Clinic Workers Who No Longer do Abortions

Sonogram at 10 weeks

Abortion Doctors and Clinic Workers Who Quit

This section contains quotes and excerpts from interviews with former abortion clinic workers. They tell what they saw in their profession.

"I can remember...the resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube, and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and to see what was inside. I didn't have any views on abortion; I was in a training program, and this was a brand new experience. I was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I opened the jar and took the little piece of stockingnette stocking and opened the little bag. The resident doctor said "Now put it on the blue towel and check it out. We want to see if we got it all.' I thought, "that'll be exciting-hands on experience looking at tissue.' I opened the sock up and put it on the towel, and there were parts of a person in there. I had taken anatomy, I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a a leg, and a tiny hand and an arm, and you know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I had a conscience, and it hurt. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head and so forth, and I turned and said "I guess you got it all.' That was a very hard experience to go through emotionally.

"I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterotomy. I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes, as the cesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the water. The thought came to me, "My God, that's a person" Then he broke the water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just like when I saw that first suction abortion. And then he delivered the baby,. and I couldn't touch it.. I wasn't much of an assistant. I just stood there, and the reality of what was doing on finally began to seep into my calloused brain and heart. They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking, and set it on that table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. Every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person moving in that bowl. And it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at the baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart was beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was." --Dr. David Brewer

'Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet" by David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in Oct "New Dimensions" magazine

"I got to where I couldn't stand to look at the little bodies anymore" --Dr. Beverly McMillan, when asked why she stopped performing abortions.

"I have been there, and I have seen these totally formed babies as early as ten weeks... with the leg missing, or with their head off. I have seen the little rib cages..." --Debra Harry

"We all wish it were formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional pain." --abortion clinic worker

Quoted in "The Ex Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 p a 21

"I was for abortion, I thought it was a woman's right to terminate pregnancy she did not want. Now I'm not so sure. I am a student nurse nearing the end of my OB-GYN rotation at a major metropolitan hospital and teaching center. It wasn't until I saw what abortion really involves that I changed my mind. After the first week in the abortion clinic several people in my clinical group were shaky about their previously positive feelings about abortion. This new attitude resulted from our actually seeing a Prostaglandin abortion, one similar in nature to the widely used saline abortion. . . this method is being used for terminations of pregnancies of sixteen weeks and over. I used to find rationales. the fetus isn't real. Abdomens aren't really very swollen. It isn't 'alive.' No more excuses...I am a member of the health profession and members of my class are now ambivalent about abortion. I now know a great deal more about what is involved in the issue. Women should perceive fully what abortion is; how destructive an act it is both for themselves and their unborn child. Whatever psychological coping mechanisms are employed during the process, the sight of a fetus in a hospital bedpan remains the final statement." Quoted in "The Zero People: Essays on Life" by Jeff Lane Hensley, editor. Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1983

From Norma McCorvey's book Won By Love:

At least 80 percent of the women would try to look down at the end of the table, wondering if they cold see anything which is why our doctor always went in with the scalpel first. Once the baby was already cut up, there was nothing but blood and torn up tissue for the woman to see. When a later abortion was performed, workers had to piece the baby back together, and every major part--head, torso, two legs, and two arms --had to be accounted for. One of our little jokes at the clinic was, "If you ever want to humble a doctor, hide a leg so he thinks he has to go back in." Please understand, these were not abnormal, uncaring women working with me at the clinic. We were just involved in a bloody, dehumanizing business, all of us for our own reasons. Whether we were justifying our past advocacy(as I was), justifying a previous abortion (as many were) or whatever, we were just trying to cope--and if we couldn’t laugh at what was going on, I think our minds would have snapped. It's not an easy trying to confuse a conscience that will not stay dead.

"I wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion...My attention was so focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?"

--former abortionist Dr. McMillan "How One Doctor Changed Her Mind About Abortion" Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs

From World magazine August 1995:

"You would just look in the buckets and see arms and legs. I have horrible dreams about that now. It was something you would see in a scary movie." --Former clinic worker Kirsten Breedlove

"Another thing that bothered me as I went about my work at the clinic was the fact that I had seen an ultrasound abortion. We did first trimester abortions. This was a late first trimester, probably second trimester. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen the Silent Scream a number of times, but it didnt effect me. To me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I couldnt deny what I saw on the screen." --Joan Appleton, former clinic worker

"I walked in the laboratory every day. I saw dead babies every day for three years. If I could see fifty, I was so happy. Because, you know what? That meant I was really gonna have a good bonus in my paycheck." ---Clinic worker Hellen Pendley. Quoted by Mary Meeham in "The Ex-Abortionists: Why They Quit" in The Human Life Review

