them in or they were going to be found out that they were doing abortions which were too late term. This is what I participated in while I worked there

The ones that were small enough, which would be 12-13 weeks or less, we would put in a jar, label them, and put them in a big box to go off to the pathology lab. I want to share this with you that this is the type of person that I was. As far as moral convictions, I might have had them way earlier in my life, maybe at 17 or 18. But here I was, 21 years old, and very much into the world. I did drugs, I drank; I was just a very, very bad sinner. When the babies would be put in the jars, we would hold them up and kind of twirl them around and look at the little arm and little leg float up, and we’d put them back in the box. As sick as that sounds, that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is at a lot of places right now.

I think that there are two sets of people in these abortion clinics. We have the ones who have been there for a long time, since the first day, and they’re more like Dr. Brewer in the fact that they’ve just become hardened. After a while it doesn’t bother them at all. Then we have the other set who don’t stay there very long, and that was me. They stay for three or four months, and they can’t take it any more and they have to get away. That was basically the two types of people that I came in contact with during my short stay at that abortion clinic.

Then, of course, I worked the procedure room where we assisted the doctors. We handed them their instruments, took the blood pressure, made sure that the girl was okay. They did have two registered nurses on staff there that would administer a drug called Sublimaze, which was kind of like a relaxing drug. This drug was given to the girls who were farther along, 12, 13, 14 and farther to help her become relaxed. But, oftentimes, it didn’t really help. A lot of times people think that these girls are put to sleep. I’ve never seen an abortion where the girl was put to sleep. I do know that they do take place, of course, but not at this particular abortion clinic.”

******

Sparks then describes how miserable she was, how she became suicidal, and how she went on to have a religious conversion.

******

The next day I went into the abortion clinic. It was so completely different than the very day before. It was freezing cold. I could not get warm. I was chilled all the way down to my bones. I just couldn’t get warm. I had a sweater on, and it was incredible because no one else seemed to notice. There was a smell, a stench in the air that I couldn’t get away from. I kept breathing it and breathing it and it was making me nauseous. One of the first abortions done that day was on a woman who was 23 weeks pregnant. This woman should have had a saline or a laminaria abortion, or even a hysterectomy. Anything would have been better than to try to do a D&C on a woman who was that far along.

z22to24wk4 (2) — 22 to 24 weeks sonogram

You have to realize that in this particular abortion clinic, what would be done was she would be examined one side; a pelvic exam by one doctor; then she’d come over and go through all the blood work and sign a release paper, etc. Then, by the time it was time for her abortion, she would be examined a second time. So we’re talking about two different doctors doing a pelvic exam who knew this lady was farther than certainly 12 weeks along. She lay on the table. She was a regular-built person, and she had a belly. And I thought, no way! That couldn’t be the baby! So the doctor did the pelvic and sat down on his chair and mouths up to me, “very big.” I’m thinking, very big, what are you going to do this for? I was trembling and getting a little bit nervous. But he began the procedure. He started to dilate her with the dilating rods and the water broke. He began to do a procedure that normally would take five to eight minutes, and we were in there for an hour. This woman was in so much pain, she was coming off the table. Every medical assistant and nurse was in that room. The nurse had to give her three doses of Sublimaze to try to calm her down. She was screaming; the nurse was yelling at her because everybody else was getting quite upset in the waiting area, as you can imagine, from this woman who was screaming. The doctor was trying to do the abortion, and the baby’s bones were far too developed to rip them up with this curette, and so he had to try to pull the baby out with forceps, which he brought out three or four major pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned and scraped and suctioned. There this little baby boy was laying on the tray. I took the baby and I took him to the clean-up room, and I set him down, and I began weeping, uncontrollably sobbing for what I had been a part of because God showed me that was a baby, they were all babies, and I had been a part of murdering probably nearly 1,000 babies, and I cried and cried. His little face was perfectly formed, just like the sign you saw, perfectly formed; little eyes were closed, little ears and everything was perfect about this little boy.

unbornbaby20w-01 — unborn baby at 20 weeks

So the recovery nurse was wondering what was taking me so long and she walked in and looked at me. She left, didn’t say a word, shut the door, and went and got the director of the abortion clinic. This woman walked in, shut the door behind her, put her hands on my shoulders and grabbed me. She began to rebuke me; pull yourself together; you’re a professional. She shook me. I was a limp rag and crying and crying, this baby was 23 weeks. The doctor himself had told me how far along she was. She said, when did you get your medical degree? She took the baby boy over the toilet and put him down the toilet. I was crying and crying. Finally, when she was finished, I told her I couldn’t work procedure anymore, that I’d stay in cleanup. She said, fine. We worked it out and the other girls went in to work procedure for the rest of the day.

