Live Action News recently discovered and documented dozens of online reviews, allegedly posted by current and former Planned Parenthood employees, criticizing the abortion chain for its substandard care, exploitative treatment of employees, and toxic culture. Some reviews also mention the emotional cost of working in an industry which kills thousands of babies on a daily basis.
One Glassdoor review, apparently posted by a former Planned Parenthood customer service representative in Syracuse, New York, called the experience of working for the abortion chain “[d]isturbing.”
“I was deeply scared working here when they made me sit through and over see the abortion process,” the former employee claimed. It is unclear whether this employee meant “scarred,” as in wounded, or “scared,” as in fearful of what he or she witnessed while working there.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Planned-Parenthood-Reviews-E14417.htm
Another alleged former Planned Parenthood employee wrote on Indeed that working at Planned Parenthood was “emotionally draining.”
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Planned-Parenthood/reviews
“Basically working as robots”
The work of Planned Parenthood, frequently involving abortion, takes an emotional toll on Planned Parenthood workers. Even The New York Times described Planned Parenthood jobs as “emotional roller coasters” and cited low morale and high turnover rates in the abortion corporation’s workforce.
Former Planned Parenthood worker Patricia Sandoval recently revealed to Live Action just how emotionally disturbing it can be to work at Planned Parenthood.
“I would cry every day,” Sandoval admitted in an episode of Live Action’s “Face to Face” film series. “I didn’t understand how my coworkers, how the abortionists, how they were basically working as robots. They looked like they didn’t have any emotion. It looked like they were just trying to survive working there. But I could say that working behind the doors of Planned Parenthood is horrifying.”
Sandoval recounted how she was forced to assist the abortionist during an abortion performed on a 15-year-old girl:
When I witnessed that first abortion, what I witnessed was like a violent scene… And then I had to be the abortionist’s eyes. So I had to grab the biohazard bag that was attached to the vacuum machine, the machine that they use. I went into this hidden room behind the doors of Planned Parenthood and there was a big petri dish in front of me.
I was instructed to dump the contents inside that petri dish and I really thought and I believed that I was going to look for a sack of tissue because that’s what I was told before my three abortions. But what I found was a baby… just… in pieces. And I had to look for the five body parts.
One day, it all became too much for Sandoval. “The day that I ran out and was horrified, I was to assist a young girl that was 24 weeks pregnant with twins. I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I left.”
Former abortionist, Dr. Anthony Levatino, also told Live Action in the “Face to Face” series about his horrifying experience with abortion work, and one abortion in particular which convinced him to leave the abortion industry:
I showed up at the hospital to do a D&E abortion. Wasn’t thinking of it as anything special. This was routine. Put that sopher clamp in. Ripped out an arm or a leg, and just stared at it in the clamp, and got sick.
But once you start an abortion, you can’t stop. You have to get two arms, two legs, and all the pieces. Because if you don’t, your patient will come back infected, bleeding or dead.
“Takes an emotional toll”
Other abortionists, even those still involved in the abortion industry, have attested to the emotional toll that the work takes on abortion facility staff, as Sarah Terzo previously reported for Live Action News. One author who interviewed abortionists and abortion workers for a book observed:
Abortion work is not easy. Late-term abortions are horrific. Nurses doing abortions after the first trimester of pregnancy either seem rather distressed by what is going on, or appear rather as cynical and hard. When they are distressed it may be that their caring role and training is still fundamentally at odds with the termination of pregnancy.
The Journal of Medical Ethics published an article in 1989 with a similar observation of abortion staff:
It is clear that physically dismembering and removing the fetus is emotionally distressing for the doctor. A doctor, therefore, has to overcome an element of revulsion in order to do a late term surgical termination of pregnancy…. Dismemberment of a baby so violates a general human instinct that it is morally worse than destruction of the fetus by other means.
A Planned Parenthood abortionist, who was several years into abortion work at the time of his interview, summed up the shocking reality and emotional burden which abortion workers encounter on a daily basis:
This can burn you out very, very quickly…not so much by the physical labor as the emotional part of what’s going on. When you do an ultrasound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing its thumb to its mouth, and things like that – it’s difficult.
Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off… It does take an emotional toll.
Abortion work like Planned Parenthood’s appears to have a particular distressing effect on abortion facility staff. As the quotes referenced in this article explain, abortion work is fundamentally antithetical to human instinct. What abortion actually is, the direct and intentional killing of a helpless preborn child, and the physical reality of a little human being, torn limb from limb, presents a horrifying vision to anyone who sees it.