"...I was challenged on numerous occasions by pro-life Christians who tried to convince me that what I was doing was wrong. By then I had convinced myself that abortions were going to happen whether I did them or not and that I genuinely cared about those women what they were going through. I was so blinded by Satan and his lies that I could do mid trimester procedures and carefully count body parts and never think about the baby that might have been. The fact that I was able to do this seems impossible to me now...It was not until I was pregnant myself that I began to really examine my feelings about the moral aspects of abortion. It had taken me over a year to become pregnant with my daughter. The first time I saw the tiny little flicker of her heartbeat on an ultrasound screen I fell completely in love with her. I finally had to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that made my daughter any different than all those tiny babies I had terminated was the fact that I wanted her. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I was at last able to see what I had not allowed myself to see in all those years of doing terminations..." --Dr. Yvonne Frank Sims, former abortionist.

Hand of unborn at 12 weeks.

"Following [the doctor's] directions, I took the collection bottle and poured its contents into a shallow pan. Then I used water to rinse off the blood and smaller particles which clouded the bottom of the pan. 'Now look closely,' the doctor said. 'It is important that we have got all the stuff out.' I looked in the pan to find that the stuff consisted of the remains of what had been, a few minutes before, a thirteen week old fetus. I could make out the remains of arms and legs and a trunk and a skull. I tried to piece them back together in my mind, to see if there were any missing parts. Most of the pieces were so battered and bloody they were not recognizably human. Then my eyes locked upon a perfect little hand, less than half a centimeter long. I stared at four tiny fingers and a tiny opposed thumb, complete with tiny translucent fingers. And I knew what I had done." --former abortionist "Chi An" quoted in Stephen Mosher's "A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One Child Policy" pgs 60-61

"I found much distress in the clinic, but it involved not only the women. I saw the pain of the babies who were born burned from the saline solution used for late-term abortions. I saw the bits of feet, bits of hands, the mangled heads and bodies of the little people. I saw pain and felt pain." --One time clinic worker Paula Sutcliffe in "Precious in My Sight" "Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices" Gail Garnier-Sweet, editor

"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide."

--Luhra Tivis on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"

From the "Meet the Abortion Providers" workshop sponsored by the Pro-life Action League of Chicago:

From the Testimony of Carol Everett, former abortion clinic owner and worker

"I have seen doctors walk out after three hours work and split $4,500 between them on a Saturday morning. More, if you go longer into the day, of course. The doctor walks in, sees the patient for the first time, pats her on the leg, says, Hi, baby, how are you? You call them 'baby' so you don't have to remember their name....And he doesn't really ask her any questions. It's just get the abortion done. If he discovers that she may be further along than anyone thought she was, they stop right there, collect the money, and then finish the procedure...If abortion is such a good thing, why don't they go ahead and do the abortion then, and trust you to pay the extra $200 when they're finished? That's not the way it is."

"I've never been able to come up with the words to describe the abortion procedure, because, you see, you're educating people about abortion. You know more about it than the average person. However, no matter how bad you think abortion is, there are no words to describe how bad it really is. It kills the baby. And, yes, I've seen sonograms with the baby pulling away from the instruments that are introduced into the vagina. And the woman, the mother is hurt if she doesn't have the money to be put to sleep..."

From the Testimony of Dr. McArthur Hill, former abortion provider

"The vacuum machine is used [for first trimester abortions] and the vacuum tubing empties into a tiny 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 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....half of the aborted fetuses were males...Even 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.]"

From the Testimony of Dr. Anthony Levantino, former abortion provider

"Along the way you find out you make a lot of money doing abortions...I'll give you an example. When I am going to deliver a baby, I'm going to have that woman in my office for seven to eight months; she will have unlimited office visits. I get calls all hours of the day and night. More often than not, I'm getting up in the middle of the night. In Eastern New York, I can tell yhou, at this time of year, it's not a particularly fun thing to do: to go out in a blizzard and drive to the hospital, sit by a bedside for hours watching somebody in labor, accomplishing the delivery, hoping to God that everything works out well, as it usually does. And then following her afterwards; follow-up visits in the office. Then you wait and youi expect that everything's over. Usually it is over, but sometimes its not. Six or seven years later you suddenly get a request from a lawyer that they want the medical records because the baby has a problem of some sort. That doesn't mean you're responsible, but this nation is set up in such a way that families, if they have a deformed or an unhealthy child for any reason, and healthcare costs being what they are...You have no recourse; you have no source of funds other than going back and suing the people who did the delivery in the first place......Or, I can do an abortion. I can work in an abortion clinic. I work 9 to 5; I'm never bothered at night; I never have to go out on weekends; I more money than my obstetrician brethren. And I don't have to face the liability. That's a big factor, a huge perk."

