Two nurses who were former employees of Planned Parenthood of Delaware testified in the Delaware state senate this week, claiming they repeatedly contacted authorities over many months to alert them to the “absolute nightmare” of dangerous and unsanitary conditions at a Wilmington Planned Parenthood facility but received no response.
LifeSiteNews reports that Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich and Joyce Vasikonis told lawmakers that, despite their repeated complaints, they were met with either indifference, incompetence, or what seemed to be outright corruption.
The whistleblowers alleged that the lack of response to their concerns led to more women being injured at the Wilmington Planned Parenthood clinic where even basic safety precautions were ignored by untrained and unqualified staff.
Mitchell-Werbrich testified that she made numerous phone calls and sent emails to the governor’s office, the Delaware Division of Public Health Department, the Planned Parenthood Federation, the Division of Professional Regulation, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The former Planned Parenthood employee said she told these agencies that “there were no guidelines, no standards of care, no procedure, or protocol manuals to be found anywhere,” and that “intravenous (IV’s) were being started using an unsterile technique.”
Mitchell-Werbrich also testified that abortionist Timothy Liveright once struck a patient during an abortion, that sedated patients “were found outside walking down Market Street dazed and confused,” and that medication and equipment had expired.
After resigning last August, Mitchell-Werbrich said that she telephoned Gov. Jack Markell’s (D) office and spoke with a staff member and the Board of Nursing. In September, she contacted Mary Peterson at the Delaware Health and Social Services, who explained that she could only take complaints from patients and that the department “had more facilities to inspect than inspectors to inspect them.”
The former Planned Parenthood employee said she again contacted Markell’s office but received no response. In addition, on five occasions during her monthly contacts to the state’s Division of Professional Regulations and Division of Public Health, she found that a “new” investigator had been assigned to the case each time.
At the end of December, Mitchell-Werbrich stated that the Division of Professional Regulation told her that it had completed an inspection of the Wilmington facility and had discovered “several small housekeeping issues,” none of which merited either closure of the facility or even a citation.
In February, OSHA performed its own inspection and discovered serious violations for which Planned Parenthood was fined, but the abortion facility was allowed to continue to operate with Liveright performing abortions, some of which resulted in patients needing to be transferred to the hospital. Pro-life activists witnessed five ambulances taking women to the hospital just within the first few months of this year.
Frustrated by the indifference of politicians and Planned Parenthood authorities, Mitchell-Werbrich and her colleague, Vasikonis, took their story to the media in April.
This week, the state’s Division of Public Health announced that they discovered 14 violations of health regulations. The Delaware Attorney General has also filed a complaint against former Wilmington Planned Parenthood abortionist Liveright which alleges that Liveright presents “a clear and immediate danger to the public.”
Liveright left the Wilmington abortion clinic in April, when he reportedly surrendered his license. He still retains a valid license to practice in Pennsylvania.
Among the charges in the complaint are sexual harassment of female employees and “unprofessional, disrespectful, and inappropriate” conduct such as “yelling, screaming, and cursing” in the company of Planned Parenthood employees and patients.
According to the complaint, Liveright is accused of 10 “acts of incompetence and negligence” in his treatment of five abortion patients between February 12th and March 13th, including: oversedation, unnecessary suction procedures, failure to properly administer oxygen, and failure to “act with due competence and diligence” leading to patients requiring emergency transfer to the hospital.
However, state Senator Greg Lavelle (R) noted that the attorney general’s complaint is “too little, too late.”
“It smacks of reactionary, ‘we-have-to-cover-our-butts’ bureaucratic practices,” said Lavelle. He added that Planned Parenthood and state officials are “partners in crime…This is typical abortion politics.”
In response to the testimony of the former Planned Parenthood employees, Maureen Ferguson, Senior Policy Advisor with The Catholic Association, released the following statement:
We applaud the two former Planned Parenthood nurses for testifying Wednesday in the Delaware state senate about the unsafe and unsanitary conditions of ‘meat-market style of assembly-line abortions’ at Planned Parenthood of Delaware. In the wake of the murder conviction of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the abortion lobby shamelessly claimed that Gosnell was an outlier — but now we see that even the supposedly pristine Planned Parenthood, worthy of half a billion dollars annually in tax-payer funds, has Gosnell-like problems. In the words of nurse Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, ‘Planned Parenthood needs to close its doors, it needs to be cleaned up, the staff needs to be trained.
Ferguson added that she commends “Congress for stepping up its oversight of this largely unregulated industry.”
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