Testimony of Carol Everett
(This testimony was originally given at a "Meet the
Abortion Providers" workshop sponsored by the Pro-life
Action League of Chicago, directed by Joe Scheidler. Priests
for Life offers their video, "Inside the Abortion Industry,"
containing excerpts of the testimonies of many former providers.
Contact Priests for Life for more details.)
Thank you all for coming. In 1973, when abortion was legalized,
I was married, had an 8 year-old daughter and a 10 year-old
son. Two weeks later, with abortion very much in the news
and everywhere we turned we were still talking about abortion,
I found myself pregnant. When I told my husband, I was excited.
But his initial reaction was, you'll just have to have an
abortion. Because I really didn't want to deal with that with
him, I decided I'd look for someone to help me. I went to
my friend, my doctor, and cried out to him, and said, "Harvey,
Tom doesn't want me to have this baby." And he said,
"Oh, that's easy. You bring Tom's urine in, the pregnancy
test will be negative, we'll do the abortion in the hospital,
and your insurance will pay for it".
What I'm telling you is that this man offered to do an illegal
abortion in the State of Texas and, yes, indeed, we did it.
I was looking for someone to tell me not to have the abortion
and I ran into an abortion salesman. And that's what happens
in our nation today. We're going to talk a lot more about
that, but let's go back to my story and what happened to me.
When I woke from that abortion, I picked up the telephone,
and literally started working from my hospital bed, not realizing
that I was already running from that decision. Within a month
I was having an affair, and that had not been one of my patterns
prior to that time. Very soon I started drinking; I'd not
ever drunk in my life and I would go out and just get drunk
once a month. It was almost like on target; once a month I
had to do it. Very soon I asked my husband to leave, and then
I started seeing a psychiatrist daily.
At the rate of $125.00 an hour, I could not go on with this
very long. So I decided to do what I called, "get hold
of myself." I changed everything I could in my life,
except my children. I got away from the job I'd had; got away
from my husband, and decided I would make it on my own. What
I'm telling you is the story about how my life went along
at a pretty good level for a while, and the moment I had that
abortion, it went straight downhill. And I think that's what
happens to every woman who has an abortion.
One of the things that I want to impress upon you today is,
yes, we do have to save the babies; they're important. But
we're saving the mother, and, yes, we're saving the father.
My ex-husband has been in counseling all this year trying
to deal with this abortion. And we're saving all those family
units in our entire nation. We've got a lot of work ahead
of us.
When I did get hold of myself, I went to work for a nice
Catholic man who had a medical supply business. At about this
time abortion became legal in the State of Texas, and very
soon we had an account on-line that was very profitable for
us. We were making over $1,000 a month profit out of this
account. So he decided that he wanted to look into it to see
exactly what sort of business they were, and yes, indeed,
they were an abortion clinic. So this great Catholic man who
told me he never wanted to see an abortion, never wanted to
know what an abortion really was, opened his first abortion
clinic, and soon he had four. All this time he kept inviting
me to join. He kept saying, come over and do this, come over
and do that; if you'll go out and sell abortions for me, I'll
pay you $10 an abortion, and on and on and on. I kept selling
medical supplies, and finally the day came when I needed to
make more money, and I went in and said, hey, I'm quitting
my job; I want to go with another company. And he said, give
me some time; let me come up with something. So, he got me
on the fringe of the abortion industry by asking me to go
out and set up referral clinics all over Texas, Oklahoma and
Louisiana. And I did that for a while and it was quite profitable.
Then one day the call came: Come into the clinic; I need you
to work in here for a month.
When I got in the clinic I had to decide whether to get involved
in the abortions over here (and I am a scrub tech, so I have
been involved in the medical industry for a long time), or
if I was going to get involved with the numbers. And since
I had that option, I got involved with the numbers. With just
a very few small changes, his abortions went from 190-195
per month to over 400 per month. So then he sent me to another
clinic. I went to his Fort Worth clinic, and yes, we were
soon doubling his abortions over there. The last month I was
with him in those two clinics (by then he had split with his
partner), he was doing something over 800 abortions a month.
