Behind the Scenes of an Abortion Clinic: Ex-Director Speaks by Carol Everett

Carol Everett entered the abortion industry in Texas during the 1970’s. Prior to this, she herself underwent an abortion under pressure from her husband and doctor. This event had a devastating effect on her family and emotional life.

She entered the abortion industry reluctantly at first by working with a partner who directed four abortion clinics. Under the guise of offering sexual counseling, she would direct women to their offices in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Later, she took over the direct oversight of these clinics and increased their killings from 200 to 800 per month. Finally, due to the lucrative nature of the business, she left and set up several clinics of her own and earned approximately $150,000.00 a year. At the time she quit, she was overseeing the death of about 550 babies per month.

God is merciful to us all, and He opened Carol’s eyes to what she was doing. She turned from her sin and now faithfully serves Christ. She now lectures and fights in the battle against baby-killing. Her amazing testimony was aired on Dr. James Dobson’s radio program, Focus On the Family across the nation in 1988. We have, with permission excerpted a major portion of that devastating testimony for our readers. We hope that the Lord will continue to use Carol Everett mightily in this battle.

In this section of her testimony, she rehearses, sometimes through tears, some of the behind-the-scenes activities which she witnessed and directed in her clinics.

….Let’s talk about what happens when they call [a woman calls the abortion clinic]. First of all, these people spend a lot of money on advertising, getting people to call them. It’s very important. Look at all your Yellow pages. In every one of them there are abortion ads and the free 800 numbers. Those things cost them a lot of money, so we know that they’re spending a lot of money there.

When they call, the calls are answered by people who are paid by the abortion clinics. Now the reason we know that there’s deception here is that these people are not paid by Pro-Life people. Their checks are written by Pro-Choice or Pro-Death people, whichever way you want to look at it. Their motivation is certainly to get new patients in there, and they are instructed not to rock-the-boat. They are told that they are not to answer any questions that they [potential patients] don’t ask. Meaning, if they don’t ask, “Does it hurt,” don’t tell them. As a matter of fact, if they ask if it hurts you say, “No. It’s a slight cramping sensation. Your uterus is a muscle and there’s a small cramp to open it and a small cramp when you close it, and it’s nothing.” When in fact it’s excruciatingly painful.

Another thing that callers ask is, “Is it a baby?” And the stat answer is, “No.” Now they may call it something different –the “products of conception,” a “blood clot,””tissue,” anything, maybe even “a fetus” but never “a baby.” And those people in there know it’s a baby.

I want to tell you something else here. You know those little feet pins? Those things used to irritate me to death when I was in the abortion business. I could not stand them. I would go into the grocery store and this little girl in the line, about sixteen, would have those feet on, and every time I would just go crazy, because she was shining truth on me. And I couldn’t understand it, but I hated them.

So people call, and here’s this girl, and they answer their phones, many of them twenty-four hours a day. We answered ours twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And this girl on the other end of the line has just found out she’s pregnant, and she’s scared to death. And all she wants is an answer. She may not even know that she’s calling an abortion clinic. She may think that she’s calling a crisis pregnancy center. But she gets this person on the other end of the line, who deceives into thinking that she’s her friend, who sounds like the authority on abortion, who sounds like an authority on unwanted pregnancy. This woman is an authority figure to her, just like my doctor was to me. And she has all the answers, “Come on in and have an abortion.” That’s exactly what she’s doing; she’s inviting her in for an abortion.

And so this poor little girl is scared to death. Here’s this person with the answers, so she’s going to make the appointment and go in. And when she gets there, they ask her to fill out a few forms. And they’re very sweet to her and nice to her. They hug her, and she thinks it’s love because she so scared she doesn’t know the difference. They take her back to the lab, and they do a pregnancy test and prick her finger. And they’re all patting her and being nice to her. So she thinks she’s in the right place.

