In the second installment of Live Action’s powerful new video series, three women who experienced abortion trauma and regret came face to face with three former abortion providers.
Live Action president and founder Lila Rose moderated the discussion, which strongly focused on the role deception and denial play in abortion — both for the women who have them, and for the abortionists who commit them. Despite this, they all said, there is hope.
The Panel
Emily Rarick had two abortions. Upon introducing herself, she said she became pregnant at 17 and had an abortion using the abortion pill (which she refers to as “RU486 drugs”), and then became pregnant again seven months later and had another abortion by the same method.
Gigi Davis, seated next to Rarick in the video, also experienced abortion regret and had five abortions by two different methods: first trimester suction aspiration abortion and the abortion pill.
Patricia Sandoval had three surgical abortions when she was 19, and later worked at Planned Parenthood, where she was involved with first-trimester surgical abortions as well as second-trimester D&E (dismemberment) abortions up to 20 weeks gestation.
Drs. Kathi Aultman, Haywood Robinson, and Anthony Levatino, who no longer commit abortions, are seated on the opposite side of the table in the video. But Dr. Aultman noted that she could just as easily have been seated on the other side, as she, too, once had a D&C suction abortion, and went through a long process of post-abortive healing.
Dr. Aultman believes her own abortion is why she was “so gung-ho, so pro-abortion when I started my residency, because I had my own abortion just prior to entering medical school, because I thought if I was pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to become a doctor.” Before ending her career as an abortionist, she committed an estimated 500 abortions.
Dr. Robinson committed “several hundred” D&C suction abortions in the first trimester, and during his abortion training, witnessed “saline abortions” and saw “very mature second [and] third-trimester babies [aborted]” which he noted that today, “we’d see in the NICU in lots of hospitals….”
Dr. Levatino stated that during his residency training, he “learned to do first- and second-trimester abortions, including suction D&Cs and saline abortions,” and “performed almost 1200” abortions of various types during his abortion career.
The Lies
During the discussion, Sandoval said she felt the abortionist failed her years ago during her three abortions, noting that it was her abortion industry training that finally opened her eyes to the truth:
When I started to work [at Planned Parenthood], they trained me to change my vocabulary… You tell the women it’s a sack of tissue, you never let them see the ultrasound.
But I was the one that had to look for body parts. I didn’t know when I assisted with the first abortion that I was going to look for body parts. I seriously with my whole heart thought I was going to look for a sack of tissue. Because that’s what I was told before my three abortions.
But to my shock and my surprise, they were babies… so immediately, I thought, they lied to me. They failed me. They convinced me to kill my children… they denied me the right to see the ultrasound, and so I had to heal from that.
Sandoval said the first abortion she assisted with was 12 weeks, and she saw that even at that age, the baby was completely formed — and her own abortion had been at 16 weeks. “I felt guilt, shame… how can you undo this? How can you undo murder?… and I felt completely hopeless.”
Rarick said she, too, was angry at her abortionist because she had been denied relevant information:
There was a time in my life when I was very, very angry… I was angry because I felt that [the abortionist] understood the development of my baby, of both my babies, and I did not, and I felt like I had been deceived in a sense because I wasn’t given the full story, the full truth….
She noted later in the conversation that years later, when she was pregnant with her son, she looked up his development at 10 weeks on pregnancy apps and it dawned on her that “the baby I had aborted years previously was that exact same gestational age… I was in despair for years.” Rarick said she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal thoughts. “It’s still hard… I’m going to continue healing and just want to do what’s right now, and honor my children by trying to warn other women.”
Davis noted that she forced herself for years to refrain from looking up prenatal development online so that she could deny the truth of what she had done in her abortions. But when she went through a post-abortion healing program, she came face to face with the truth.
‘Depravity’ and ‘Darkness’
Dr. Robinson mentioned “the depravity of [humans] and what we’re capable of,” confessing that he and his late wife, Dr. Noreen Johnson (who also stopped committing abortions many years prior to her death), both committed an abortion on Johnson’s sister:
We killed our niece or nephew. Each one of these abortions has a vast consequence. My niece or nephew would have been in their forties right now. My sister-in-law had one child at that time. That child was killed in a boating accident. We killed what would have been her only surviving child.
That sister-in-law is childless now because of the abortion we performed on her.
He added, “It’s a wake-up call that we are fighting an intense battle against a formidable enemy but we still have to take personal responsibility at the same time.”
Later in the conversation, Sandoval asked the doctors:
When I had to look for the body parts… the first time, I knew that was a human being… and I was literally in shock.
And the abortionist came in to make sure everything was in the petri dish… and he was whistling, and I remember him saying to everybody, ‘What are we all going to have for lunch?’ when before this abortion, he told me to tell the young woman it was not a baby, it was a sack of tissue.
And I remember screaming inside of myself, ‘How can he not see what I’m seeing?!’ And my question is, could you see? Could you see that they were babies?”
After a brief pause, Dr. Levatino said, “I can answer that — for myself. I cannot speak for any other abortionist in the world. Did I know those were human beings?” he asked, as Sandoval dabbed tears from her eyes. “Absolutely. I. Didn’t. Care. I did not care.”
And yet, after Dr. Levatino and his wife lost their six-year-old daughter Heather in an automobile accident, something happened to him when he showed up to commit a D&E abortion. “I looked, I mean, I really looked at that pile of body parts,” he said, and for the first time, he saw that “this is someone’s son or daughter.” And “that was the change that eventually got me out of the abortion business.”
Dr. Aultman answered Sandoval by saying, “I knew they were human… but my interest was extremely scientific. I didn’t see the difference between them and a chick embryo or frog that we dissected. I thought they were beautiful.” She said she would marvel over the “little toes and the little fingers” and think how “amazing” they were, but she never thought of them as “little people that were worth caring about.” Aultman said she grieved with a mom who miscarried, but had no problem aborting the child of a woman who didn’t want her baby.
“It wasn’t until I read an article comparing abortion to the Holocaust that I suddenly realized that I could do these terrible things, because I didn’t consider them human beings,” just as the Nazi doctors did not consider their victims to be human beings, she said. “I didn’t see them as human… Somehow, there’s this darkness that clouds your mind, and you can do things that you would never think possible.”
She added, “I really thought I was helping women, and had no idea the trauma and that scarring that I left in my wake.”
Dr. Robinson noted something similar, saying that he felt like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” when he would deliver one baby joyfully, and then walk a few feet down the hall and kill someone else’s baby. He called it “flipping a switch” from “healer to killer.” Dr. Levatino and Dr. Aultman agreed, saying that “compartmentalizing” is something that is very common for doctors to do — something taught on “day one” in medical school.
The Message
Near the end of the conversation, each panel participant responded with a message of hope for women who are either considering abortion or who have had abortions.
Dr. Robinson said he would tell women, “We’re going to walk through this… and it’s gonna be okay,” letting both post-abortive women and women considering abortions know that they are not alone.
“No matter what your situation… you and only you can give your son or daughter the chance to live just like you do,” Dr. Levatino said, urging viewers to choose life for their children.
Dr. Aultman pointed out the three most important things for women to know: there is hope, there is healing, and there is help. “Please seek healing. Receive God’s forgiveness and forgive yourself,” she said. “Abortion is never the answer, and it will always destroy you….” she added. “Unlike what you’ve been told, there is help… there are people willing to come alongside you and help.”