I went in and said, hey, look, I've doubled your business,
come on, give me an equity interest in the business. And he
politely said no, and I politely scheduled my hysterectomy,
the kids teeth being fixed, everything his insurance would
pay for, and, by the way, I placed my Yellow Page ad to come
out in six months for my own abortion clinic. We opened and
the first month we did 45; 65; 85, and the last month I was
there, with two clinics functioning in the Dallas area, we
did over 500 abortions a month in that clinic. I was compensated
at the rate of $25.00 per case, plus one-third of the clinic's,
so you can imagine what my motivation was. I sold abortions.
I had made $150,000; was on target in 1983 to make about $260,000;
and when we opened our five clinics, I would have been taking
home about a million dollars a year. I expected to make more
than that after we were really functioning.
All of this sounds neat. I had two kids in college, and I
was alone and I was making plenty of money. But that money
went absolutely nowhere. Taking home that much money a month,
I literally couldn't even pay my utilities. What you've got
to remember is that this is really one of Satan's strongholds.
That money literally ran through my fingers so that my motivation
was to do more abortions to make more money, and on and on
and on.
That's what I think happens with doctors. A banker called
me one time and asked me to go to work for an abortionist
there in the Dallas area. He said he was putting $27,000 a
month in my bank in his account and he can't pay me back what
he owes me. Go to work for him and help me. That's the way
it is. These guys just get in there and it goes on and on.
With Satan in there, we had problems between the partners,
and so if we were going to open these five clinics, I went
to our financial advisors and said we've got to get the partners'
problems straightened out, let's do it. So he called in a
man he told me was a business counselor. This man met with
us for an hour each, brought us back together for a fourth
hour, and had a paper with six points on it. All six of these
points were in my favor, and I thought, boy, I paid you $75.00
an hour long ago when I found you. He told the doctor's live-in
girlfriend to get out of the clinic and stay out and to leave
me alone. But we had to agree to meet with him for four more
weeks, an hour each. On our second visit, I found I couldn't
control him. You know, when you're in the world you control
people, but I couldn't move him. So I suppose out of desperation
I finally asked him the question: Are you a preacher? He said,
yes. I said, what in the world are you doing in here? He said,
God sent me. I said, wait a minute! I'm a Christian; I have
a Bible in my desk; I tithe on all this abortion money, and
I want you to know that God has me in here helping women,
and God doesn't really talk to people anyway.
So, through a long period of discussions, he told me that
indeed God did talk to people. That God had asked him to come
into this situation for 30 days, and through much prayer,
he and his elders had decided that there was indeed someone
in there that the Lord wanted out. And we left in 27 days.
Now that's kind of remarkable. But you don't take this lying,
cheating, stealing on our income tax woman, and just change
her into an angel overnight. And you also don't just walk
away from all of this without looking back. So when I started
telling people that I was leaving the clinic, they started
telling me how crazy I was. They'd say, how are you going
to pay your bills? Of course, I did spend it all. I mean,
you'll never be able to make this much money; you can't even
live on $5,000 a month, and where are you going to make $5,000
anyway?
Then people said, you worked so hard to be here, why? So
I literally fell to my knees in that abortion clinic. At this
point it was: Lord, if there is a Lord, if this is not where
you want me, hit me over the head with a 2 x 4. Now I encourage
people not to ask that because He has a 2 x 4, and my 2 x
4 was a report that Channel 4, a television station in our
area did. They sent their star reporter, Laura Randall, in,
wired for sound. And we so convinced her that she was pregnant
and that yes, she needed an abortion, and we had the answer,
that when she left there the poor girl was so shaken that
she went to another doctor. She was not sure she wasn't pregnant.
