Interlude: Sarah Eubanks
Praise Her in the Gates - Dispatches for a Pro-Life Nation
…in which a former abortion clinic worker confronts the burdens and possibilities of memory.
ONE. Sarah’s first day at the clinic was in the procedure room, assisting Dr. Stuntz — Vanderbilt Medical, Class of 1950 — who for over a decade flew from Baltimore to Alabama, to Mobile and Montgomery, for three days of abortion work each week. He was an unsmiling man, taciturn, but because he knew she was in nursing school Stuntz wanted to teach her everything, his journeyman’s trade, had her right down there beside him on his stool, instructing Sarah to pass him all the necessary equipment — the speculum and tenaculum; the needle of lidocaine to numb the patient’s cervix; the four or five stainless steel rods, each with ends of different sizes, used to force dilation. At first, when she turned on the suction, the noise reminded her of a dentist’s office, but when she saw the fetal tissue and blood surging through the clear tube, and breathed the rusty iron scent of bloody death — pungent, a smell that doesn’t go away, that still lingers in her memory — Sarah remembers looking up at the ceiling and praying to God to help her get through, because she couldn’t look. But then something inside her clicked and her mind slipped back into the medical zone, where training and composure overshadow any common uncertainties of the heart. When the doctor was finished Sarah escorted the patient to the recovery room, then walked to the sub-waiting room and got another, and then another, and onward, until she finally finished the day and went home.
But when she got there — Sarah was only twenty-two, and still living with her mother — she went into the bathroom and stood in front of the sink with the water running, washing her hands over and over. Like Lady Macbeth, she kept seeing blood. When she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she found she didn’t recognize herself.
Later that evening her older brother stopped by, and when he asked her about the day Sarah cried and cried, and he told her, simply, she had a choice to make: either quit, or suck it up.
So she sucked it up. Because Sarah Eubanks is not a quitter.
TWO. Sarah’s own abortion had been at the same clinic, when she was nineteen. Many of the girls she knew had gone there. In the crowd she hung around with, when you got pregnant you didn’t tell your parents: you just made the appointment, had the abortion, and moved on. You rarely talked about it again. Usually the boyfriend covered the cost.
She grew up in Mobile, the youngest of five in a good Baptist family. Her father owned a drugstore in Bayou La Batre, but died of leukemia in July of 1984, the summer before her junior year of high school. Her best friend was killed in a car wreck a year later, and shortly thereafter Sarah watched her late father’s best friend succumb to throat cancer. In the spring of ‘86, after being voted a senior class favorite, and only weeks before graduation, she was arrested and kicked out of school on a drug charge, barely eighteen years old. Then, in June of 1987, an unplanned pregnancy. Her boyfriend was in the Navy, set to ship out on a Mediterranean tour. Even still, he proposed when he found out she was pregnant.
Sarah said no. She thought the idea of marriage ridiculous. She was sure they’d divorce before too long, and then she — still enjoying her lifestyle of drinking and drugs, with no desire to give it all up — would be stuck with a kid, alone.
She didn’t tell her mother she was pregnant, even though she knew what her mother would say. Mrs. Eubanks was a nurse, and in the early days of her career, working in an emergency room, had seen women come to the hospital with objects in their vaginas from self-induced abortions — some would die, some would need hysterectomies. So even though she was a good Baptist woman she believed in choice, sure that legal abortion had to be better than what she’d witnessed on the job. When Sarah was fifteen, a girl in her youth group had gotten pregnant, and the girl’s parents forced her to have an abortion. Sarah’s mother told her the same would happen if she was ever in a similar situation. So even though Sarah was now an adult, in not telling her mother, part of her wonders if she just didn’t want to be told what to do, even if she’d already decided herself on what needed to be done. But still, she knows there’s so much that goes into making the decision for an abortion — it’s just like peeling back an onion, she says, and there’s always more than one reason why the choices happen the way they do.
Sarah’s boyfriend came with her to the clinic, still begging her to reconsider. Not knowing what to expect, she was most scared of what pain the abortion might entail. On the table in the procedure room, her feet braced in the stirrups, she can’t remember the doctor saying anything, or even introducing himself. A nurse stood quietly on the far side of the room. No one made eye contact.
