Behind Dana’s quick wit and salty sense of humor is a tough, hardworking woman who has had to pull herself up by her bootstraps all her life. She has had to figure out how to make things work for those who depend on her for survival, without throwing herself a pity party.
It wasn’t until Dana reached out to And Then There Were None that she finally allowed herself to lean on others for support. No woman is an island – not even Dana.
Raised in rural Illinois, Dana is the oldest of three children. Her parents divorced when she was in fifth grade and reunited in marriage again in her adulthood, but that left Dana to help raise her sister and brother during the years of separation while both parents worked. Her mother worked to become a women’s health nurse, a nurse practitioner, and eventually became a nursing professor at a university. Dana was the backbone of life at home.
“And if I didn’t know how something worked, I did not bother my parents. I figured it out on my own,” Dana reflected.
Dana’s grandparents took her and her siblings to church growing up. Baptized Lutheran, she attended a small parochial school through eighth grade.
Despite her mom’s medical background, abortion was never discussed openly in Dana’s home. Dana didn’t become familiar with abortion until she was older, sought the services herself, and had friends who went through it.
“I said, ‘Oh, I’m never going to do that. That’s never going to be me,’” Dana recalled. “And guess what? It was me, too.”
“I drove my friends to the clinic and was with them as a support person, and as a care person after the abortions were complete. They knew that I was the most prudish person out of our whole group of friends, and while my friends were openly promiscuous, the first time that I ever had sex, I got pregnant. So, I was the first one out of our group of friends to ever have an abortion.”
Dana didn’t have internet then in 1990. She looked up ‘abortion’ in the phone book to schedule her appointment at a clinic in the nearest town.
“I was the one my friends came to for advice, information, what to expect. I was just there for them in any capacity they needed. I drove them to appointments. I explained to them what the procedure was like. I answered their questions and just tried to be as supportive as I could because it’s a horrible decision and thought nobody should be alone.”
Dana eventually had three abortions before working in the abortion industry: one surgical and two chemical procedures.
Having previously worked in various healthcare administration roles before starting a career with a cable and internet service provider, Dana was anxious to get back into her passion field helping others. When a position at Planned Parenthood in St. Louis opened in 2014, she took the opportunity and gladly accepted the offer.
“I saw it as being an advocate for women in bad situations. I bought into the whole Planned Parenthood ideation,” Dana said.
During this season in life, Dana was a single mom raising two girls. Planned Parenthood seemed like a suitable place to support them while getting her foot back in the healthcare door. Dana never really discussed with her daughters what she did at Planned Parenthood, but she told her mom that she got the job and expressed her excitement.
Dana’s mother had an unexpected response: “I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Dana.
“It’s just I don’t think it’s what you think it’s going to be,” she told Dana.
“And she was right,” Dana reminisced.
But Dana had been raised her to grit her teeth, bear her own cross, and do what needed to get done. They left the conversation on that practical note, and she moved forward with the new job despite that first warning.
“There was also a part of me that kept telling myself God didn’t raise me to be a failure. There’s a small margin for error when you’ve got to take care of yourself and your children. You can’t drop the ball because there’s nobody to pick it up.
“My first day was on a Friday. The following Wednesday, I noticed some weird noises coming up through the floor where my desk was. I was on the top floor. The second floor was the clinic area. The basement was a call center. I did not know that Wednesday was the clinic day, and my desk was right above one of the procedure rooms,” Dana remembered.
When she asked one of her coworkers about the disturbance, she casually said, “Oh, it’s clinic day.”
Dana felt sick at the realization that the strong vibrations were from the suction machine downstairs beneath her chair.
“It’s a pretty powerful machine,” said Dana. Flashbacks of her own surgical abortion hit at once; memories repressed from over a decade ago came flooding back.
“It floored me because when you actually go through it…it seems like forever and then it seems like it doesn’t. It seems like it’s over in the blink of an eye, but then when you’re physically going through it, it’s like, ‘when is this going to end?’
“And at that point, once I felt that vibration below my feet and I heard that hum, I was like, ‘that’s a very powerful machine,’ and that was just really a shock for me,” Dana said.
“I can’t believe that I didn’t notice that on the day of my own procedure. Something that would be that powerful, that noisy for you to hear one floor above; to think that I never noticed it when I was actually having my own abortion.
“I thought, ‘how could I not notice something that obvious?’ Was I just that desensitized or was I that numb that it just didn’t register with me?” Dana reflected. She also recalled that she was not under any sedation during her surgical abortion so many years ago.
Dana shook off the macabre thoughts and focused on her job. As a single mother, she had to work. But a culmination of things, including the filth and disgusting conditions at the clinic, made work loathsome to Dana.