And she wasn't pregnant. So we had a five-day report wherein
Laura Randall, wired for sound, came in the abortion clinic
and had our doctor saying, yes, baby, you're pregnant. Come
on, let's do this abortion today. You haven't had anything
to eat, you've got your money, why would you want to come
back tomorrow. Come on, let's do it now. And that was my answer
to prayer.
I didn't understand why. I didn't have enough sense to know,
but I did know that I had a peace about walking out, and I
did know that God did answer prayers. He put me in a wilderness
situation for a long time.
I've got to tell you this, and there is no good way to tell
it. I have tried a million times. From the abortion clinics,
I had a meat market. Now my problem is that I don't very often
call it a meat market. You see, I call it a butcher shop.
So when I say butcher shop, people think I'm talking about
the abortion clinic. But I was involved in the butcher business
for several years, I guess. (That wasn't very funny.) Anyway,
I did go into this butcher shop and I did stay out there and
the Lord worked with me for a very long time. And through
the man who washed my windows in the butcher shop, the Right-to-Life
came into my life. Through a long period of association with
this man who was a seminary student washing my windows, I
finally decided that yes, the Lord did want me to speak out,
and that I would become involved in this Movement. Now what
I do is just go around and tell people the truth about what
really happens inside one of the abortion mills.
There are all sorts of experiences with the abortion. I want
to walk you through my experiences in an abortion clinic.
Let's just step back. How many of you have children 14 and
under? How many of you have seen a number, unsolicited, that
you think you could call that said, "Problem Pregnancy,"
"Abortion Information," or "Pregnant?"
in your area where you think you could call for abortion information?
Let's talk about those kids when they find out that they are
pregnant. They may not want an abortion; they may want information.
But when they call that number that's paid for by abortion
money, what kind of information do you think they're going
to get? Let's remember, they sell abortions. They don't sell
keeping the baby. They don't sell giving the baby up for adoption.
They don't sell delivering that baby in any form. They only
sell abortions.
In the State of Texas, a girl can come in to have an abortion,
and the abortion clinics are not required to have parental
consent. Most of the abortion clinics in Texas do require
it for 14 and under. However, let's paint this picture: The
girl comes in, has an abortion, she can sign for it. But when
the doctor rips her uterus out and they take her to the hospital,
they won't admit her until her parents get there and are told
she had this abortion without their consent. And they will
not repair the damage or try to save her life until the parents
sign on the dotted line. And that happens. It's terrible.
So the girl calls this number and says, I'm pregnant. How
far along are you? What's the first day of your last normal
period? They've got their wheel there and they figure it out.
This counselor is paid to be this girl's friend. She is paid
to be the authority for this girl. She is supposed to seduce
her into a friendship of sorts to sell her the abortion. Every
problem this girl has: I don't want to tell my parents. You
don't have to tell your parents. They don't have to know.
You're old enough to come in and have it without them knowing.
And then the money, and they ask them to go get their money
and pay the people back in a year. Then the two questions
they ask are: Does it hurt? Oh, no. Your uterus is a muscle,
and they hold their hand up if they're seeing them; if not,
they tell them over the phone: It's a cramp to open it; a
cramp to close it; it's a slight cramping sensation. Everybody's
had cramps; every woman in the world. So they think that's
no problem. I can stand that; I've been through it before.
And then they say: Is it a baby? No, it's a product of conception;
it's a blood clot; it's a piece of tissue. They don't even
really tell them it's a fetus, because, you see, that almost
humanizes it too much. It's never a baby. They can't admit
it themselves when they go in the back and have little 6-week
fetuses, babies that they put down disposals, and that's how
we did it in our clinic. The clinics in Dallas use disposals
so none of those crazy Pro-Lifers will come and get them out
of the trash anymore and bury them the way they did. So, they
lie to her. You know, if you look at abortion from the face,
I cannot tell you one thing that happens in an abortion clinic
that is not a lie. They tell the counselors, and I told the
counselors, not to rock the boat; not to answer any questions
that they didn't ask. Get them in here; the faster you can
get them in here, the easier it is on them. You concentrate
on the woman; you tell them to help her, and you don't deal
with the baby at all.
