Antonia Tully, Blogpost

“No one grows up wanting to work in an abortion clinic”, says Abby Johnson, the US abortion worker turned high profile pro-life advocate. Since 2009, her organisation, “And then there were none”, has helped over 600 abortion workers move into employment that doesn’t involve killing tiny human beings.

The grisly nature of abortion work

It seems that here, in Britain, abortion work is not the number one choice for employment either. In 2021, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) reported that it was struggling to meet a surge in demand for abortion for second-trimester abortions. According to BPAS, “growing numbers” of women are being forced to keep their babies because of a lack of abortion appointments. This is due, in part, to “problems with staffing”. Whatever else may be impacting staff shortages, it is not surprising that staff don’t want to be part of a procedure that destroys a fully formed human baby.

Staff retention is a problem for the abortion industry. Pro-abortion academics see the Abortion Act 1967 as a barrier to “the creation of a sustainable workforce”.[1] It’s unclear why the Act, which is so widely flouted as to allow around 200,000 abortions per year in England and Wales, should be such an impediment. The grisly nature of abortion work is far more likely to be why recruiting and retaining staff in abortion facilities is such a problem.

A scarcity of doctors was highlighted in 2019, when Professor Lesley Regan, then President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, bemoaned the lack of doctors willing to take part in abortion procedures. Professor Regan put the unwillingness of junior doctors to specialise in abortion down to “vilification from anti-abortionists” and, interestingly, “criticism from colleagues”. While Professor Regan regrets the shortage of doctors with abortion experience, there is no shortage of obstetricians and gynaecologists, with numbers in the UK growing from around five thousand in 2000 to nearly nine thousand in 2020.

The significant shift towards early “medical” abortions, with DIY abortion the most common method of abortion in 2020, means that fewer doctors are needed to perform later abortions. However, the distasteful and distressing nature of late-term abortion must surely be a key reason why doctors do not want to take part in the procedure.

Reports on abortion providers by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) give another insight into abortion staffing issues. The lid came off the appalling state of Britain’s abortion industry back in 2016, when the CQC revealed over 2,600 breaches of health and safety in Marie Stopes International facilities (now MSI Reproductive Choices) in Britain. By 2020, many of these facilities had improved to some extent and had received a CQC rating of “good”.

However, a rating of “good” was not all that good. In a report published by the CQC on 29 January 2019, following an unannounced inspection at the MSI London headquarters, the inspectors “remained concerned around the fragility of the leadership team”. The inspectors also reported that the “stability of the core leadership remained in a period of high flux and we were not assured an effective system of leadership and governance was in place to monitor the service and reduce the risk of harm”.

It seems that there is a high turnover of staff at the top of MSI, with the potential of risk to women.

A money motivated industry

In the United States, Dr Leanna Wen left her position as CEO of Planned Parenthood within a year of her appointment in 2018. This gave rise to coverage of the haemorrhaging of staff from Planned Parenthood, with ex-employees complaining that the organisation was “money motivated”. In 2019, when Planned Parenthood reopened the only abortion facility remaining in Nashville, Tennessee, 40% of the staff were new and had to be trained to assist with surgical abortions.

A money-grabbing culture may be among the ostensible reason for wanting to leave the employment of an abortion provider. But it’s hard not to think that what actually happens in an abortion clinic isn’t part of the reason too. It was seeing a second-trimester abortion that made Abby Johnson quit.

In September 2021, Abby Johnson organised the first-ever Quitters’ Ball, when she was joined by 50 other former abortion workers. Can we imagine 50 former UK abortion workers gathering to celebrate leaving this soul-destroying industry? Surely a challenge and a hope for us all.