That night I went home and I told Mike about the entire experience. I said, Mike, I don’t know what to do. We had thousands of dollars worth of debt. We had all the debts from his first marriage, a new baby, so much financial debt. And at the time we were such new believers in Christ that we didn’t know that He was our God who would provide every need according to His riches and glory. We didn’t know that yet. Apparently, Mike must have skimmed over that in the Bible, we didn’t know that yet. He said, let’s just pray about it. Okay, Mike, let’s pray. He went to work that night and I lit two candles at the side of my bed and sat down and prayed a very childlike prayer: Lord, if you want me out, just speak to me, and if I know it’s going to be okay, I’ll leave, Lord. I will leave. Just tell me.

I went to sleep that night, got up, and went to the abortion clinic the next morning and experienced the same smell, the same cold chills. I worked the cleanup room and at 10:00 in the morning, the director, the same lady who rebuked me the very day before, walked in and closed the door behind her. Only this time, she’s very bothered. She’s very troubled. “Kathy, I had a dream last night and it was so real that I don’t know if I dreamed it or if you told me this, or what.” I’m kind of looking at her and said, “What did you dream?” She said, “I dreamed that you walked into my office and you told me that you had to quit this place because of your religion!” I had not told a single person that I had made a commitment to the Lord. You know how you have to grow in that before you tell anybody, and I just didn’t tell anybody yet. So I knew that God had given her a dream to come in and tell me to get out. So I told her, “You did have a dream; I did not tell you that, but I am going to quit. I do have to leave, and it is because of my religion. What you’re doing here is wrong and I must leave.” She left then. She thought I had lost my marbles the day before and now I was crying.

It’s amazing how Satan works, because if you don’t think he’s real, he sure is. She walked in later on that day and offered me $2.50 an hour more to stay and work tubal ligations. She said, “Certainly birth control isn’t against your religion.” I said, “Well birth control might not be against my religion, but this place is. I’ve got to leave. So I quit.”

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Former Clinic Worker: Jewels Green

Like many who work in abortion clinics, Jewels Green had an abortion herself, which had led to emotional trauma, including suicidal feelings and a psychiatric hospitalization. She worked in the abortion industry for five years, witnessing the aftermath of many abortions, before leaving her job.

Recently, she began speaking out about her experiences in the clinic. She says that a kind of “gallows humor” pervaded the clinic, in which the workers made jokes about the dead bodies of the babies they saw and the other distasteful aspects of abortion. For example:

“I vividly remember the cleaning lady who quit after finding a foot in the drain of the one of the sinks in the autoclave room (where the medical instruments were cleaned and sterilized after abortions) and how we all laughed and joked about it in the staff lounge for days and weeks afterward…”

She goes on to mention:

“But one thing about the clinic never sat well with me, and maybe this is because in my heart I always knew it was wrong. All of it was wrong. Especially this: the dead baby in the refrigerator in the lab. It was touted as a “teaching tool” and a “medical anomaly that this perfect 10-week-old fetus “survived” the suction abortion procedure perfectly intact. So he (I thought I could tell it was a he) was given the dubious honor of being preserved in formalin in a translucent plastic jar in the laboratory refrigerator. I think we called him Charlie, but I can’t really remember…. Occasionally I peeked in on him, fascinated by the bizarreness of it all, but also with a scientific curiosity—every other abortion resulted in parts, bits and pieces of human in the jar—but this miraculous little creature was perfectly formed and complete in every way, with the heartbreaking exception that he was dead. There was no amniotic sac, no placenta, just teeny-tiny perfect little baby. Floating in the jar. In the fridge. Forever silent witness to the march of death of his immature brethren. How I now pray his soul rests in peace, and that someday he is given decent burial—or at the very least tossed out with the rest of the bio-hazardous waste—for that would be far more merciful than where I knew him to be.”

10 weeks — 10 week-old unborn baby – from a miscarriage

She also says of the abortions she participated

“Abortion ends life. Period. This is not in question nor should it be. This is a fundamental truth. I worked in the autoclave room where the “products of conception” (as so many pro-choice proponents—and abortion clinic counselors—call the fetus and placenta) were rearranged and counted to make sure “we got everything.”…. For abortions from about 8 1/2 – 12 weeks, this meant counting hands and feet, making sure the spine and ribcage and skull were present, you get the idea. For the abortions where the gestational age of the fetus was in question, especially if there was a chance it was an “oops,” meaning a pregnancy terminated beyond the clinic’s legal limit of 14 weeks LMP (from last menstrual period), the feet were measured to determine a more accurate gestational age.

