Former abortion worker: We needed women to have abortions ‘to feel better about our own’
Live Action News has documented many cases in which abortion workers pressured women to have abortions. Many former abortion workers have admitted that they were trained to aggressively sell abortions to women, even women who were ambivalent or unsure they wanted them. In some cases, pressure came from the owners of these facilities or from Planned Parenthood supervisors. Some former Planned Parenthood workers have claimed that Planned Parenthood established quotas or goals for the number of abortions to be committed, and reprimanded abortion workers who did not meet those quotas. In these cases, abortion was pushed on women because it was profitable and contributed to the abortion facility’s bottom line.
But there is another possible reason why abortion workers pressure pregnant women to abort.
Former abortion worker Rita, who worked as an abortion “counselor,” was post-abortive. Without her realizing it, subconscious feelings of guilt from her own abortion influenced the way she dealt with pregnant women:
I was completely driven to help other women to obtain abortions. I was totally invested in keeping abortion safe and legal. I never recognized how pushy and one-sided my counseling was until I became pregnant and wanted a child. Everyone around me was so critical of my own pregnancy. I realized then that I had been the same way toward every pregnant woman who entered our clinic. It’s almost like we needed them to abort so that we could feel better about our own abortions. I was too busy justifying what I had done to be aware that I carried any grief about it.
Rita validated her decision to have her own abortion t every time she convinced another woman to go through with the abortion procedure. It wasn’t until she found herself in the position of the pregnant woman and experienced “counseling” similar to her own that she realized how coercive she had been.
Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson, who is post-abortive herself, has written about how common it is for Planned Parenthood workers to have abortions in their past. According to Johnson, at a Planned Parenthood meeting in 2009, it was revealed that70% of Planned Parenthood workers had at least one previous abortion. So the behavior Rita describes might be common in the abortion industry.
Source: Teresa Burke, David C Reardon Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2002) 37 –38
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