So they get this girl to come in the clinic, and many times
they just get her to come in for a pregnancy test, and if
that's the case then they greet her at the door and they say,
Oh, Linda, I'm so glad you're here. I've been waiting for
you. This girl doesn't know they have an appointment book
and each counselor has to schedule their appointments an hour
apart so she has plenty of time to spend being their "friend"
while they're there. She takes them back; she does the pregnancy
test; it doesn't really matter. If there's any way they can
convince this girl she's pregnant, she's going to be pregnant.
But they go through this test anyway. She tells her she's
pregnant, and the girl might cry. She may get upset. But they
take her into a separate room; they don't want anyone to see
anyone crying in there; it's supposed to be a great place;
we're supposed to help people in the abortion clinic.
If she has the abortion that day, she goes through one procedure,
but if she comes back another day, she just comes in the front
door, fills out some forms (very minimal information). Most
of the information on that form is name, address, telephone
number, and your financial status. So they can find out to
what group they need to appeal with their $250,000 per clinic
Yellow Page budget.
Then the girl goes back, has some lab work, and then she
pays, up-front, for what they have decided the term of pregnancy
she is. Cash, Master Card, or Visa--get a Master Card, Visa
or American Express. You might consider sending them back
because they do charge for abortions, and tell them why you're
sending them back. They will accept those charges. Then the
girl goes into this room for counseling and they give her
a 6 to 12-page form. This form is written by an abortion attorney.
Ours was written by one out of New York, and it was written
to confuse the girl to death. It had every possible complication
of an abortion you could imagine, and it would take [a doctor]
two hours with a medical dictionary to go through it. Words
two inches long that no one could possibly understand, and
it does its job. It confuses her and she doesn't ask any questions.
She goes back to the two questions: Does it hurt? Is it a
baby? And when you have convinced her again and lied to her
again that no, it's not going to hurt, and if she doesn't
have her money--in the State of Texas you have to pay extra
to be put to sleep--it's an extra $100 to $250, depending
on how far you are into the pregnancy.
Then she goes into this holding room, waiting for the abortion.
And it depends on the day of the week, of course, as to how
many people are in there. Saturday is the big day, but it
could be a day in the week when there are only five or six
people in there waiting. And soon, if there are 30 or 40,
especially, they kind of number each other so they know what
order they are going to be going out in. They kind of laugh
and joke. And if there is one crying in there, you get that
one out. You don't want that one affecting the rest of them.
She is taken back to the procedure room, put on the table,
and draped. Her chart is put in the door. Each chart in our
clinics was handled with a little coupon on the front. The
coupon was for the doctor, because when he walks up to that
door for the first time--if you have two or three doctors
working, you don't know which one is going to do the abortion--so,
they don't collect the doctor's money with the clinic money,
they collect it separately and do not show it on any of the
records in those clinics. In the four clinics I've been in
and worked in, they never showed that they collected the doctor's
money at any place. That way, they are independent contractors;
you don't have to be concerned with their malpractice insurance,
and you don't have to report it to IRS. He collects the coupon,
puts it in his scrub suit pocket. At the end of the day he
goes up and presents his coupons. This is how many I've done.
And each doctor presents them separately. The girl counts
the coupons, figures out how much she owes him, and pays him
in cash.
As I said earlier, I have seen doctors walk out after three
hours work and split $4,500 between them on a Saturday morning.
More, if you go longer into the day, of course. The doctor
walks in, sees the patient for the very first time, pats her
on the leg, says, Hi, baby, how are you? You call them "baby"
so you don't have to remember their name. And she says, Oh,
I'm scared, or, I'm cold. Never anything positive. And he
doesn't really ask her any questions. It's just get the abortion
done. If he discovers that she may be farther along than anyone
thought she was, they stop right there, collect the money,
and then finish the procedure.
