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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
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Cut-Throat

CARTEL-BREAKING ABORTIONIST

Editor: The following interview ran in Life Issues Institute's July 1999 Connector magazine.

Eric Harrah was part owner of one of the nation's largest chains of abortion clinics. He recently converted to Christianity and walked away from the lucrative business of killing unborn children. Dr. John Willke and Brad Mattes interviewed him regarding his involvement in the abortion industry.

Dr. W: I am curious about your function in the clinic. Were you basically a business manager, owner?

Eric: I was an owner. My first position was director of public relations and then I became an owner and from there went around opening clinics -- that was my biggest function with my different partners.

Brad: How did you select areas to open abortion clinics?

Eric: Basically, you looked in an area that didn't have a clinic in it. You would get demographic numbers, from areas that had colleges or universities, with the amount of abortions that had taken place prior to that. If it had a high abortion rate, that would be a prime area.

Dr. W: How would you hire the abortionists?

Eric: Well, before you would even go to a town, you would usually have your doctors lined up. A lot of times, doctors would contact me. There was always some doctor somewhere in some town who was already doing abortions. Also, in larger demographic areas (metropolitan areas) it was easy to tap any number of residency programs.

Dr. W: These were residents who'd moonlight?

Eric: That was not all I hired, but that was a very nice pool to be able to select from, because they were interested. You take a resident, bring him into an abortion clinic and they work part-time, even just one day a week. They can make $75,000 a year, if not more, which is very beneficial to pay off their student loans.

Brad: How many states did you have clinics in?

Eric: About 11 or 12.

Brad: And how many abortions did your chain of abortion clinics do?

Eric: If I take all the numbers from the time I started in the abortion industry to the time I got out (10 years), we probably did about a quarter of a million total.

Brad: Were the abortions that were done in your clinics limited to first trimester abortions?

Eric: Oh, no. People in the abortion business don't want to do first-trimester abortions. That's not where the money is. The money is in mid-second to early third-trimester abortions.

Dr. W: But you can't do those in every clinic -- or do you?

Eric: No. Every place has different laws. In New Jersey, you can only go to 14 weeks in a clinic setting, but what you do is get approved and open up a surgi-center where you can get abortions done. Pennsylvania, which prides itself on having some of the strictest abortion laws, actually has some of the most lenient and is a mecca for late-term abortions. They go to 24 or 26 weeks -- that's in a clinic setting. Delaware is 22-24 weeks -- that's in an office setting....

Brad: When you were involved in this industry, what was your annual income?

Eric: When I walked away from the clinics, I walked away from everything. I left my ownership and my money there. I wanted nothing else to do with it. The average doctor who does abortions one day a week at a clinic averages 25-40 abortions. He will walk away in his pocket with an average of $100,000-$125,000 a year. An average clinic that performs roughly around 8,000 abortions will gross approximately $1 million a year.

Dr. W: One doctor can do that? That's full time, though.

Eric: No, it's not. Not at all. Abortion clinics, Dr. Willke, are set up like cattle slaughtering centers. You get 'em in and you get 'em out. I would say, honestly, about 60-70 percent of all abortions take place on Saturdays.

Brad: How many women do they usually schedule in a day?

Eric: The maximum I've ever seen get done in a day is probably 50-60 women. Usually, that takes two abortionists, but I have seen doctors kick out 40-50 patients by themselves. First-trimester cases -- if you have a doctor who's been doing it for a while and he knows what he's doing -- you can push through 6-7 an hour. And that goes back to the whole issue too of how little regulation there is. Even within Pennsylvania, which prides itself on being the bastion for restrictive abortion laws, there really are no regulations. There's nobody to monitor these facilities. There's nobody who tracks the money that comes from the birth-control companies that flood through the clinics -- the paybacks. There's nobody who tracks the insurance companies that give incentives to physicians for performing abortions, because insurance companies would rather pay for abortions than pay for a full labor and delivery.

Dr. W: You get those incentive payments?

Eric: Oh yeah, they flow like water. If you're a participating member of an insurance company, they will give you incentives to perform an abortion. First-trimester abortions are $250, and insurance companies such as... I've seen them pay over $2,000 for those abortions, because they would rather pay $2,000-2,500 for a first-trimester case than pay $7,000-8,000 for prenatal, labor and delivery....

In my facilities, I always gave option counseling. Of course you make the abortion the most appealing. I told them about adoption and about foster care and about (when there was welfare) assistance. The typical way it would go is, "Well, you know you can place your baby out for adoption." But then, in the second breath you would say, "That's an option available to you, but you also have to realize that there's going to be a baby of yours out here somewhere in the world you will never see again. At least with abortion you know what's happening. You can go on with your life...."

Dr. W: Let me ask about picketing out front. Did you have that in front of some of your places? And what influence did that have?

Eric: It depended on what kind of picketing it was. I found that it did nothing but infuriate people and the woman who came in. What worked, and what I hated the most, were the sidewalk counselors who would stand there and give a brochure about the local Crisis Pregnancy Center. Those were the most effective, because that's when the girl would stop to have a conversation.

Dr. W: And some of those women never came in?

Eric: Yes.

Brad: You saw those dollar bills walking away.

Eric: You never minded it when the men were outside picketing, because that was good, especially if they were loud and obnoxious, telling women they were going to go to hell. That was productive because they would come in and say, "Who do they think they are telling me what to do?" Women were much more effective at it than men, definitely. We knew which one was going to be successful. What I found, in my personal experience, is that the women didn't usually respond to younger women because they would typically look at them and say, "You're my age -- what do you know?" But who they did respond to was older women -- middle-aged women and senior citizen women because I think, in their minds, those women had valuable advice....

Dr. W: We hear that the number of abortionists is declining, is aging, and that worries the industry.

Eric: The number of these abortionists, yes, is declining, but what is increasing now is what's called "docs in a box," doctors who hold licenses in anywhere from 5 to 20 states and spend their time flying from state to state just doing abortions. You also have what are called "mega-docs" who totally control a certain geographic area. Those are on the increase. You should see the anti-trust laws that are being broken by abortion providers ˆ the "carteling", as we used to call it, where you would get together for a friendly lunch and decide what fee was going to be charged. The reason I was hated so much by the people in the abortion industry was that I was a cartel-breaker. If I went into a town where first-trimester abortions started out at $275, I would go in and charge $200, because I knew that the clinic had been around for five or six years and already had a kind of debt. I was coming in and starting from scratch. The thing was to go in and force them to shut down. It's a very cutthroat business, very backstabbing and very physically dangerous too....

Brad: You recently came out of the abortion industry. Tell us about some of the new things pro-lifers should be concerned about.

Eric: The non-surgical, Methotrexate/Misoprostil abortions. That's a whole other racket. By the time you count the two medications and the needle you need to give the injection, it's going to cost you around $15. I was charging anywhere from $375 and others charged as much as $600. Now, here's the big racket they do with it. They bring these women in and they know it's only good up until about 7 or 8 weeks. A woman comes in at 9 or 10 weeks and they tell her about this wonderful non-surgical abortion. She's so desperate not to have to have the surgery that she opts for the non-surgical procedure. They know it's going to fail and then they tell her, "Now we're going to give this to you, but if it fails, you're going to have to pay us for a surgical abortion."

Life Issues Institute's address:
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513-729-3636 fax.

-- from the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, November 1999

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