Planned Parenthood cares as much about women as Coca-Cola cares whether you really do smile when you consume one of its sugary beverages. Any statements the organization makes with regard to “women’s health,” “empowering women” or what have you, should be seen for the corporate advertising slogans that they are. At its core, Planned Parenthood is a (taxpayer-subsidized) retail franchiser with one product at the heart of its business plan: abortion on demand.
So the recent revelations in The New York Times that Planned Parenthood shuns, harasses and retaliates against pregnant employees over the inconveniences that arise from their nurturing new human life are not much of a shock. The last thing a high-volume burger joint wants to have is a roomful of employees munching on salads all day in front of the customers.
Heartless Employer
The Times describes how pregnant PP employees were denied frequent rest breaks, badgered for taking maternity leave and forced to deal with other workplace hardships. There is more at play here than mere employee persecution, however. The most informative part of the article features former Miami employees relating how a hostile work environment openly discouraged staff members from getting pregnant in the first place.
A former Miami PP staffer told The Times that fearful employees would tell supervisors that they were homosexual or single to allay any suspicion on management’s part that they would become pregnant while on the job. “It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” Carolina Delgado said. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Beyond the anti-life ideology that is a natural part of Planned Parenthood, sheer business necessity demands such an atmosphere. Despite the lies spun by the abortion Goliath, clinic employees are not there to put a human face on women’s health care. They are there to aggressively promote a constant flow of customer purchases and to attend to the stark, inhuman details of the grisly procedure involved every time a sale is made.
Vile Job
Former PP clinic staffer Abby Johnson now works to help ex-employees recover from their time working at the abortion equivalent of a fast-food chain. In a 2017 op-ed piece for The Hill, she described an ex-employee named Rhyan, who had recently left a Kansas PP franchisee that “only offers abortions and pregnancy tests.”
Rhyan told Johnson that staffers were repeatedly instructed on the need to “increase their revenue” at the clinic. “We were told that we needed to push abortion services, as that was the service that generated the most income,” Rhyan said.
After the sales push comes the need for staffers to make sure the abortion is fully capitalized upon. This is otherwise known as the “pieces of children” part of the job. Former Planned Parenthood worker Catherine Adair wrote a book in 2017 called Shockwaves: Abortion’s Wider Circle of Victims. Sarah Terzo at pro-life website Live Action quoted from the book’s descriptions of life as a PP clinic employee:
“Women were not counseled about their options … They weren’t given any information about fetal development and if they asked any questions, we lied to them … We were told not to say the words abortion, fetus, baby or embryo.”
Obviously, you don’t want a visibly pregnant saleswoman attending to this part of the business plan.
And then, once the baby was ripped from its mother’s womb, the nurses were left to perform a grim task. “After the abortion it was the nurse’s job to look through the remains of the baby for what is called ‘products of conception,'” Adair wrote. “We used to joke and call them ‘pieces of children.’ This is the abortion industry. This is reproductive justice.”[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]…you don’t want a visibly pregnant saleswoman attending to this part of the business plan.[/perfectpullquote]
The problem here is not that Planned Parenthood is a company that neglects its pregnant employees. It is that the duties to be performed at a Planned Parenthood abortion joint provide unique challenges that make the job totally unfit for such workers in the first place. This is a fact of which management is well aware. Taken all together, this paints a picture of a work environment that prefers callous, desensitized and emotionally numb automatons as employees to work the assembly line of retail abortion.
Bearing new life most certainly puts an employee outside the “corporate culture” of this particularly unseemly business model. Beyond the sloganeering, there is an ugly day-to-day routine to this industry that takes an extremely high toll on those involved. And this cannot be hidden forever. Proclaiming to care for women with a strident voice while decrying and punishing the choice of pregnancy is more than just hypocritical; it is cruel mental violence that should not go unquestioned.
