The room in the back of the clinic was quiet but Catherine’s mind was screaming. There was a baby in a jar. Arms. Leg. Fingers! There was a baby in a jar! She knew she had to get out of there. Fast. She couldn’t look at it one moment longer.

It?

Catherine Adair had spent the previous year working at Planned Parenthood convincing women that despite what they thought, that wasn’t a baby growing in their womb. It was a…an…it. And it required a “procedure” as she called it back then.

She’d spent the previous year accepting payment for abortions and “counseling” young women in the bright office and working as a medical assistant for first trimester abortions.

But one day in 1997 everything changed. She was asked to clean up the room from a second-trimester abortion. She had never been in that room before, and even though she had “counseled” other women about the procedure, she had no idea what it really entailed.

She’d walked into a similar room once before when she was 19 when she aborted her 11 week old baby, something she promised herself a long time before she wouldn’t think about ever again. And she hadn’t wanted to go back in but she convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with what was going on.

“I walked in and looked on the side table. And there’s a jar. And in this jar are clearly body parts. Two arms two legs. I stared at it.  I wasn’t sure if I was making it up. I felt like I was having an out of body experience. I backed up out of the room. I went to the medical assistant and said ‘I can’t do this.’”

“What’s wrong?” asked the medical assistant.

“I…I…I can’t go back in there,” said Catherine.

“You wanna’ talk about it?” asked the other woman.