With abortionists in their ranks do doctors now have any claim to the word “profession”?

The following article is presented here just before Dr. Marx’s article to render a description of the actual situation within an operating aboratory.

Before becoming a Christian, nurse Sam Griggs assisted with numerous abortions while working for an obstetrician in Denver, Colorado. In this article, Griggs tells the writer Theresa Havens about her experiences. In telling this story Samantha hopes that it will affect others to the point that they will rise up and take action against this savage cold-blooded butchery.

When I was interviewed the doctor asked me if I had anything against abortions. I told him that I had never dealt with them. I had a lot of labour and delivery experience and he supposedly hired me with that in mind. He said, “Well, you won’t have to work with them very much. We only do a few of them.”

I had no idea when I got in there just how many he was really doing and just how involved I was going to have to get. The second week I was there, a 17-year-old girl came in for her third abortion. She was using it for birth control. I asked her, “How come you don’t use something else?” And she said that she didn’t like the effects of the pill and that she didn’t like the other forms of birth control. They were too sloppy. She thought this was so convenient and it was free. Medicaid paid for it. She didn’t have to pay one penny.

It was at that point I realized just what was really going on. Nobody else said anything to her. They didn’t try to convince her to change her mind. She was on Medicaid and it was all getting paid for. The doctor didn’t care as long as he got the money. It didn’t bother him.

There was a Public Health Center in a town not far from Denver. They would send a lot of girls to us. I don’t know where they found so many girls that were pregnant and wanted abortions. They told us that they did all of the counselling and that we were not allowed to say anything. We were not allowed to counsel them or even ask them about birth control. We couldn’t even tell them what could happen during the abortion, nothing. All we did was find out how far along they were, tell them when they were going to be finished, get their money, do it and send them home. The health center was really touchy. If we tried to discuss alternatives, we would get into trouble with the doctor because the health center would threaten to take away their business and send it elsewhere. They were really nasty about it.

One half to two thirds of this doctor’s practice ended up being abortions. We charged the girls $110 up to 12 weeks because that’s what Medicaid would pay. If a girl wasn’t on Medicaid it ended up being more than that. We went up to 16 weeks in our office and sometimes people from out of state would come to have it done because they were too far along to have it done legally in their own state.

We did several kinds of abortion there. We used suction up to until 12 to 14 weeks. That’s just a big metal suction apparatus that is inserted into the uterus and poked around until the fetus is all sucked out. After about 12 weeks the fetus would be too big. That’s when the really gross part came.

In another type, we dilated the cervix. It was a two-step procedure. The first day they would come in and the next day they would come again and that evening they would have the abortion. We would dilate the cervix as big as we needed to, then they would go in with something like a spaghetti tongs with an open spoon at one end, and they would just grab parts of the baby and pull them off. The baby would bleed to death. They would get an arm or a leg and the nurse would have to count everything that came out to make sure they got it all. It was horrible.

A few of the girls that came in would get hysterical. Very few, though. Some of them just acted like they were coming in for a regular check up. They couldn’t have cared less. Like the 17-year-old coming in and using it for birth-control.

Nobody even told them, “Don’t do this.” We never told them about the possible complications. There is a medical condition that can occur if you have so many abortions, sometimes even just one, where there is scarring of the uterus from the scraping. When the uterus is scarred it won’t hold a pregnancy to term. The fertilized ovum will not hang on the side of the uterus. It will just shed every time. But we never told them those side-effects or any of the complications. There were chances of infection or chances of them bleeding too much.

Bleeding badly

One patient, an older lady, went into shock in the middle of the abortion. She turned blue. I tried to start an I.V. so we could give her some emergency medications, but every one of her veins had just collapsed. She was bleeding badly and was in shock. We had to call the emergency room of the hospital next door and rush her over there. We had no emergency equipment, no stretcher or anything. She came out of it OK, but that incident shook me up. I thought, “Man, this lady could die here in the office in the middle of an illegal abortion.”

Most of the abortions we did were not illegal. We could do them in the office up to 16 weeks and then we could do them in the hospital up to 22 weeks. The doctor had his own sonogram machine, though, and if a baby was over 22 weeks he would write down 22 weeks so he could still do it. It was gross. It was like he just didn’t care. All he wanted was the money.

I took care of a lot of the obstetric patients because he just didn’t want to deal with them. He could get more money from one abortion that would take about 10 minutes than from a 9 month pregnancy. We did upwards to two dozens abortions a day. On one pregnancy, he only got about $625.00. He could do just six abortions and clear that easily.

She would bleed and holler a lot

If we got a screamer in the office he would just go nuts. He’d say, “Get them out of here. Get them in the back room. You can’t get everybody all upset.” That’s why we seldom did abortions in the middle of office hours. We did them before office hours, during lunch or after hours because he didn’t want his obstetric patients to know.

I remember one time we did a girl that was 12 weeks along and as little as that baby was, you could see on the sonogram, it was sucking its thumb. Twenty minutes later it was in a bottle of formaldehyde all sucked up. We showed her the picture. We got a kick out of it and twenty minutes later it was gone.

Right before I was born again, in August of 1979, we got a lady in that was 8 weeks along. She was big. It was Saturday afternoon and we saved her until the very end because she was so big. We knew she would bleed a lot and holler a lot, that it would just be a big mess and take a lot of time and effort. So, I had to go in and help one of the doctors, Lanny. I had to hold her down. While you do this, sometimes you have to hold the top of the uterus so the doctor can know that he’s getting to the back and getting it all. I could feel him in there scraping and pulling. She was bleeding and hollering and arms were coming out, then the head. It was just gross. Blood was going everywhere. It was on the doctor and it was getting on me. It was just horrible. It got so hot in that room because of all the lights.

“I’ll be there first”

There was an LPN working with me that Saturday and we were trying to get all of this mess cleaned up. There was a big bucket at the end of the table to catch stuff. We had to take all the contents of that bucket, the fetus, and put it in formaldehyde. We couldn’t find a jar big enough so we ended up having to put it in different jars and labelling it. The LPN ended up going into the bathroom and vomiting. I was standing there at the sink crying my heart out. I said: “Lanny, my God, are we going to hell?” He was standing there sweating and shaking and said, “Well, if we are, honey, I’ll be there first waiting on you.”

It was horrible. Right after that, the next day, we went to Happy Church there in Denver. Two weeks after that we gave our lives to the Lord. Shortly thereafter I finally quit the doctor’s office and we went to work at the hospital next door. They did saline abortions up there, but I refused to have anything to do with it.

You are killing a life

The Lord delivered me from it completely. I was innocent at the time. I was ignorant. I was being destroyed because of it, but I was ignorant. I knew I would never have an abortion and I would never have advised anyone else to have one, but it was a job and at the time I felt it was the girls’ decision.

Now I know it’s destroying life; therefore it has to be murder. As long as it remains in the uterus, the baby will he nourished. It will grow and be delivered at term. If you disrupt that in any way, knowingly and intentionally, you are killing a life.

First published in the Times Arrow reprinted here with permission from the Christians Concerned for Life Bimonthly Newsletter June/July 1984.