Kathy Sparks
Kathy Sparks worked at an abortion clinic until she quit in the mid-80s. While her involvement with abortion work took place several decades ago, many of the things that she describes witnessing during her time in the abortion industry are similar to things described by workers who came out of the abortion business more recently.
Sparks’s testimony, which appears in the video series “Meet the Abortion Providers” is so long that I’m going to divide it into several articles.
The Sell
According to Sparks, “In my opinion, the most important part of this particular abortion clinic was the counseling.”
She describes how the clinic workers would attempt to sell women abortions even when the women were undecided. She was trained to answer the phone and instructed to rush women into their abortions if they were in any way ambivalent:
“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 [they told me] 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.”
According to an interview Sparks gave in the Christian Herald, the clinic workers were also encouraged to lie about fetal development:
“Sometimes we lied. A girl might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say ‘It’s not a baby yet. It’s just tissue, like a clot.’(1)
While it has not been scientifically determined that the baby can process pain at 12 weeks the way an older child can, you can see a video of a 12-week-old baby responding to touch here, on the Endowment for Human Development website, which is not affiliated with the pro-life movement.
In her speech at the Meet the Abortion Providers convention, Sparks describes one particular clinic worker who was especially good at selling abortions:
“I was able to sit 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 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…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.”
The well-being of the women who came to the clinic was not a concern. According to Sparks, “… I believe the love of money was the root of evil that happened at this particular abortion clinic.”
The clinic was a moneymaking operation, and women were convinced to have abortions even if they were uncertain of their decision.
More recent examples of clinic workers lying in order in order to convince women to have abortions are shown in undercover videos shot by Live Action in abortion clinics.
Kathy Sparks’s testimony shows that this dishonesty has been a part of the abortion industry for a long time. Future articles will discuss more aspects of Sparks’s testimony.
1. Gloria Williamson “The Conversion of Kathy Sparks” Christian Herald January 1986 p 28
