For 17 Years She Sold Abortions at Planned Parenthood. Now She Wants to Shut it Down
Mayra Rodriguez can’t undo the years she worked at Planned Parenthood — just like she can’t forget the harrowing stories she regrets ever being a part of. “You understand that what you have been selling has never been freedom — not for the mother and not for the child. What you have been selling [is] pain and darkness, and it’s bloody.” She pauses. “[F]or 17 years, I helped no one,” Mayra admits. “I helped no one,” she repeats, “but I destroyed many.”
Rodriguez’s testimony is part of a powerful new video released in December by Stop Coerced Abortions. Like so many former abortion center workers, Marya finally had a crisis of conscience about what she was doing, and the testimonies she remembers from helpless, hurting women still haunt her. “The phone calls that strike me the most were the clients with the abortion pills that will call me in the middle of the night and said, ‘So you guys told me to push a blood clot on the toilet, and I tried to do that, but I didn’t make it, and it’s not a blood clot, it’s actually a baby. So what do I do?’” she recalls.
She says, “You’re instructed to tell them to go ahead and grab it and throw it in the toilet, flush, and don’t look.” The moms would almost always reply with panic. “‘But, you told me it was just a blood clot. But I can actually see the hands, the feet, the face.’ And they will be crying.”
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Abby Johnson, the face of countless pro-lifers who converted after years at Planned Parenthood, lived through her own horror when she took the abortion drug. “[The blood] — it looked like I was sitting in the middle of a crime scene. This couldn’t be normal. Planned Parenthood didn’t ever tell me this could happen. … I decided that I would call them in the morning… if I didn’t die before then.”
Like a lot of women, she thought taking the abortion pill would be the easy way out. She was wrong. Her nightmare — of gushing blood and excruciating pain, of clumps passing out of her body while she cried and sweated alone — is the story of tens of thousands of women.
And as dangerous as chemical abortions were then, they’re even more lethal now. With the explosion of the online pill market after Dobbs, tens of thousands of women are bypassing surgical abortion altogether, ordering drugs from blue states without a single assurance that they’re safe or that a doctor will be there to help if (or more likely when) something goes wrong.
Stopping this wild west of mifepristone has been the call of pro-lifers since the Biden administration, when all of the federal protections for women were erased, and moms could get their hands on the abortion pill without so much as a doctor’s visit — and no matter what their state laws said. Republicans had hoped with the second coming of Donald Trump that the White House would step in and stop this dangerous new world of convenient unborn killing, but to everyone’s disappointment, this seems to be the one policy the administration hesitates to change.
Over the past several months, conservatives have been increasingly vocal about Trump’s inaction as more and more women fall prey to these dangerous drugs that are sending them to the emergency room in record numbers. This is especially frustrating to medical doctors like Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy (R), who joined a hearing on Wednesday to demand the administration take action.
“The focus of the health committee hearing is to make people aware that taking an abortion drug is not like taking a Tylenol,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” That’s what the other side keeps insisting, Cassidy pointed out. “[But] we need to go back to where we have a requirement that if the patient wants a prescription, she needs to see a doctor. That sounds so basic. There [are] complications for taking this medicine,” he said, harkening to the 11% serious complication rate that was reported last year by an Ethics and Public Policy Center study. “There [are] some pregnant women [who], even if they want an abortion, should not be taking this pill for their own health. But without that in-person interview, we don’t really know what’s going on.”
Then, of course, there’s the sinister side, which Americans have seen in the headlines with startling frequency. “To put a human face on it,” the senator explained, there are “several descriptions of women coerced into having abortions by somebody who physically or emotionally, were able to just bully them into doing something they didn’t want to do, including an example of a young girl who wanted to have a gender reveal party, and instead, her mother coerced her into … taking these pills,” Cassidy lamented. “And instead of having a gender reveal party, she had a dead fetus.”
He went on to tick off other real-life criminal suits taking place as we speak in places like South Texas, “where the husband or the boyfriend puts the pill in the woman’s drink and then she won’t drink it, and so comes back later and when she’s asleep, shoves it in her mouth and holds it till it dissolves.”
Leaning into Cassidy’s career as a doctor, Perkins wanted to know if there had ever been another drug with these types of adverse side effects that would be treated like the abortion pill, “where they would just let it be sent through the mail, no questions asked?”
“I can’t think of one,” Cassidy replied frankly. “And particularly when it’s so prone to be taken incorrectly. Let’s just take the perspective of someone who’s pro-choice,” he pointed out. “This pill should only be taken up to week 10 of pregnancy. … And yet, women apparently often [take it after that because] they may not know they’re pregnant. They may think they’re week 10. Turns out they may be week 20. And there’s nothing to document that. This is something which borders on medical malpractice,” he argued. “And I want the FDA to go back to the requirement that there has to be an in-person visit.”
Turns out, he’s not the only one. People on both sides of the debate think that’s a reasonable common-sense practice. As of last year, a surprisingly strong number of Americans— 63% — agreed with Cassidy that women should be under the supervision of a doctor, including 54% of self-described “pro-choicers.” Even to Democratic voters, this is not an unreasonable request — it’s the most basic standard of health care.
To hand women a lethal drug without any oversight “is a disaster,” Chuck Donovan insisted. What we’re talking about by reinstating these FDA guardrails, the former Charlotte Lozier president stressed on the “Outstanding” podcast, “is not a restriction. It’s simply a requirement that there be a doctor somewhere in the picture, a doctor who examined the patient and knows he has a patient. He doesn’t have the patient’s sex trafficker or disgruntled boyfriend. He knows she’s [actually pregnant]. He knows that the pregnancy is not ectopic.”
All of that could have been addressed in January 2025, Donovan argues. “And in fact, there were proposals, ideas, [and] language that could have been addressed [right after Trump’s inauguration] … and at the barest minimum, require a doctor’s visit in-person. We’re not living in the COVID regime where you dial somebody up and say, ‘Hey, here’s my medical situation,’ and you get prescriptions online.” Not to mention, he added, “There’s no tracking of abortion complications from the pill. That was dropped years ago [and] absolutely should have been reinstated, so that we know what’s happening.”
The bottom line, Donovan underscored, is that millions of children are dying. “And the policy we’re pursuing now is a discredit to a pro-life administration. It’s a tragedy for women, [and] obviously horrific for the unborn. And we are not using the tools available,” he shook his head. “And I guess it’s why President Trump isn’t getting the benefit of the doubt that the ‘flexibility’ he wants will not compromise principle. I think people think it will.”
On the flip side, Chuck was quick to point out, in the last couple of weeks since the president’s comments, “You’ve seen pro-life groups, some of which were not all that adamant about protecting the platform last year … [have] rallied on this. They do see it as a red line, and they’re speaking pretty much with one voice. So I think we need to pray. We need to actually get back a little … on offense. We need to have proposals that are voted on that are difficult for the other side to vote against.”
Is it a tough battle? Absolutely. “It’s always been uphill,” he concedes with the scars of someone who’s been in the battle for decades. “There have always been strong opponents. There’s always been a hundred times more financing on the other side than on ours. And yet, through prayer and persistence, we were able to reverse Roe v. Wade. So don’t get discouraged,” Donovan implored. “Make headway. If it’s incremental, that’s fine. … And let’s encourage one another across the pro-life groups. Let’s keep working together, as we have with President Trump’s call for flexibility. … And let’s press on. There’s no greater purpose in life.”
LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
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