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Mayela Banks recounts the most painful event of her life to sound the alarm on abortion coercion and warn others about the harms of late-term abortion.

Mayela is an immigrant who spoke little English as her second language. When she was young, she discovered she was pregnant. Lacking money and fearing what her parents would think, Mayela went to an abortion center to confirm the pregnancy. Little did Mayela know, but soon Planned Parenthood would take her child’s life against her will.

The first thing Planned Parenthood told Mayela was that she was pregnant, “…but you don’t have to be.” Mayela didn’t even understand what they meant, nor did she know that Planned Parenthood offered abortions – or even what an abortion truly was.  Once the staff confirmed Mayela’s pregnancy, they listed all the reasons why she should not be pregnant. “You have no support, you have no money, you just need to try again later,” they told her.

They convinced her to schedule an appointment at another center in Phoenix. She trusted them and proceeded because she wanted to ask a doctor further questions about her pregnancy at the appointment.

“When I look back, I see how young and vulnerable I was.” Mayela said in hindsight, “I was an easy target for the abortion industry.”

Upon arriving at the appointment, staff told Mayela that she had to pay $200 and sign documentation before even seeing the doctor. Mayela – not understanding because her English was weak – was pressured to sign documentation without a translator.

“Next thing I knew, they took me to a back room and had me change and lie down and gave me an IV.” Mayela said, “I started to drift off.”

Then the horror began.

“I could hear what sounded like a vacuum machine” Mayela testified. “I couldn’t move and felt like I was in a dark room. I thought I heard my baby screaming in pain. This is when my maternal instincts awakened. To my horror, I could do nothing to help my baby. This is how I finally learned what an abortion is.”

“They lied over and over again to me. They said there’d be no pain. There was tons of physical pain,” she added.

After this gruesome experience, the Planned Parenthood staff did not connect Mayela with the doctor as she’d hoped. There was no discussion or explanation for her as to what had happened.

Instead, they let Mayela leave feeling horrified and traumatized.

“This was not what I agreed to,” she said; “it was not what I thought would happen.”

That wasn’t even the worst of it.

It really hit her when her chest became swollen and began producing milk to nourish a baby that was no longer alive.

“My body was yearning for my child,” Mayela said.

The worst lie the Planned Parenthood staff told Mayela was that she could be a mother again. For years, Mayela tried, unsuccessfully, to have a baby. “I wanted so much to be a mother, and I was never able to have children of my own,” she said.

Years later, Mayela would learn that she had been much further along than anyone knew. She was not only the victim of abortion coercion; she and her child were victims of late-term abortion as well.

As a young woman, Mayela was oblivious to her rights, much less what late-term abortion was. She now realizes how much they abused her rights. They denied her informed consent, denied her a consultation with a doctor, denied her a translator and even denied her an explanation of what would happen.

“I’ve lived with this shame for far too long because I felt like I was partners in crime with Planned Parenthood for taking the life of my baby,” Mayela said. “Now I realize that they coerced me into abortion and got paid doing it.”

Now all these years later, Mayela is shocked to see states like Arizona which have been deceived by the abortion lobby into moving to allow more women and unborn children to suffer what she and her baby suffered, rather than moving to protect women.

“No woman should have to live my nightmare,” Mayela said. “We must never go back to that.”