If abortion is such a good thing, why don't they give them
away? If abortion is such a good thing, why don't they go
ahead and do the abortion then, and trust you to pay the extra
$200 when they're finished? That's not the way it is. I've
never been able to come up with the words to describe the
abortion procedure, because, you see, you're educating people
about abortion. You know more about it than the average person.
However, no matter how bad you think abortion is, there are
no words to describe how bad it really is. It kills the baby.
And, yes, I've seen sonograms with the baby pulling away from
the instruments that are introduced into the vagina. And the
woman, the mother, is hurt if she doesn't have the extra money
to be put to sleep, and I've seen D&Es through 32 weeks
done without the mother being put to sleep. And, yes, they
hurt, and they are very painful to the baby. But, yes, they
are very, very painful to the woman. I've seen six people
hold a woman on the table while they did her abortion.
But, they have the abortion and they go to the recovery room,
and then there are two reactions in the recovery room. The
first one is: I've killed my baby. And even then, it amazed
me that that was the first time they called it a baby and
the first time they called it murder. But, you know, as bad
as that sounds, that's probably the healthiest reaction. That
woman is probably going to have the ability to walk out of
there and deal with it, and perhaps be healed and go on.
And now, in Europe, where they've had abortions for much,
much longer than we have, there are some authorities in the
Netherlands who are alluding to a spiritual healing that women
have to go through before they can completely deal with their
abortion. So they're getting closer day by day by day. But
the second reaction is: I am hungry, you kept me in here for
four hours and you told me I'd only be here for two; let me
out of here. Now that woman is doing what I did. She's running
from her abortion. She's not dealing with it; she's choosing
to deny it, and she's the woman that we read all the statistics
about, post-abortion syndrome. They say now it's an average
of five years before people actually deal with the fact that,
yes, they did kill their baby. And yes, they do have to deal
with that.
You know, I go back to my own personal healing, which just
started a year ago. I was making deals with God. I didn't
want to talk about my own abortion. Then when I finally did
deal with it, I cried nonstop for five months because, you
see, I killed my baby, and I'm still not through that. And
how difficult it is for all these women because, you see,
I believe that every woman, even if she's not physically harmed,
is harmed by abortion.
Then what the recovery room personnel do is resell it. They
resell them on their next abortion. They don't say, hey, I'm
reselling you so you'll go out and get pregnant and come back.
But they make subtle innuendos that say, you know, this isn't
going to happen again, but, you know we're always here. And
when you leave here you're going to have a couple of days
when you won't feel so good. You'll have a couple of days
of depression, and that's just your hormones realigning, and
everyone who has a baby has postpartum depression, and don't
worry about it. And there they are encouraging them to suppress
their feelings about that abortion.
So they go through this whole gamut of reselling abortion,
encouraging suppression, and say, call us if you have a problem.
And the girls leave, and they do have problems.
The girls that walk out of there, though, are the lucky ones.
We were seeing over 500 abortions per month; we were doing
the only one-day second or third trimester abortion in the
state of Texas. (We didn't call it third; we called it second.)
Meaning that we didn't use the laminaria. We did all the dilation
on that day, and that's why we were seeing such a tremendous
number of complications. We saw complications in the second
and third trimester, but we were seeing one per 500 abortions
for over a year. Yes, we had a death. A 32 year-old woman
with a 17 year-old son and a 2 year-old son. Never made the
papers. Her boyfriend felt guilty for his part in the abortion
and he didn't want to deal with it. Her family thought, yes,
she had probably had an abortion, but they didn't want to
deal with it. It never came out. No lawsuit.
