Former Deliberate Parenthood Employee Says Abortion Biz Lies to Girls

In 2012, I interviewed former Planned Parenthood worker Catherine Adair. I thought now might be a good time to revisit her story.

Reasons for Working at Planned Parenthood

Adair began working at Planned Parenthood in 1997. I asked her what her views on abortion were before she was hired, and she responded:

I really didn’t have any feelings on it; I was much more concerned about feminism and women’s rights, and I felt that abortion, as a politic[al] issue, was part of the feminist framework of forwarding women’s rights.

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I didn’t have any understanding that abortion could/did have any negative implications for women, and I certainly didn’t consider the baby involved.

Adair herself had an abortion several years before she started at Planned Parenthood, and says that, looking back, it “greatly affected” her views.

According to Adair, “I had found [the abortion] highly traumatizing, and my way of dealing with the emotional aftermath was to bury it and not deal with my emotions.”

Some former abortion workers who have had past abortions told me that surrounding themselves with people who wholeheartedly supported abortion helped ease their guilt. Also, each time they helped another pregnant person have an abortion, they said, they validated their own.

Jewels Green, another former abortion worker, had a very traumatic abortion and was devastated by it. Part of the reason she became an abortion worker was in a misguided effort to help provide a better experience for other women.

Green told her story in a short memoir published on Amazon Kindle, which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be available for purchase anymore. I hope to write more about her in the future.

Adair discovered that Planned Parenthood was advertising for employees just as she was finishing her education in college. She says she “jumped at the chance” to work at Planned Parenthood because, to her, “Planned Parenthood represented the feminist movement.”

The Planned Parenthood center where she worked was “almost exclusively an abortion clinic. Abortions were performed all day, every day.”

Abortion “Counseling”

Part of Adair’s job was to conduct pre-abortion “counseling.” This “counseling” was done after the pregnant person had paid for her abortion. According to Adair, “The counseling was not meant to be an opportunity to discuss the woman’s decision to abort. It was merely a pre-operative screening.”

In the session, Adair went over a health questionnaire with the patient, took the patient’s blood pressure and pulse, described the abortion procedure (very selectively, without giving any information about the baby), and made sure the patient chose a birth control method (and, presumably, paid for it) before leaving the facility.

According to Adair:

I never once asked what had led the woman to choose abortion – the attitude was that she was already there, so she must be sure. We did have to ask her if she was aware she could continue her pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption, but we didn’t get into any options counseling.

We never discussed fetal development. The baby was referred to as the “contents of the uterus” or a “clump of cells.”

In an editorial in the Washington Examiner, Adair said that she was instructed to use these terms by her bosses at Planned Parenthood. She says, “I was continuously reminded that when referring to the baby, the appropriate terminology was ‘clump of cells’ or ‘contents of the uterus.’”

In her interview with me, Adair described how she would respond when someone asked questions about the baby’s development:

On the rare occasion a woman asked about the size of the baby, I would tell her it was about the size of the tip of my pencil, regardless of how many weeks into her pregnancy she was.

The facility where Adair worked performed abortions through the second trimester. She handled fetal remains and saw dismembered arms, legs, hands, and feet with toes. She knew her answer was misleading and, often, an outright lie.

The Planned Parenthood facility where Adair worked rarely did ultrasounds. They only did them when pregnant people were unsure how far along their pregnancies were (the length of the pregnancy and the size of the baby determine the abortion method), or the doctor ordered one.

People coming in for abortions were never offered the chance to see the ultrasound screen.

The Exploitation of Women

Adair believes that Planned Parenthood exploited women when they were vulnerable. In the Washington Examiner, she says they took “specific advantage” of pregnant people who were “too young or misinformed” to know better than to trust them.

She says:

My superiors constantly reminded me of our abortion-centered business model: abortions first, everything else came second.

I began to recognize their emphasis on performing abortions each time a woman would express concern or have second thoughts about having an abortion. When I notified management, though, they told me not to worry and [to] encourage her decision to move ahead with the procedure.

Adair wrapped up her article by writing:

Planned Parenthood’s mission is to pressure as many women into having an abortion as it can…

There is no counseling, no care, no waiting, and no discussion. Once a pregnancy is confirmed, it is off to termination.

She is not the only former Planned Parenthood worker to come to this conclusion.

I will have more about Adair and her time at Planned Parenthood in a future Substack article.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.