"In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 for an abortion, and it was cash. That's the only time as a doctor you can say, either pay me up front or I'm not going to take care of you. It's totally elective....Either you have the money or you don't. And they get it."

"I had complications, just like everybody else. I have perforated uteruses. I have had all kinds of problems --bleeding, infections-- Lord knows how many of those women are sterile now. I remember getting called down to my chairman's office because a young lady that I had done an abortion on showed up...and the abortion had been incomplete. I had not done my job right, and she passed an arm or a leg and she freaked out because she didn't realize what happened."

Read Dr.Levantino's description of a D & E abortion.

From the Testimony of Kathy Sparks, former clinic worker

"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...That's where the babies were brought back. At the time I worked there, they only did first trimester abortions; they didn't have the facilities to do second trimester abortions. 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 those babies. They knew they couldn't turn them in or they were going to be found out that they were doing abortions which were too late term...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...When the babies wouild be put in the jars, we wouild 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."

"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 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. You have to realize that in this particular abortion clinic, what would be done was that 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....This woman was in so much pain, she was coming off the table. Every medical assistant and nurse was in that room...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 and pull the baby out with forceps, which he brought out in 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...His little face was perfectly formed....everything was perfect about this little boy."

This is Kelly, born premature at 21 weeks

From the Testimony of Deborah Henry, former clinic worker

"One of the girls called me into the lab as she was cleaning up, and on the end of the cannula, which was the instrument at the end of the hose, was a little baby's foot. It was about half an inch long. This foot was perfectly formed. I couldn't believe it. I was so amazed at the sight of it. It was all black and blue...The baby's body was completely ripped apart because of the abortion."

"I know that the Lord has forgiven me, but I can never erase those things from my mind. The sounds of those bones breaking. The sight of those babies...You tell me that this baby doesn't feel anything. I will tell you differently."

"I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I have in fact presided over 60,000 deaths. There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy" --Dr. Bernard Nathanson, "Deeper Into Abortion" New England Journal of Medicine Nov 1974

14 week unborn

In an interview by Mark Crutcher, former abortion clinic director Joy Davis said

"Each person who worked there had a different way of dealing with it. [One] would look at the ultrasound the entire time she was in the room, but she would never look down in the pan. She would never look at the tissue being removed. She never wanted to see that. She would never take her eyes off the screen. And I had one who would never look at the screen....she would never look at the tissue and never look at the screen, she just didn't want to see anything."

From a 1993 Chicago conference: "Planned Parenthood is set up so clinic workers never have to see the babies. It's set up that way because having to look at the babies bothers the workers. ...Generally there is one clinic worker in charge of the babies...I was that clinic worker. I had to look at the babies. I had to store them, I had to send them to pathology. And I was the person who had to dispose of them.....in order to maintain my sanity, I established a personal mourning ritual. I said Shiva for the babies. I said prayers for the dead. I also named the babies as I put them in a waste container."

"I hated putting babies in strainers and rinsing them off and putting them in zip-lock bags." --former abortion clinic owner Eric Harrah

By Dr. Arnold Halpern, former director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic "There is no difference between a first trimester, a second trimester, a third trimester abortion or infanticide. It's all the same human being in different stages of development. I finally got to the point I couldn't look at those little bodies anymore."

My official title at the mill was "health worker." I did various duties-lab work, leading groups (deceiving women about their abortions), "advocating" (deceiving women during their abortions), and assisting the abortionist, which included helping during the abortion and checking to make sure all the parts of the baby were there in the collection jar afterwards. I will never forget, in the second-trimester abortions, holding those little feet up to a chart on the wall to make sure of the age of the baby. --- Dina Madsen

My 23rd abortion changed my mind about doing abortions forever. This patient was a little overweight and ultimately proved to be a little farther along than anticipated. This was not an uncommon mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age. Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water broke, but then nothing more would come out. When I withdrew the curette, I saw that it was plugged up with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and used ring forceps to dismember the 13 or 14 week size baby. Inside the remains of the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally able to remove the head and looked squarely into the face of a human being -- a human being that I had just killed. -Dr. Paul Jarrett

"I saw a little foot—caught in the end of the suction tube."

--Nurse who had helped in a number of suction abortions, after viewing the aftermath of one for the first time. From the article "Even Abortionists are Having Second Thoughts" in "Human Events" April 12, 1980, written by Thomas Gulick.

Quoted from the woman.com message board:

When I first started out nursing in the late 70's I was working for the Ob/Gyn physicians in this hospital. My duties were not only to care for those that were in for abortions, I also cared for the older folks having hysterectomies and so forth. I didn't have a personal opinion on abortion until I saw how many were done and for the multitude of ridiculous reasons. Not to mention the actual procedure itself and the "aftermath". It wasn't until a few years afterwards that I started to feel this wasn't right. That is when I transferred to a different department and hospital completely. . . Plus you must understand, I worked for a hospital smack dab in the middle of NYC, I got to know some of the girls getting these abortions on a first name basis, since they had them so often. That really got under my skin, seeing these girls using it as a birth control measure. And why shouldn't they? The state paid for it anyway! Just not right!