14 week sonogram

Working in the autoclave room was never, ever easy. I saw my lost child in every jar of aborted baby parts. One night after working autoclave my nightmares about dead babies were so gruesome and terrifying and intense I met with the clinic’s director to talk about my feelings.

She was very understanding, open and honest, and painfully forthright when she told me, “What we do here is end a life. Pure and simple. There is no disputing this fact. You need to be OK with this to work here.” After a few days rotated out of the autoclave room, I felt I was OK with this, and God help me, I went back.”

Green eventually did leave and is now a pro-life activist.

Sources:

“Former abortion clinic worker breaks silence, speaks out for life” BY KRISTEN WALKER Lifesitenews.com Thu Jul 21, 2011

“ Laughing at the baby’s foot in the sink: for us abortion clinic workers, the macabre was the normBY JEWELS GREEN LifeSiteNews.com Thu Sep 08, 2011

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Well Known Abortionist Discusses Abortions To Save a Woman’s Life

Abortionist Don Sloan, who has performed abortions for decades, says that a situation where the mother’s life is endangered by her pregnancy is extremely rare:

“If a woman with a serious illness- heart disease, say, or diabetes- gets pregnant, the abortion procedure may be as dangerous for her as going through pregnancy … with diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, even breast cancer, the chance that pregnancy will make the disease worse is no greater that the chance that the disease will either stay the same or improve. And medical technology has advanced to a point where even women with diabetes and kidney disease can be seen through a pregnancy safely by a doctor who knows what he’s doing. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s time….The idea of abortion to save the mothers’ life is something that people cling to because it sounds noble and pure- but medically speaking, it probably doesn’t exist. It’s a real stretch of our thinking.”

Don Sloan, M.D. and Paula Hartz. Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma. New York: International Publishers 2002 P 45-46

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Abortion Unnecessary to Save a Woman’s Life

An American medical journal, after polling 40,000 American physicians about abortion in 1967 quoted Dr. David Decker of the Mayo Clinic saying that there were “few, if any, absolute medical indications for therapeutic abortion in the present state of medicine.”

“Abortion: the Doctors Dilemma” Modern Medicine 35 no. 9 (24 April 1967): 14 – 16.

know how much science and medicine have advanced since 1967, over 40 years ago

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American Medical Association (1971) On Abortion to Save a Woman’s Life

The following was said at an American Medical Association meeting way back in 1971. Keep in mind how much medicine has advanced in the past 40 years.

“Few abortions need to be performed [due to] organic disease in a well conducted contemporary practice if the traditional demand of hazard to life is followed. Cardiovascular disease, for example, has long been known to increase the risk of maternal health during pregnancy. Yet recent research has shown that nearly every pregnancy of a cardiac patient can be completed successfully with little risk of maternal health… A small number of pregnant patients with severe renal disease and decompensating renal failure seem truly threatened by pregnancy. Even in this instance, however, heroic measure such as the use of a dialysis unit may see these women through severe life-threatening episodes…Neurologic disease is an occasional indication for abortion. The patient with multiple sclerosis, for example, sometimes is, indeed, made worse by pregnancy. The effect in this instance is unpredictable, however, and the condition of some patients actually improves. The effect of pregnancy on epilepsy is equally uncertain pregnancy itself does not increase the risk of death for the pregnant women… Tuberculosis accounts for nearly all of the pulmonary conditions thought to indicate therapeutic abortion. But with the advance of drug therapy, abortion really seems necessary for this disease… Malignancy is occasionally an indication for legal abortion. There is little convincing evidence, however, that pregnancy in any way adversely affects the outcome of neoplastic disease. Even with cancers known to be endocrine dependent, such as cancer of the breast, the survival seems unaffected by pregnancy interruption.”

K. R. Niswander, “Indications and Contraindications,” Highlights from the 1971 AMA meeting in Abortion – a Legal Fact, Audio Digest, Obstetrics and Gynecology 17 (3 August 1971) quoted in Thomas W Hilgers and Dennis J Horan, editors Abortion and Social Justice (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1972) P 38 – 39 Also quoted in James Tunstead Burtechaell, C.S.C. Rachel Weeping: the Case against Abortion (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982)

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