On April 1, 2017, 40 Days for Life participants witnessed an apparently unconscious woman being transported out of a Planned Parenthood facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina, into a waiting ambulance.
This marks the thirteenth time that a Planned Parenthood has sent a patient to the hospital in this year alone, reports Operation Rescue. However, the pro-life group notes that it receives calls “routinely” regarding ambulances at abortion facilities — “so many, we can’t even report on them all,” said OR president Troy Newman.
Witnesses stated that once the patient was inside the ambulance, the vehicle ” remained in the back parking lot for about 20 minutes before it finally rolled away, raising the possibility that she required immediate emergency care that could not be done while the ambulance was rolling.”
Witnesses also said that as the ambulance left Planned Parenthood, it did not turn on its sirens until making its way through parking lots to take a “longer route to the main road” and then finally turned on its sirens “when they were well away from the Planned Parenthood abortion facility.”
It is not unusual to see this type of surreptitious activity when ambulances either arrive or depart abortion facilities. Some abortion facility staff have requested ambulances without lights or sirens so they to not draw attention to a facility’s medical emergencies.
Operation Rescue states that it has documented 40 ambulance transports from Planned Parenthood facilities alone since January 1, 2016. At least one of those patients is a confirmed death: 24-year-old Cree Erwin-Sheppard, who died from complications after receiving a first trimester abortion from a Planned Parenthood in Kalamazoo, Michigan.