In the video “Meet the Abortion Providers” a former clinic worker named Kathy Sparks gave her testimony. In a February article, I quoted her description of how her clinic “counseled” women by lying to them about the development of the unborn baby and frightening them into having abortions. Here is more of her story.
Getting the Job
Kathy Sparks, who was raised Catholic, described her family as being in “bad financial shape” after her daughter was born. Sparks’ neighbor worked for an abortion clinic. The neighbor told Sparks that the clinic was hiring. As a teenager, Sparks had volunteered at a hospital and enjoyed being in a medical setting. She had been hoping to get a job in the medical field. Sparks asked her friend what the pay was like at the clinic, and her friend assured her that it was “excellent.”
So Sparks went in for an interview. This is how she describes it:
So I went down and had a very intense interview. Let me tell you, as all of the former abortionists will tell you, that they really want to make sure that you are pro-choice before they hire you, and I really was. I did not have to convince them; it was obvious. They did put me through a second interview, however; they wanted to make doubly sure that they were hiring someone who was pro-choice.
Pro-choice ideology was apparently more important than medical training, and Sparks got the job.
Taking on medical responsibilities
Sparks learned to talk women into having abortions over the phone and in person. Then she took on medical duties:
Then I was trained to do all sorts of fun medical things, like take blood pressure. I just really loved it; I really liked it; I liked my job. I got to wear a white uniform. All the desires in my heart to be a nurse were being somewhat fulfilled, as evil as it was. I did not see how evil abortion was. It did not bother me at all. When I saw my first abortion procedure, I didn’t see it any differently than dissecting a frog in biology. I had blinders upon my eyes, as I believe many people involved in the abortion industry do. I believe that many of them, giving them the benefit of the doubt, didn’t really see the evil that they were partaking in.
Sparks is not the only former clinic worker who has said she saw nothing wrong with what she was doing at the time. Some people who have come out of the abortion industry have described this as “spiritual blindness.”
“Flushing” aborted babies and putting them in jars
I worked in the clean-up room, in my opinion the worst part of the clinic because it was so messy. …That’s where the babies were brought back…they didn’t have facilities to do second trimester. But, oftentimes, second trimester abortions were performed and these babies we would not put in the little jar with the label to send off to the pathology lab. We would put them down a flushing toilet. They had a toilet that was mounted to the wall, and it was a continually flushing toilet; it didn’t have a lid or a handle. That’s where we would put these babies. They knew that they couldn’t turn them in or they were going to be found out that they were doing abortions which were too late term. This is what I participated in while I worked there.
The ones that were small enough, which would be 12-13 weeks or less, we would put in a jar, label them, and put them in a big box to go off to the pathology lab… When the babies would be put in the jars, we would hold them up and kind of twirl them around and look at the little arm and little leg float up, and we’d put them back in the box. As sick as that sounds, that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is at a lot of places right now.”
The recovery room
After their abortions, women were sent to the recovery room, where they recovered from the anesthesia and rested until they were considered ready to leave the clinic:
After a while, I would sit in during the recovery room phase before I learned how to assist the doctor in the procedure room. The recovery room is an incredible place at this particular clinic. I don’t know how it is now, but back then they would do so many abortions. They had recliners, like most abortion clinics do, and some girls, if they were far along in their pregnancy, would be on a stretcher. But oftentimes, there were so many girls and not enough recliners that they would be sitting on the floor. After this medical procedure, here they are sitting on the floor with a blanket around them. They would be given a couple of cookies and perhaps a soda, and as soon as they were even somewhat ready, they were out the door because they had more patients to get through. It was really sad.
During that whole time, I didn’t think a thing about it. It didn’t bother me at all that they were sitting on the floor. We would keep moving out of the recliners and move more in, and just keep going.
Sparks’ heart was very hardened to the pain and suffering she saw the clinic every day. But that would change. Things in her life, things completely unrelated to her work at the abortion clinic, were about to go so wrong that she was would turn to religion, experiencing a conversion which would rock her values to the core and lead to her leaving the clinic. I will discuss these events in the next article.
