Former abortion worker Joy Davis originally worked in one abortion facility, then left to set up a new facility with abortionist Thomas Tucker. By the end of her time in the abortion industry, she was the director of six abortion facilities and making $100,000 a year. Eventually, a patient died in her facility due to medical negligence. “We were not there to help women,” Davis says of the first abortion facility where she worked. “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.”
Tucker asked Davis to help him open a new facility, and she agreed. At first, the abortionist hired competent people. But then:
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.
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Davis was put in charge of hiring new employees. She says she “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.” And, she adds, she looked specifically for women who “needed us and needed the money” because she believed she “would have their loyalty and… they would stick with it no matter how tough it got”:
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.
By now, Tucker, the abortionist, had set up six different abortion facilities, scattered across several states. To avoid hiring another doctor, he flew from one facility to another, doing abortions. But the airline wasn’t fast enough. He could not get from facility to facility in time to do all the abortions he wanted. His solution was to train Davis to do abortions herself. Davis says:
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.
Tucker had a chain of facilities where people with no medical experience were giving anesthesia, conducting tests, and doing surgery on unsuspecting women.
Finally, Tucker botched an abortion so badly that a woman was left bleeding heavily in the recovery room. Refusing to see the patient, Tucker ordered Davis to stop the bleeding, but she was unable to. Afraid the woman was about to die, Davis called an ambulance. But the doctor was reportedly “furious” and “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.
It took 20 minutes for the ambulance to come. Davis later got a call from the hospital telling her the woman had died.
READ: Former abortion worker: We ‘don’t report it’ when patients go home injured
The facility was required to turn over the woman’s records, but abortionist Tucker wrote new records for the patient, trying to cover up the negligence. He gave the originals to Davis and told her to burn them. Instead, she turned them over to the medical board. Yet the facility continued to operate. Davis says:
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.
Eventually, Tucker botched so many abortions that the board finally acted, and he lost his license. At the time, he had over 10 malpractice suits.
You can read Davis’ whole testimony here.