They could do her pregnancy test many times, but before they get the results back, they’ll send her back up to the front to pay. She goes up, pays, and they give her a counselling form. She’s put in this room to read this six or twelve page form. They say, “Okay, read through this. Mark the left margin if you have any questions. And I’ll be back in a minute to explain it to you.” Here’s this poor little girl, scared to death that her parents are going to find out, maybe even her husband, or something else. But fear is certainly motivating or gripping her at this point. They give her this form. She reads this thing about all these things that could kill her. It scares her even more, so she just immediately signs this form just as quickly as she can. The counselor comes back in and says, “Do you have any questions?” and she says, “No.” Or sometimes she’ll say, “Does it hurt?” And the pat answer I have given you, “No, it’s a small cramping sensation.” “Is it a baby?” “No, product of conception, blood clot, etc.”

“What do you do with it?” “Well, we send it to the lab.” They put it in the garbage disposal, but they don’t tell her that. Sometimes they’ll even charge her for additional lab work because there is something wrong with it, but very very few ever go to the lab. They stopped using the trash receptacles because we crazy right-to-lifers would fish them out and go bury them. So now they put them down the garbage disposal, at least in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Here she is scared to death. She finally has her counselling form signed. They give her medication. If she wants to be put to sleep they’ll charge her an extra hundred or hundred and fifty dollars. If she just wants to take the oral medication, they have samples that they’ve gotten from somewhere.

Then she’s taken into a room, and the so-called counselor goes with her. They tell her that the counselor is there to be her friend and helper. The counselor is there to keep her quiet. So the people who are being aborted in the other rooms can’t hear her screaming, if she starts to scream.

And they tell her to breathe in and out, and they do all the Lamaze methods and all those things, so they can try to control her to some degree.

She’s on the table scared to death, so tense she can’t stand it. The doctor comes in, sometimes says hello, sometimes says nothing. The people in the room laugh and joke because you’ve got to remember these people are having trouble with what they’re doing too. If you kill babies for a living, you have to deal with it some way. And they deal with it in different ways — by laughing, joking, turning the radio up so loud in the room so that no one can hear them or think about what’s going on. The nurses dance, the doctors joke — “Here’s looking at you!” when an eye goes through the tube. All sorts of things. But they have to deal with it, and that’s what they do.

So they start the procedure and sometimes she’ll scream, and sometimes she’ll just lie there and weep. But then they get her up and send her to the recovery room. And there are two different kinds of reactions in the recovery room. It’s amazing to me that some of them say, “I’ve killed my baby.” But that’s the first time they ever call it a baby. That’s the first time they ever think about killing it. But many of them do.

Now I think that the girls that do that are probably going to be healthier about it. They are probably going to deal with it to some degree almost immediately. But then there are the other people — the people like me — the people who run and don’t deal with it, who say, “Hey, let me out of here, I want to go get something to eat. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten in hours.” Those people are closing the doors, and they don’t want to deal with it at all. Those people go out to run like I did, for maybe as many as fourteen years.

There are so many statistics on Post-Abortion syndrome. I believe that it’s five to seven years that is the average time that a woman deals with an abortion. But they don’t deal with it right away. We need to pray for those women. They are deceived, and we need to take them the Lord’s love.

There are two other things I’d like to talk about. There are women who come in and have abortions but aren’t pregnant. You may say, “Oh, that doesn’t happen.” Maybe you say that. It does happen. First of all, this woman thinks she’s pregnant. She’s scheduled herself for an abortion. She’s come in and her pregnancy test is negative. They have a woman that they have paid their advertising dollars to get in there. They want to do that abortion if there is any way.

So they do everything they can to prove that she’s pregnant or has been pregnant. You say “has been pregnant?” Yes, if they can convince her that she has been pregnant, that she’s had a spontaneous abortion. She’s going to have to go into the hospital to have a D&C to remove the rest of the contents of her uterus. They will convince her to go ahead and have a procedure she doesn’t need that day. And it happens. Channel four [Dallas-FortWorth] got it on tape — a woman that went directly from our office to a doctor’s office and the doctor told her that she was and had never been pregnant, and we had tried to do an abortion on her. I don’t know what percentage that is. I have no idea…

The other thing [I want to discuss] are the ones that are too big. The ones that are over what they call their legal limit of twenty-four weeks or whatever it is in your state. These women come in — young girls, teenagers, deny that they were ever pregnant, deny that they are pregnant — they come into the clinic almost in maternity clothes literally. So big, and the doctor looks at them, checks them out, and if he can get a picture on the sonogram that shows that they are within his range — a picture that he can put in the chart — he will do that abortion.

