A woman who used to work at an abortion clinic did not see any problem with her job at first – until she got transferred to the clinic’s pathology lab.
Jackie said she used to work at the clinic’s reception desk, and her duties mainly involved “checking patients in and out.” While all of it seemed ordinary, her world changed when she was moved to the pathology lab, where she witnessed the gruesome realities that made her realize “everything I believed about the abortion industry was wrong,” Live Action News reported.
Jackie was one of the women featured in the nonprofit organization And Then There Were None’s (ATTWN) webcast, where she shared her story. The webcast was aired December 21, 2015.
The pathology lab, according to her, is the place where a worker conducts an inventory of “the body parts of the fetus that comes out of the woman.”
She had a number of responsibilities there.
“The first part of that job is … inventorying the parts,” she said, “and the second also involves inventorying the parts to determine if they are intact enough to be harvested and sold.”
It doesn’t end there.
“The third part is doing a checklist such as the head, the arms, the torso, the legs, and you send it to the doctor to let him know that the abortion was complete,” Jackie said.
Being exposed to these things affected her so much that she felt “disgusted and discouraged”with herself and the things she had done. Three days into her new assignment, she felt she “had just about as much as my heart, and my soul, and my stomach could stand.”
“I can’t even think of anything that is a worse feeling than having experienced what you see in those clinics, and that’s not something everyone can relate to unless you worked inside of one,” Jackie said.
On that day, as she walked to the clinic’s parking lot on her way home, she heard a man from ATTWN say something that was so unlike the angry comments of other pro-life protesters who called the workers murderers as they walked out of the clinic.
“You don’t have to do this anymore,” the man said to the abortion clinic workers who walked to their cars. “There are organizations that can help you, you know … feel free to reach out to us anytime.”
When Jackie got home, she cried. She thought about leaving her job, but she did not feel financially secure to do so. And she prayed – something she had not done for a very long time.
She sought help online by typing “abortion clinic worker help” into Google and saw ATTWN, a pro-life, nonprofit organization that specifically helps people like her to leave the abortion industry.
She got connected with the organization, and she was given a mentor who advised her on how she could quit.
Upon resigning from her job, Jackie felt like “an enormous burden” was lifted off her. She felt some kind of cleansing that took a heavy weight from her spirit. Now she wants to take every chance to tell people about what she had learned.
“You know I’ve seen some really nasty things and we have to do something about this. Because this isn’t okay, this isn’t all right,” she said.
Jackie’s story is proof that abortion affects not only the parents, but also the clinic workers.
According to an article from LifeSiteNews, an abortion clinic worker found the experience of dealing with abortion tissue “really hard,” primarily because “it looks like a baby … You can see a face and hands and ears and eyes and, you know…feet and toes.”
The article also said abortion clinic workers commonly reported having nightmares and feeling a deep sense of guilt and loneliness. It ends with a reminder that pro-lifers should reach out to abortion clinic workers with compassion, because some of them could be suffering in silence.