Compounding the guilt and second-guessing Dana felt about her own choices, the protesters outside triggered intense paranoia for her.
“There were a couple of guys out there who were very graphic, very nasty, very image driven. They would hang bloody baby clothes and dolls over the fence. They would call you names and follow you to lunch,” Dana said. “I started bringing my lunch to work with me, but when I opened the staff refrigerator it was disgusting. It took me four and a half hours to clean out that fridge.”
The filth wasn’t only confined to staff areas. The procedure rooms resembled a crime scene. The clinic was infested with mold. Staff who worked directly with patients lacked personal hygiene.
“The affiliate I worked for provided services at five locations. We were the main campus. Three out of the five locations provided chemical abortions and our facility did vasectomies. They had transgender counseling services. They did a lot of outreach work for that community.
“We had this lady who was the educator for trans teens, and I put their materials together in little leaflets. They would go to schools, and they would hand this stuff out with condoms and Planned Parenthood information. Saint Louis has a lot of inner-city areas that are low income and that’s the community that they try to reach.”
Dana’s workspace came with a red binder listing local resources. When a woman called asking where she could get prenatal care, Dana thumbed through the binder. None of the phone numbers were updated. “I do know of one place,” she told the woman, and referred her to a pregnancy center around the corner.
“My boss overheard me make that referral. She ripped me away from my desk and I had my butt handed to me,” Dana remembered.
“We don’t do that here,” Dana’s boss yelled. “If you do that again, you won’t have a job here.”
This wasn’t an isolated incident over the six months Dana stayed at Planned Parenthood.
Not knowing what to do or where she could go making the same kind of money – starting at nearly twice the pay she made at her previous job – Dana finally realized: there is no amount of money that would ever be worth staying at the clinic without her peace of mind. Her conscience gnawed at her constantly along with her paranoid thoughts. She began losing sleep, fearful of who might be following her home.
One person’s voice rose above the vulgarity on the other side of the fence, and he handed her a card with And Then There Were None’s information. “You didn’t grow up wanting to work here,” he told her.
Needing another sign that it was time to quit, Dana held onto that card and waited. The mail arrived soon after with a handwritten card from ATTWN.
“I still have that card to this day,” Dana mused. “I felt like I was pirating out a bar of gold bullion or something, stuffing it in my pocket with my palms sweating and heart racing. I thought, ‘If they catch me with this, they’re gonna kill me.’ I felt like I was working for the mafia because I got in trouble for doing the right thing helping people who didn’t want abortion services.”
Dana prayed and called ATTWN and was connected with Nichola, her client advocate. They had only been talking for about a week when Dana decided to quit. “I told Nichola, ‘I’m leaving,’ and she was like, ‘Well, just do it.’”
“I didn’t need all those buts. I called Nichola the day I quit, early in the morning, and I sent my notice over email,” Dana said.
“I would be locked up in a in a looney bin somewhere if I’d stayed there one second longer.”
When asked if she was afraid of talking to ATTWN, Dana replied, “Nichola put my fears at ease. She wasn’t a fanatic like the protesters outside my clinic. You’re not going to sway one woman acting that way. That approach just pushes women right into the clinic.”
“I’m going to tell you something about Planned Parenthood. They talk to women however they have to. They will seem a heck of a lot less intimidating. If you’ve got a choice between going towards a crazy man who’s using all this fanatical stuff trying to sway your heart into not having an abortion, and then you’ve got Planned Parenthood over here saying, ‘Oh, we’ll take care of you,’ where do you think a woman’s going to go?” Dana ruminated.
“But after she gives them their money and has her procedure, she’ll never see that nurse or that practitioner again unless she has another abortion. Chances are, if you have any complications, they’ll route you around to people with no medical credentials at the call center. Someone just following a script. You won’t get the same level of compassion you received while they were making their sale.
“See, the thing is with women, we are so prone to trying to ignore the red flags, whether it be in the workplace, personal life, romantic life; we just try to smooth things over and maintain status quo or just to make everybody happy. You can’t do that when you’re dealing with something like abortion. You have to be sensitive, you have to be kind, you have to show compassion, and you have to exemplify Christ because there’s no other way,” Dana passionately explained.
Dana has experienced healing on multiple levels since leaving Planned Parenthood. She received counseling from ATTWN’s beloved late therapist, Peg, and meets regularly with Dr. Amanda Willie. She has attended healing foundations weekends in all three phases, spoken on webinars, and uses her voice to tell the whole truth, whether people like it or not.
Dana takes it all one day at a time. “I try to be a little bit better of a person than I was yesterday.”