The 21-year-old that danced in, and I'll never forget her
for as long as I live. She was my son's age. Danced in to
get her "problem" taken care of. Had the extra money
to be put to sleep. And you see, my job with two of those
doctors was to put my right hand on the baby and hold it while
they did the abortion so I could tell them where the head
was and where the legs were, and all of that. And I had my
hand on that woman's stomach, and that baby was perfectly
inside her uterus; she had been examined by the doctor; and
he said, yes, the baby was inside her uterus and everything
was fine and she was 24-weeks. And he went in one time, and
he pulled out placenta, and he went in the second time and
he went through the back of her uterus and pulled her bowel
out through her vagina. We put her in the car because we didn't
want an ambulance in front of the abortion clinic and we took
her to the hospital. Seven doctors worked on her and they
did a colostomy on her. When the reports came back, they said
that it was an abdominal pregnancy that had not been in the
uterus, and seven doctors and a pathologist concurred with
that, and then the hospital wrote off her bill, and there
was no lawsuit, ever. She was told that had been a normal
complication; it was just amazing that she'd made it that
long. And she didn't know any better. And then the girl that
the doctors decided had a fibroid tumor at the back of her
uterus. That's a highly common tumor that's very rarely malignant.
And the two doctors decided they were just going to pull this
out after she had her abortion, and they didn't know they
were pulling on the back of her uterus, and they pulled the
uterus out wrong-side-out of a 21- year-old; she had a hysterectomy.
Those are the ones that I remember. Those are the ones that
bother me. Those are the ones that I have to go through and
deal with and be healed of constantly. Because, you see, it
was like the mothers were presenting their babies to be killed.
And it was okay to kill 500 babies a month. But when we started
killing or maiming a mother for each 500 babies, even I couldn't
handle that.
There are two problems that are going on that we might be
able to do something with, too. That is, that abortion clinics,
if they have someone that does present themselves thinking
they're pregnant and of course the test show they're not;
that they're going to sell that abortion to that non-pregnant
woman. And every time that you are standing in front of an
abortion clinic, you are holding a light on inside that clinic.
You are holding those people accountable and that day they
are less likely to do the woman who is not pregnant because
they're scared of you. They think these crazy Pro-Lifers are
going to run in, chain themselves to the table. We had seven
locks or something from the front door to the back. They are
less likely to do that woman who is too far along that day
too, because, you see, when the babies are so big they don't
come apart like the others. Their muscle structure is strong
that the heads come off from the body, and you can't dispose
of those in the disposal. You have to put those in the trash.
And we used to take ours over to opposition abortion clinics'
trash and hope they'd be found there.
But every time you're in front, you're holding that light
on. They slow down. An abortionist who brags and thinks he
can do eight to ten, maybe even twelve abortions an hour,
with a picketer in front of him, will slow down. Do four,
six, three, something--but he'll slow down. He's afraid of
you.
If there is good medical care inside an abortuary, the day
you're standing out there is the day it happens. And you asked
me how I feel about what you do? First of all, in Dallas,
Texas, we have a guy named Winston Wilder, and thank you,
Lord, for Winston. When I finally got over the right side...
That's another thing, you don't see the defectors from the
Pro-Life side to the abortion side, did you ever notice that?
The defection's this way, and there are a lot of them. Winston
and I sat down and I gave him all the names, addresses, telephone
numbers, business offices (because many times their partners
do not even know they do abortions). We had one guy called
in from the Bahamas because they suddenly started picketing
his office, and his partner didn't know he did abortions in
the clinics. At their private homes, many times their wives
do not know they do abortions. Many times their mother-in-law
doesn't know they're doing abortions. Many times the maid
doesn't know they're doing abortions. Their neighbors, of
course, rarely know. But that's the most effective thing.
Picket them where they live. The clinics, yes, because it
is my firm conviction that every day abortion is done and
we're not standing in front of the abortion clinic, that we
are held accountable. We must be there doing what they say
that we should do.
But even more important than that, I believe at their homes
and their private clinics where they're going in and being
closet abortionists. We do have responsibility; it's pretty
clearly laid out to us. I'm just so delighted to meet people
who are out there doing it.
Thank God for you'all. |