"Tearing a developed fetus apart, limb by limb, is an act of depravity that society should not permit. We cannot afford such a devaluation of human life, nor the desensitization of medical personnel it requires."

--George Flesh, "Why I No Longer Do Abortions" Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1991: B7.

Joyce Craig, director of a Brooklyn clinic of Planned Parenthood, worked in surgery assisting in late abortions for two months, then quit. She said, "The doctors would remove the fetus while performing hysterotomies and then lay it on the table, where it would squirm until it died. One Catholic doctor would call for sterile water every time he performed a hysterotomy and baptize them then and there. They all had perfect forms and shapes. I couldn't take it. No nurse could."

And one man's story....

The Day I Became Pro-Life Source: New Man Magazine; October 30, 2002 By Don Haines

"Don, I want you to go down to Ob-Gyn this morning. They're doing an abortion and I want you to see it."

My first thought after getting these directions from my nursing instructor was, Why me? I could remember asking previously to be present at a live birth if the opportunity presented itself, but I had no desire to see an abortion. But I went. I was in my final semester of nursing school. It had been a long grind. I wasn't going to make any waves at that point.

It was 1975 and I was not the fervent pro-lifer that I am today. Fact was, I hadn't given the subject of abortion much thought. Looking back, it seems inconceivable that I, a conservative Christian, would be so unconcerned. Was my attitude sexist? Did I view abortion as a "woman problem" that had nothing to do with me?

Perhaps. But I do know this: What I saw that day has stayed with me 23 years, and will stay with me until I go to my grave.

One scene in particular is as vivid today as on that May morning in 1975. It is with me always, both on a conscious level and in my dreams: a little hand...a little rib cage.

"We've given her a general [anesthetic]. She's about 11 weeks, so a dilatation and suction will be all that's necessary." The physician spoke very matter-of-factly as he sat on a stool between the stirrupped and draped legs of his patient. He was obviously very familiar with the procedure. He continued: "We're going to keep her longer this time. Last time she nearly exsanguinated on the way home."

I looked at the assisting nurse. She nearly bled to death last time? This isn't her first abortion?

The doctor continued talking in his disinterested monotone, and I watched as the contents of the woman's womb came through a suctioning device and into a stainless-steel pail sitting at his feet. I stepped back and wiped the perspiration from my brow. "This is kind of gruesome," I said. "Was there some special reason she didn't want to have her baby?"

"She wanted an abortion," the nurse replied, "and we're required by law to do what she wants." The doctor had been listening to our conversation. As he stood up, he said: "At this point in a pregnancy, the products of conception aren't much." I knew the emphasis on "products of conception" was for my benefit.

Is that what you have in that pail? I thought. Does that make it easier for you? I did not have the courage to put into words what I was thinking. I've always regretted that.I stepped forward and peered into the pail. This time I broke out in a cold sweat. I backed up and leaned against the wall, my eyes closed. Dear Jesus! I thought. I just saw someone murdered! And I just stood and watched! Why did I come down here? How will I ever put this out of my mind?

"Are you OK?" the voice of the nurse brought me back.

"I'm sorry," I smiled weakly. "I just never realized what it was like. Do you assist with these all the time?"

"More than I care to admit," the nurse said. "Actually I can handle one, but when they come back for the second or third time, it really gets to me."

As I left the operating room, I shook my head in an attempt to get the horrible vision out of my head. I couldn't. It was there; it would always be there: a little hand...a little rib cage.

For some years after that, I had a recurring dream. A little baby would reach out to me. I would try to get to the baby, but my legs were like lead weights. When I'd finally drag myself to the baby, he would be gone. I knew the dream was symbolic of the guilt I was feeling. I could not have stopped that abortion. I had not the courage or the authority.

I now no longer have the dream. God in His infinite wisdom set me free. But I still have the memory -- the little hand...the little rib cage. The difference now is, I don't want the memory to leave. It gives me strength.

From what I read, 25 million more babies have been aborted since the one I saw in 1975. That baby who was never given a chance would now be 23 years old. But I believe that little child has an immortal soul just as I do. He now resides with God. And nowadays, when I stand alongside the highway, holding my sign that reads Abortion Kills Children, I think of the soul of that baby and the tiny body that ended up in a stainless-steel pail at the doctor's feet. Then I hold my sign even higher, because I know that baby is looking down at me and is glad I'm there.

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