Even with the shot of lidocaine, Sarah could feel the doctor dilating her cervix, a pain that grew worse and worse — more painful than she’d even imagined. When he applied the suction she could feel it moving inside her, could actually see her stomach rippling from within. She felt something ripping in her womb, something being torn from her. She knew it was her baby, and started crying, silently. She knew then she’d made a mistake, but it was too late.
In recovery, she didn’t want to talk, didn’t even want to look at anyone. They gave her saltines and Sprite, to manage the nausea. She didn’t do well in recovery, and had to stay a long time. She was the last patient to leave. Back at her apartment, she had cramps and bleeding, she was throwing up and still crying. She was inconsolable.
She says it was the first brick she put in her heart.
Sarah hates that she still cries when she tells that story.
THREE. At the clinic, in addition to Dr. Stuntz there was Dr. Smith, who flew down to Mobile from Birmingham. He was known for making stupid, awful jokes in front of the patients, and for snapping his surgical gloves like a cartoon villain. On abortion days, the staff would wait at the back door for the doctor to arrive, keeping watch for the rental car, quickly ushering Stuntz or Smith inside, to keep the men from encountering any sidewalk protestors lurking near the parking lot. Tuesdays were busy, Thursdays were slow, but Saturdays were always packed full, with thirty or forty patients, sometimes fifty, cycling through.
On abortion days Sarah would arrive early, preparing a supply of translucent plastic containers labelled with each patient’s name and last menstrual period date, as well as a cache of white mesh netting wound in channels and cut to length. Nested within each container, with one end attached to the suction and the other knotted shut, the length of mesh would gather the fetal remains vacuumed from the patient’s womb, while the mingled blood of mother and child would instead pass through and collect in the cup.
Eventually, for her good work in the procedure room, the clinic administrator started asking Sarah to cover shifts in an adjacent room called POC — product of conception — into which each labelled container was passed once an abortion was completed. Here, Sarah would empty the fetal tissue onto a clear glass pie plate, then begin piecing the aborted child back together, accounting for the entirety of its remains, ensuring no portion of the fetus was left behind in the patient before she was allowed to leave the clinic. Sarah would see the skull, the spinal cord, the legs and arms — sometimes even all the fingers on a hand, perfectly formed. Once, while accounting for aborted twins, she thought of her own brothers, also twins, and marveled to herself that this is what the two must have looked like in the womb. She had to force her mind away from that thought, swiftly.
When the work in POC was complete, the fetal remains were wrapped in red medical waste bags, packed into square cardboard boxes, then shipped out of the clinic via UPS. The delivery driver was a hardcore feminist, and would always arrange her schedule to ensure she was present for pickup on abortion days, cheering the clinic staff for the great struggle in which they were engaged: the cause of freedom, the cause of choice, the work of death.
Imagine that familiar big brown truck, trundling through Mobile’s unknowing neighborhoods — through Spring Hill, through Midtown, down Old Shell Road — with boxes of torn children stacked and hidden in the back.
FOUR. Sarah worked at the clinic for three and a half years. When she finally left, it wasn’t with any change of heart regarding the abortion work itself, but rather in a fit of pique.
Sarah describes herself in those days as rabidly pro-choice, despite any misgivings or uncertainties that might have arisen in the course of the work. Since she herself had an abortion, she reasoned, it must be right, and so proselytized far and wide the libertine sensibilities of which child-killing is simply the culmination, passing out colored condoms to all her friends, even going so far as to wear a specially made condom barrette in her hair to work each day, the height of sexy, freewheeling fashion in the naughty ‘90s.
Her life grew darker. The work itself had a coarsening effect, reducing the human complexity of abortion to a brutal calculus of profit and loss. She quit nursing school. She kept abusing drugs and alcohol, started gobbling LSD. Her outward demeanor was unchanged, but inside her heart was hardening, brick by brick.
The clinic workers were accustomed to anti-abortion protestors haunting the sidewalk outside, who would try to counsel them as they came and went from work, who would plead with the pregnant women hastening toward the door on abortion days. One day the clinic administrator accused two protestors of coming too close to the building, of straying off the sidewalk and onto the grass, and so called the police to have the two arrested for trespassing. When officers arrived, the administrator was unwilling to sign the paperwork herself, so Sarah stepped forward, afire with righteous anger.
