In the latest video of Live Action’s “Face to Face” series, a former abortion worker and an abortion witness discuss the things they saw in their respective professions, and how it impacted each of them.
Live Action founder Lila Rose speaks to former Planned Parenthood worker Patricia Sandoval and former RN-turned-pro-life-activist Jill Stanek about their life-changing experiences with abortion.
Babies left to die in a soiled utility room
Stanek worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Christ Hospital in Oaklawn, Illinois, a suburb on the south side of Chicago. She learned that her hospital was involved in late-term abortion, and that the method used, “induced labor abortion,” had been happening for about a year. Stanek said that type of abortion “sometimes resulted in aborted babies being aborted alive, and if they were aborted alive, they were shelved to die in hospital’s the soiled utility room.”
Though Stanek was not required to participate in aborting these babies due to her pro-life convictions, she became involved in a way she never expected.
“One night, a nurse friend was taking a little abortion survivor to the soiled utility room to die. And when she told me what she was doing, I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying alone,” Stanek said. “He’d been aborted because he had Down syndrome. He was about 21 and a half weeks old; he was about the size of my hand, and he didn’t move very much, you know, using all of his energy attempting to breathe. At that time, he wouldn’t have lived, even with help. But it was a life changing event. He lived for 45 minutes…. After I held that baby, I just had to do something; that propelled me into the pro-life movement.”
Stanek said she learned her hospital was committing abortions “by accident.” She saw a report for a “mid-trimester labor induction,” and says that was the first she learned of it and was never told the hospital committed these abortions when she applied to work there. She later learned “they had been doing these for 20 years with no policy whatsoever, but I knew that they were aborting babies with non-fatal handicaps like Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis… fatal handicaps… selective reduction… and also for rape/incest.” The AG of Illinois looked into these abortions, and said the hospital wasn’t violating any laws by doing them.
Stanek also learned that there were other children who had been left to die. “When I testified on the federal level, another nurse at the hospital testified with me. And she testified of finding a live aborted baby laying naked next to the sink in the soiled utility room once” with another found “lying naked on the scale.”
Horrifically, Stanek said, “I heard stories from nurses who were in the room directly… One mom didn’t know her baby could be aborted alive… and when her baby came out alive, she screamed, because not only was he alive, but he didn’t appear to have the physical defect that she’d been told he was going to have — which is why she aborted — so she screamed for someone to help her baby. The nurse… grabbed the neonatologist…. He assessed the baby and then he had to tell the mom, ‘there’s nothing I can do for your son, because he was born too soon.’ The mom was so traumatized, she had to be tranquilized, and it was left up to this little guy’s grandma to rock him for the only half hour that she would ever spend with him….”
Stanek said that Christ Hospital had a level 3 NICU, which meant that other hospitals would send their very sick babies there for care, “so that was ironic.” She also noted that she had seen a baby aborted at 28 weeks old, weighing almost two pounds, who was simply left to die, though that child could have survived with some intervention. Most of babies who survived were simply left to die, cold and naked. She said one baby “lived almost as long as an eight-hour shift.”
After Stanek went public as a whistleblower and outrage ensued, Christ Hospital established a “comfort room.” Stanek took photos of the room, which can be seen here, and was later fired.
Piecing babies back together
Patricia Sandoval was impacted by abortion in a completely different way than Stanek. Sandoval was taught at age 12 that abortion was a woman’s right, and years later, at 19, she had three abortions within a year and a half time span. “I really believed that being pregnant would destroy my dreams and goals that I had… I was never told the truth about abortion… And after each abortion, I suffered severe post-abortion syndrome and so did my partner.”
Sandoval’s first abortion was committed at about four months of pregnancy. “I felt shame, but I thought that I walked out of that abortion clinic as a free woman, liberated, empowered — and truly after that was when all my problems started. And I never connected all the symptoms… with post-abortion syndrome.”
She later applied for a receptionist job at Planned Parenthood, but “when they learned during my interview that I was post-abortive and that I was bilingual, they hired me illegally as a back office nurse. They told me that 95% of their abortion patients were immigrants that spoke Spanish, they didn’t speak any English, and they had never had anybody speak Spanish at their facility,” which raised questions about consent and safety for women.
“I learned the truth about abortion… when I had to assist the abortionist,” Sandoval said, adding that she was “never truly trained,” but was told never to even use the word “fetus” because “even ‘fetus’ gave human dignity,” and was told never to let clients see the ultrasound screen. The first time she assisted the abortionist, the patient, a 15-year-old girl, was crying and kicking, and Sandoval thought the abortionist was going to remove the suction cannula because of this, “but he didn’t; he kept going.” She said, “What I witnessed was like a violent scene.”
Later, she was tasked with taking the contents of the container holding the aborted baby’s remains and “dump the contents inside [a big] petri dish” and she thought she’d look for a sack of tissue. “But what I found was a baby, just in pieces, and I had to look for the five body parts… As my coworker held each little body part up to the light… I contemplated the face. I remember seeing the little eyes, the nose, the ears, and the baby’s mouth wide open as if this baby was screaming, but nobody could hear this baby’s voice. Completely voiceless.” She quickly learned that she had been lied to before her three abortions.
Sandoval said her facility typically did abortions up to 20 weeks, but the last straw for her was when she was supposed to assist with the abortion of 24-week twins. “I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I left.” She said she cried every day before leaving. “Working behind the doors of Planned Parenthood is horrifying.”
Today, Sandoval has found healing for her own abortions and travels the world telling her story so that other women might be healed as well.
