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Dana was hopeful working at Planned Parenthood would provide the stability she was looking for. As a single mom, she wanted to find a job that could accommodate her daughters’ school schedule. Little did Dana know, working at Planned Parenthood would become one of the most traumatizing events of her life.

When Planned Parenthood hired Dana, her mom told her, “I just don’t think you’re going to like it. I just don’t think it is what you think it’s going to be.”

Dana didn’t think anything of it, because she hadn’t heard anything bad about Planned Parenthood up until that point. In fact, Dana was looking forward to getting back into what she thought was going to be the healthcare field. However, Dana soon realized her mom was right. She found the day-to-day work at Planned Parenthood very inconsistent. She describes her time as being “very unstructured, very unregimented, very unprofessional.” It didn’t feel like a health clinic to her.

One of the biggest red flags Dana noticed was the unsanitary conditions. If the women who came to their center could have seen the kitchen and the bathrooms, she thought, it would turn their stomachs. The first day Dana opened the fridge to put her lunch in, she says, “I’ll never forget it. It was just like it was something out of Amityville Horror! It was terrible. There was rotten, moldy food and there were rotten, moldy juices in the bottom of the fridge.”

She felt like she was working at a prison. It took her four and a half hours to clean out the fridge. Dana remembers other health concerns such as coworkers not even bothering to use soap after using the restroom and generally having poor hygiene practices.

Dana’s experience there only got worse.

During Dana’s first week of work, she was sitting at her desk and heard a loud humming noise. Under her feet she could feel the vibration of a machine coming from the floor.

After twenty minutes, she turned to her coworker to ask, “What’s this vibrating? What’s this noise?”

To which her coworker simply responded, “It’s clinic day.”

Dana found out the loud humming sound she could hear was in fact coming from the surgical abortion machine downstairs. Those powerful vibrations she could feel coming from the floor beneath her office were being placed on women’s bodies to extract the unborn child from their womb.

She was caught in her tracks and remembered the abortion she had when she was 19 years old. That same type of powerful machine was used to perform the surgical abortion on her young body years ago. It was a groundbreaking moment for Dana to hear and feel how strong the machine was, even through the floorboards.

This wasn’t the only reason Dana felt uncomfortable working at Planned Parenthood. One day, Dana received a call from a woman who was looking for prenatal services, not an abortion. Following the training Dana received, she told the woman Planned Parenthood did not offer any prenatal services, but she could point her to some other resources.

Dana flipped through the binder Planned Parenthood had given her of “resources,” and it was filled with yellowed, dirty pages of outdated contacts. Dana gave the woman some of the phone numbers in the folder, only to have her call back and tell her none of the numbers were in service, let alone applicable to her situation.

Since the contacts Planned Parenthood had were out of date and unhelpful, Dana gave the woman the phone number of a pregnancy resource center down the street named Thrive.

A few hours later Dana got called into her manager’s office, where she soon realized she was in trouble.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the manager demanded. Dana wasn’t sure what she meant.

“Well, you sent this lady down the street to Thrive. We don’t do that. We’re not here to provide resources and prenatal information, and that’s not your job description.”

Dana describes the whole experience as being “chewed up one wall and down another.”

This was one of the many eye-opening moments for Dana in which she realized Planned Parenthood only cared about abortion and not women’s health care. She knew if she had transferred the woman down to Planned Parenthood’s call center, they would have pressured her to come into the office to make an abortion appointment instead of offering any alternative resources.

“That’s what the call center does,” Dana says.

Thankfully, Dana found the support and courage to leave Planned Parenthood. After 4-5 months of working at Planned Parenthood, Dana wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating and was anxious all day long. She had a gut feeling she wasn’t supposed to keep working there. Dana got connected with a woman named Nicola from the organization And Then There Were None who helped encourage her to seriously consider quitting. Dana describes Nicola as being her cheerleader throughout the whole process. After leaving Planned Parenthood, Dana was able to find healing through wonderful counselors, retreats and community with other ex-Planned Parenthood workers.

Dana says, “It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to be healed enough to speak out about this because it’s never going to end unless we use our voices.”