She went to court alone — none of her co-workers joined her, nor was any legal counsel provided to argue on behalf of the clinic. The courtroom gallery was packed with anti-abortion advocates. On hearing the facts, the judge immediately dismissed the case against the two protestors. Sarah was livid. On the way out of the courthouse, a reporter from a Catholic magazine stopped her for comment. Sarah responded with a profanity-ridden diatribe explaining, in the nastiest terms she could muster, exactly what she thought and how she felt about anyone who might stand in the way of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
Sarah’s anger was epic — it made great copy. But it brought unwanted publicity, which an abortion clinic rarely appreciates. The clinic administrator, who once thought Sarah could do no wrong, gave her the cold shoulder. Her colleagues began to distance themselves.
So Sarah quit.
FIVE. Flesh is grass, and youth an illusion. Always the Almighty coaxes us beyond this vale of tears, out toward the possibilities of heavenly perfection — even those of us with blood on our hands.
Nearly a decade after leaving the clinic, shortly before 9/11, a friend invited Sarah to accompany her to a Bible study on the seven deadly sins. Sarah agreed to go, she says, just to see if she was still doing them right. But God had other plans for her, and shortly thereafter that carefully laid brickwork in her heart began to crumble, all her certainties undone:
He reached down from on high and took hold of me; He drew me out of deep waters. / He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me. / They confronted me in the day of my disaster, but the LORD was my support. / He brought me out into a spacious place; He delivered me, because He delighted in me.
But still there was a reckoning to unfold. Imagine such a crucible — a woman caught between a loving and merciful God, a God of forgiveness, and her own dire realization she was directly complicit in over five thousand abortions? Including that of her own child? How to remain sane, encountering such memories? How to remain intact?
Sarah is a gregarious woman, generous. She laughs easily. Much like the Risen Christ, she bears her wounds openly, for all to see. Central to her ongoing conversion is a friendship with Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life activist, whose nonprofit And Then There Were None helps workers in the abortion industry transition away from life lived in the valley of the shadow of death. From Abby Johnson, Sarah learned accountability — uncomfortable and uncompromising, but absolutely necessary. She was able to ask her community in south Alabama for forgiveness, publicly. She was able to ask and receive forgiveness from those she’d had arrested. Ultimately, she was able to ask forgiveness even from all those children lost during her work at the clinic, and from her own child, the child she barely knew.
Though she was married for a time, Sarah never got pregnant again. She wonders if her womb was damaged during the abortion — if that tearing sensation she felt took more from her than a single child. Back then, when she was nineteen, she assumed she’d be a bad mother. Yet even with that conviction in mind, during the weeks she was pregnant Sarah stopped drinking and taking drugs, even gave up cigarettes. As long as I have this baby, she told herself, I’m gonna take care of it.
After years of praying, God revealed to Sarah she has a son, and that she’ll see him again when she gets to heaven. His name is Anthony, and he shares a name with the patron saint of finding what’s been lost. She’ll see all those other children there, as well, she says, and because there’s forgiveness in heaven, those babies are going to love her and surround her, welcome her home, guide her to the feet of Jesus, to the Heavenly Throne — and the thought of this, of what awaits her, helps her to forgive herself, day by day, here in this vale of tears.
Sarah still keeps in touch with other women like herself, those she met through Abby Johnson, working with And Then There Were None. Friends like Julie, who assisted on late-term abortions at a clinic in Colorado; or Adrienne, from Philadelphia, who did prison time for her role in Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors. Her tribe, Sarah calls them. They support one another, protect one another, understand one another — each of them veterans, wounded in America’s longstanding war on women’s bodies, our war on the unborn.
Shortly after Sarah turned to Christ, the abortion clinic in Mobile where she once worked — called the Ladies’ Center while Sarah was there, but later renamed Center for Choice — closed down for good. The facility was soon purchased and repurposed as a unique memorial for those whose lives were touched by abortion — a place to mourn those whom no one ever imagined would need to be remembered. Sarah was able to visit the repurposed clinic while working on a documentary film about her story. She saw the rooms where she once worked. She saw the spots of blood still staining the recovery room floor. After the filming was done, Sarah found herself alone in the procedure room. She knelt down, her arms draped over the table where so many women had lain. She prayed and prayed. For the building. For the blood shed. For the innocent lives. She let everything out, right there where it all began.
The burden of the past is lifted, and Sarah’s heart is free.
— Feast of the Annunciation, 2025
Blinking away the tears from my eyes. Heartbreaking to joyful. Thank you for this.