There are babies that weigh over a pound and a half, certainly viable babies, that are aborted in the state of Texas, simply because the doctor can get a picture that he can do.

And you’ve got to remember that the doctors make roughly a third of the fee. The clinics I was involved in paid in cash. They did not collect it through the clinic and show it paid out to the doctor. What we did was write out two receipts to the girl. One for the doctor’s fee, of which we kept no record, and one for the clinic’s fee for which we did have a record.

We had three doctors working on Saturday, and on a coupon system, they attached a coupon to a chart. The charts were kept in a central area. And when one of the rooms was available, that doctor’s assistant would pull out a chart and take it in there. When the doctor came to the door, when the girl was ready for the abortion, he would go in take the coupon off the chart, fold it, and put it in his pocket. At the end of the day he would take his little coupons up and redeem them for the number of abortions he had done…

In our clinic a doctor could easily make $1,500.00 on a Saturday. We charged $750.00 for what I call a third trimester abortion. And the doctor got $250.00 of that. So we would have doctors scheduling abortions at 7:00 in the morning, 11:00 at night, if they could get me to do it in the clinic. And needless to say, because of my motivation, I would do it at any hour they wanted to. We also did abortions seven days a week. Sunday was our most profitable day. It was the fastest day in and out. People just wanted to get their abortion and get out.

I’ve seen babies aborted — we had one that was so big it wouldn’t go down the disposal. We had one that was so big that it came out in two pieces. The head and a body. I sat down with a doctor not long ago and he told me that it was probably almost a term baby, simply because of what I could remember about it and specifics.

We can talk about injuries; we talk about things that happen inside abortion clinics. There are probably more deaths in the nation than we will ever know, because when someone dies inside an abortion clinic, the person who brought her in doesn’t rush out and say, “Hey, I took her in for an abortion, and she died” — i.e. she’s dead and I’m responsible. That doesn’t happen. The parents don’t say, “We took our daugher in for an abortion, and she died.” When a girl dies from an abortion in an abortion clinic, the clinic has help in covering up, because the family does not want to stand up and take responsibility, and they don’t want to face the press. So there’s really a cover up in our nation of the number of people who are aborted and who are able to get away with that. Doctors do not report it, and many cities do not require autopsies. So the truth is never known about that.

Although there are a lot of women you hear of — several women in Dallas recently — but only the ones who slip through. We had a death in our clinic — a thirty-two year old woman with a sixteen and a two year old child. It never got in the papers. It never got out anywhere. Nobody ever knew…except us.

There was one girl who was twenty-one years old. My son was twenty-one at the time. A beautiful girl, she came dancing in, I’ll never forget her. She laid down on the table…and I — my position in this and you may think, “Oh well, she doesn’t know; she was always up front.” No, let me tell you, I was in the room. I was right there with the doctor. My right hand is what held those babies in place — the big ones. There were two doctors that didn’t do big abortions unless I held the baby. And what you do is you hold it in place so that he can feel. You tell him where the head is, you tell him where the buttocks are, you tell him where everything is.

And I had my hand on this girl’s stomach, and the sonogram showed that it was a perfect interuterine pregnancy, meaning that it was inside the uterus, and everything was normal. And the doctor went in one time and pulled out the placenta…and the second time he went in he came out with her bowel… and he pulled it through her vagina.

And we took her to the hospital. She had a colostomy. She called me weeks later and told me she didn’t feel pretty. And I knew why she didn’t feel pretty. There was no lawsuit filed. There was nothing done. There were seven doctors involved in that. If you pull those hospital records today, they will show that she had an abdominal pregnancy. Meaning that they all said collectively that that baby was inside her stomach — in her abdomen, in her colon. And it was not. And we knew that. But if you pull her chart, all that’s been changed. You can’t find any record.

If you pull the chart of the woman that died, it will show that her blood pressure was always normal. That when we dismissed her, there was no reason to ever question that anything might happen to her, when in fact we’d had problems. She had had problems before she left.

We encourage you to write to Focus on the Family for Carol Everett’s full testimony. Send inquiries to: Focus on the Family, Pomona, CA 91799. Request tape CS 429. The suggested donation is $5.00. Copyright © by Covenant Community Church of Orange County 1990