Former abortion facility owner: Giving women more information doesn’t sell abortions

Carol Everett was once the owner of two abortion facilities and the director of four. During her time in the abortion industry, she ran her facilities strictly as businesses, trying to make as much money as possible. She has written about her career as an abortion worker in her books The Scarlet Lady: Confessions of a Successful Abortionist and Blood Money: Getting Rich off a Woman’s Right to Choose. Everett, whose full testimony can be found here, maximized profit by having her employees convince as many women to abort as possible.

Soon after she became an abortion facility director, she ran into trouble with one of her workers. She identifies the woman only as “Barbara.”

Everett says:

An immediate problem concerned Barbara, [a] young medical assistant who did not like abortions. She actually had a fetal development book in the clinic and often showed women how developed their babies were at various stages inside the womb. I stopped that practice immediately. Although Barbara was a good employee, if she could not sell abortions, she had to go.

Obviously, women were less likely to abort after seeing those pictures. Finding out that your baby has fingers and toes might make some women think twice. This was unacceptable to Everett. With every woman who walked out, she lost money.

Abortion advocates say that it’s all about “choice.” But what about informed choice? Shouldn’t a woman have the right to know what abortion does to her body and her baby? In Everett’s facilities, it was not about “choice” but about selling as many abortions as possible. How many women had abortions thinking they were getting a clump of tissue removed, only to learn the truth later? Everett and her abortion workers wouldn’t be there help women through that emotional trauma.

But some people reading this might have something to say at this point. Aren’t Everett’s facilities an exception? Surely you can’t judge the whole abortion industry by one chain of clinics.  After all, just because Everett was motivated by profit and wanted to keep information from women doesn’t mean all abortion facilities do that. Right?

Of course, there is no way to know what goes on in every abortion facility in the country. But there is one thing that seems to indicate that Everett’s policy of hiding of the truth from women is very common in the abortion industry.

For decades, pro-lifers have responded to a cascade of women’s accounts of dishonest counseling and withheld information by trying to pass informed consent laws. Pro-abortion groups have consistently fought against these laws.

The abortion industry makes many millions of dollars a year from abortion. Much of this money is funneled into groups that fight against pro-life laws. Abortion providers know that their livelihood is based on abortion’s legality, so they donate a great deal of money to such groups. In turn, they wield great influence on how those pro-abortion groups operate and what laws they oppose.

NARAL Pro-Choice America is the largest pro-abortion group in the country. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia has a list of “anti-choice” laws that they oppose. Under the heading “Biased Counseling, Mandatory Ultrasounds, and Forced Delays” the organization says:

Virginia requires women who’ve decided to have an abortion to receive state-directed counseling that includes government-written materials with possible alternatives to abortion and realistic pictures of a fetus.

Obviously “realistic pictures of a fetus” are not something abortion promoters want women to see. No doubt the abortion industry, which donates millions to groups like NARAL, is behind (and benefited by) their opposition to such laws.

NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon says:

Abortion-specific “informed” consent laws unnecessarily insert the government into private decision making and the doctor-patient relationship.

They call the laws part of the “anti-choice agenda.”

What are these laws they so vehemently oppose?

Counseling provisions vary, but they often include information designed to discourage women from obtaining an abortion, such as telling them that the father of the fetus is liable for child support, providing a list of abortion-alternative and adoption agencies, offering to show photographs of fetuses at various stages of development and telling women abortion may cause breast cancer.

The horror.  (Note: Here is a list of studies that link abortion with breast cancer.)

Notice that they oppose “offering to show photographs.” In fact, most informed consent laws do not force a woman to look at pictures of developing babies, they only say that the abortion facility must give women that option.

How is NARAL Pro-Choice America’s battle against letting women see pictures of preborn babies any different than Everett’s practices? In both cases, they want to suppress any information that might lead to women choosing life.

The abortion industry and their pursuit of profit lies behind the policies of pro-abortion advocacy groups, and these groups’ stands on informed consent laws reveal the industry’s desire to censor any information that would make a woman think twice about abortion. Everett’s actions were not an anomaly — rather, her attitude is typical of the abortion industry.

Source: Carol Everett. The Scarlet Lady (Brentwood: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1991),146