ex-abortionists: Why they quit, The

Human Life Review, Spring 2000 by Meehan, Mary

Dr. McMillan and others decided that the answer to crisis pregnancies is helping women with counseling, prenatal and obstetrical care, and other assistance. Many of the ex-abortionists do volunteer work for pregnancy aid centers started by pro-life activists in the past thirty years. What if such centers had been started by senior doctors and medical professors sixty years ago? It seems fair to say that millions of children's lives would have been saved, and women and health professionals would have been spared much guilt and grief.

For many people who became involved in abortion, however, it was not because they had been abused as children or because they wanted to help women. Some of the doctors started doing abortions simply because this was expected in their residency training or because they wanted to be agreeable to their medical partners. Dr. David Brewer described himself as having "no real convictions" and being "caught in the middle" when he became involved in abortion as a young resident. Dr. McArthur Hill, involved as a young Air Force surgeon, later said that his participation "was not as an avid abortion proponent, but as a reluctant puppet in a world gone berserk."30

Money was certainly a major incentive for some. Dr. Noreen Johnson became medical director of a California abortion clinic in the late 1970s when she was still a hospital resident. Averaging 30 to 40 abortions a week, she was making $70,000 to $80,000 per year from abortions alone. That was over twice as much as her resident's salary of roughly $30,000 per year. By 1994 the main doctor at a North Dakota abortion clinic made $100,000 a year while working there only two days per week.31

Carol Everett described herself as consumed by greed during her years in the abortion industry. When she surpassed her first goal of two hundred abortions per month at her clinic and $5,000 per month for herself,

I already had my sights set on my next six-month goal-four hundred abortions and ten thousand dollars a month in take-home pay by the end of March, 1982. When I got there, I planned to reward myself with a new Oldsmobile Toronado . . .

Insanely, I kept pushing to do more abortions and "bigger" ones. I was hopelessly hooked by the love of money and what it could do for me next. After remodeling my home, I planned to buy two new sports cars for the children. I was consumed with the thought of all the things I was going to do . . . and blithely forgetful of the honors we were committing at the clinic.32

Hellen Pendley recalled that "I walked in the laboratory every day. I saw dead babies every day for three years. . . . If I could see fifty, I was so happy. Because, you know what? That meant I was really gonna have a good bonus in my next paycheck."33

At the other end of the payscale were single mothers who could not easily leave their jobs even if they became assailed by doubts about what they were doing. When Joy Davis was hiring staff for Thomas Tucker's chain of abortion clinics, she looked for single mothers who "needed us and needed the money. That way, I knew that I would have their loyalty and that they would stick with it no matter how tough it got.."34