Bloodstained Instruments, Untrained Staff: Abortion at Planned Parenthood

Filthy, bloodstained instruments. Medical equipment covered in rust. Untrained staff administering anesthesia. Doctors performing surgeries without washing their hands between patients.

These were only a few of the violations found at Texas’s Prevention Park Planned Parenthood facility.

Planned Parenthood Closing Facility

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast will soon close its Prevention Park location. During its heyday, Planned Parenthood, Prevention Park, was the largest abortion clinic in the Western Hemisphere.

While many pro-lifers are celebrating, the president of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Melaney Linton, called the closure “heartbreaking” and “infuriating.”

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Prevention Park has a long tradition of shoddy medical care. Not only has the facility sent over thirty women to the hospital in ambulances with complications, but it has also failed at least three health inspections—in 2015, 2017, and 2020.

The 2020 inspection report was entirely redacted—we don’t know what the citations were for or why they failed. However, the problems identified in the first two inspections are alarming.

(Note: This location stopped doing abortions after Dobbs.)

Here is a summary of the reports:

Clinic Conditions

Medical equipment in the operating room was covered with rust and couldn’t be disinfected.

Packages of dilators marked as sterile had dime-sized brown spots on them. When questioned about the stains, a staff member admitted that the instruments weren’t sterile and shouldn’t have been labeled as such or stored with the sterile instruments.

Instruments were improperly sterilized. Instruments were improperly packaged, preventing them from being properly sterilized.

The biological indicator used on the autoclave wasn’t properly tested. The autoclave was used to sterilize instruments. Inspectors determined that the biological indicator tests being conducted weren’t valid.

Staff

The doctor was operating on women without washing his hands. Staff members failed to wash their hands after handling dirty instruments.

When another doctor was observed not washing her hands after surgery, she told inspectors, “Yes, I should do that, but because maybe sometimes if people are watching you, it’s kind of overwhelming.”

Staff didn’t have training on how to properly sterilize instruments. Three of the staff working in sterile processing had no documentation of training or competency.

Staff didn’t properly measure the amount of detergent per water used to clean instruments.

None of the nurses administering sedation were officially trained to do so or had documentation of competency to do so. The Director of Nurses claimed that nurses administering sedation learned on the job, by observing others in a mentorship-type situation, but none of the employees administering sedation were formally trained.

Treatment of Patients

Contaminated, unsterile instruments were used in surgery.

Staff didn’t clean the IV port prior to injecting medications into patients.

Reports

Here are the inspection reports:

TX Houston 2015

TX Houston 2017

TX Houston 2020 (entirely redacted)

For more information on Planned Parenthood, visit the Problems at Planned Parenthood website.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.

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