Investigative

Not just Gosnell: Former abortion workers say untrained staff is common

healthcare workers, conscience, abortion

“House of Horrors” Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell hired untrained workers to administer anesthesia and do other medical procedures, which led to the deaths of two women. But testimony from former abortion workers reveals that the wasn’t alone — other abortion facilities have also used untrained staff. In a webinar hosted by the pro-life group And Then There Were None, several former workers spoke about this.

Former Kermit Gosnell worker Adrienne Moton explained in the webinar how Gosnell hired inexperienced people:

Most of us that worked in the back, including myself, had no – we were not licensed at all… His thing was pretty much, you know, making money. Making money, that’s all it was about. … [H]e taught me everything. He taught me how to find a vein. He taught me how to administer the diazepam, you know, to put the patient to sleep. He taught me how to do the ultrasound – everything.

former abortion workers

Adrienne Moton (L), Abby Johnson (R)

Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood director, admits she also did tasks she was not trained for:

It was the same for me. I was doing a lot of things inside of my clinic that I should not have been doing. That were not legal for me to be doing. I had no business doing ultrasounds. I had no business pushing anesthesia on women.

Sue Thayer was the manager of a Planned Parenthood facility in Storm Lake, Iowa. Planned Parenthood wanted to sell more abortion pills but did not always have a doctor available to dispense them. So Planned Parenthood administrators decided to do webcam (telemed) abortions – in which a woman would talk to a doctor via webcam. The doctor would not see or examine her and could be in another state.

It is ill-advised for a woman to take the abortion pill without having an ultrasound. An ultrasound is needed to verify the length of pregnancy and confirm that the pregnancy is not ectopic. An ectopic pregnancy can kill a woman if it is not detected. Planned Parenthood officials tried to get Thayer to do the ultrasounds, even though she had no certificate or training:

I said, “Surely you’re not going to be having nonmedical people doing these transvaginal ultrasounds? (and you know, ladies if you had one of those you know it’s an invasive procedure and you don’t want the one that schedules your procedure to be the one that’s doing that, right?) But when I voiced concerns, he said, “Sue if you are breathing, you can do it. It helps if you’ve played a video game because it’s a lot like running a joystick.”

Image: Aiding Abusers: Planned Parenthood former manager Sue Thayer says PP covers child sexual abuse

Aiding Abusers: Planned Parenthood former manager Sue Thayer says PP covers up child sexual abuse

READ: Marie Stopes halts surgical abortions over untrained staff

Sonographers go to school for years and need to complete a difficult test before they are certified. Thayer was concerned about the safety of telemed abortions, and asked her boss if he was going to notify local doctors:

And you know, I had said to him, “Are you going to notify the doctors in the communities where these webcam abortions are going to be done? Because women are going to be showing up at the ER, you know, with hemorrhaging and all kinds of problems.” And they said, “No, all of our I’s are dotted and our T’s are crossed. Nothing’s gonna stop us, and we don’t want anyone to know about it until we’ve established a standard of care for 500 to 2000 done.” Just crazy, that they’d do that, but they do.

Planned Parenthood was willing to use 500 to 2000 women as guinea pigs to test the safety of webcam abortions. They were not even going to notify local emergency rooms and doctors about possible complications because they wanted to hide what they were doing. Too many medical professionals might object if they were open about their plans.

Live Action News previously covered the story of former abortion worker Joy Davis, who hired employees with no medical experience and eventually started committing abortions and performing other surgeries on women herself, without a medical degree:

I started interviewing people that had no medical background at all, bringing them in to do the job of anesthetist, lab technicians, nurses and even physicians…. So I brought in people off the street with no medical background and trained them…

I never spent the first day in medical school. I was just an ultrasound technician. I really knew nothing about medicine, other than what I had seen other doctors do, but I started doing abortions. I started actually performing surgery on women. I did Norplants, cryosurgery, pap smears, pelvic exams — anything he did, I did.

Sadly, this led to the death of a patient after Dr. Tommy Tucker, the abortionist she worked with, botched an abortion and left the woman in Davis’s care. Davis did not know what to do, and the woman died soon after being transferred to a hospital.

The reason for all this, of course, is profit – abortion facilities can pay untrained staff much less money than they can medical professionals. The more abortion facilities remain uninspected, the more likely it is that corners will be cut, to the detriment of women.

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