FULL CIRCLE: Nurse practitioner's exodus from abortion industry into true healthcare

When Caroline Strzesynski graduated nursing school, she wanted to work on a Labor & Delivery unit and eventually become a midwife. But local L&D units wouldn’t hire her without two years of nursing experience. One day, an acquaintance who was also a nurse invited Strzesynski to shadow her at her job at an abortion clinic, and Strzesynski took her up on the offer. 

At that time, she was pro-choice in a general sense, meaning that she believed it was a legitimate form of health care for other women but had no connection to it personally.

By the end of the day shadowing the acquaintance, during which Strzesynski assisted in the post-abortion recovery room, she was hired. For a year, she worked part-time in the clinic, and during that time she was also hired by the local Planned Parenthood. 

Trouble keeping a doctor

The Planned Parenthood affiliate where she worked did not commit abortions, and Strzesynski's day-to-day work consisted of contraceptive counseling, inserting IUDs and performing colposcopies and other gynecologic procedures. She became an HIV counselor and an STD examiner, and Planned Parenthood paid for her to get her Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner degree in order to have prescription-writing privileges, because they had trouble keeping a doctor on staff. 

However, she told Live Action News that didn’t strike her as unusual. “Everybody talks about the abortion industry paying well but I did not experience that; I looked at it as a nonprofit," she said. "I looked at it as ‘[a doctor] isn’t going to come [and work] unless they’re nonprofit-minded.’” 

Strzesynski said the first thing that should have been a wake-up call for her while at Planned Parenthood was the fact that they ended prenatal services at her clinic while she was six months pregnant with her first child.

At the time, she didn’t put the pieces together that Planned Parenthood’s business model relied on driving women toward abortion instead of parenting.

The first domino toward a different perspective fell within the year, when Strzesynski became a Christian. 

Leaving Planned Parenthood

One day, six years later, Strzesynski traveled with her clinic manager to another Planned Parenthood affiliate to be trained on insertion of the hormonal contraceptive arm implant Nexplanon. 

In the morning, she was taught the skill of insertion, but that afternoon she was supposed to practice inserting them after abortions.

Since the time she had worked in an abortion clinic at the beginning of her nursing career, she had given birth to two children and she’d learned how abortion is at odds with God’s design for life and love. Her daily role up until then had been “detached” from the reality of abortion. But when she entered the clinic, “the sights, the sounds, the smell of death — it all came back to me.” 

That day, the abortionist was running late; once she arrived, she came across as very immature, according to Strzesynski. The doctor was accompanied by a resident, whom she directed to do things he wasn’t qualified to do; this made the staff “very uneasy.” The abortionist laughed as she confided to Strzesynski that she had personally never inserted Nexplanon before, and joked, “I guess I better read the package insert first!” 

In that difficult moment, Strzesynski shared,  “God’s presence became so palpable for me.” 

She didn’t go through with the training, telling her clinic manager, “I’ve seen and heard enough for one afternoon, and it’s time for me to go.”

On the drive home, Strzesynski recognized, “I know that I’m resigning. I know that the Lord has called me out of this.” But that wasn’t all. 

The reason Strzesynski’s manager had accompanied her to the training was because she had a meeting at the same time. The subject of that meeting was abortion quotas.

Strzesynski was shocked when her manager alluded to the fact that preventing unwanted pregnancies through contraception wasn't Planned Parenthood's goal. Instead, her manager said that Planned Parenthood didn’t want their abortion numbers to decrease because “This is how we make our money!” 

Prior to this, Strzesynski had believed the lie that abortions were “only” 3% of the services Planned Parenthood provides — but at that moment she understood the reality that abortions are integral to the company’s business model. 

Though she had worked at Planned Parenthood for almost 15 years, she submitted her six-weeks professional notice that she was leaving.

By her last day at Planned Parenthood, she had found new employment at the local public health department. During this time, she began her journey of healing from abortion industry work and learned about the abortion worker ministry, And Then There Were None.

She went on healing retreats, grew in her personal faith journey, and began praying outside abortion clinics, publicly opposing abortion.

Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Quotas

Questioning the contraceptive mentality

When a college health job came open after four years of working at the health department, Strzesynski said it felt like “the best job ever,” because she had holidays, evenings, and weekends off, plus a flexible schedule during the summer when her children were off school. But there were “lots and lots of contraceptives… a ton of IUDs and Nexplanons” that came as part of her job. 

Over the nine years she worked there, Strzesynski observed multiple young women who experienced one pelvic infection after another.

"At one point, I had to sit down with each one and tell them, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in there but we’ve got to get the IUD out because there’s some type of inflammation going on,’” she said. But when she attempted to remove the IUDs, she couldn’t. The scar damage was so significant that they required surgical removal. 

Strzesynski began to question the long-term effects of the contraceptives she’d been prescribing for years, and the emotional cost of the hookup culture those contraceptives were supporting.

Over time, what she was observing began to bother her more — the pelvic infections, rampant sexually transmitted diseases, anxiety, and other side effects (whether directly resulting from contraceptives or from participating in hookup culture) that were blindly accepted as necessary evils in pursuit of pregnancy prevention.

She finally decided, “This is not good medicine.” 

Even though she knew that the news would not be received well because hormonal birth control was a cornerstone of her medical practice, Strzesynski informed her superiors that, effective immediately, she would no longer be prescribing contraceptives.

Gradually, her hours were cut and then cut again until her contract was not renewed.

An Alternative To Hook-Up Culture | Exclusive Interview with Jason Evert

Shifting to natural family planning and fertility awareness

Providentially, around the time she stopped prescribing birth control, Strzesynski connected with a local OB/GYN who was “NFP-friendly,” meaning that she supported patients who chose to observe daily biomarkers like cervical mucus, basal body temperature, and/or urinary hormone levels to determine their fertility. They used the information for pregnancy prevention, achievement, and/or general body literacy. 

Strzesynski also learned about restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), a specialty that recognizes female fertility as a vital sign of whole body health, and seeks to restore health by identifying and treating root causes rather than applying a 'band-aid' to reproductive symptoms with hormonal birth control. 

In 2024, Strzesynski became a certified instructor in the Creighton Method of natural family planning (NFP), and in spring of 2025 she became a certified NaProTECHNOLOGY medical consultant (NaPro is the reproductive science arm of the Creighton Method). She counsels post-abortive women, educates women on how abortion and contraception are “two sides of the same coin,” and encourages them to utilize natural family planning (known outside religious circles as fertility awareness methods, or FAM). She’s also one year into three years of training to become a certified professional midwife. 

Coming Full Circle

Strzesynski’s story is one of coming full circle, shifting from working in an abortion clinic to praying outside clinics. Though she once prescribed contraceptives with the goal of making abortion unnecessary, she recognized that they utilize abortion as a backup for cases of “method failure.” She now promotes evidence-based fertility awareness methods instead.

Her experience is a testament to the power and possibility of gradual growth, transformation, and conversion. The pro-life movement is all the stronger for her continuous courageous willingness to take the next right step.