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An Arizona jury unanimously ordered Planned Parenthood to pay $3 million in damages to a former clinic director who was fired after reporting unsafe and illegal practices at her clinic.
Mayra Rodriguez, who worked for Planned Parenthood for 17 years and ran three Arizona clinics, was terminated in October 2017, allegedly for failing to follow proper procedures regarding narcotics. Rodriguez sued.
“You know when you have been married to a person for 17 years and you find out they have been cheating on you,” Rodriguez told the Daily Caller. “That deception that you feel in your heart? That is how I felt.”
Following a two-week trial in Maricopa County Superior Courts, the jury deliberated for three hours before awarding Rodriguez $3 million in damages for wrongful termination. According to LifeNews.com, Rodriguez’s “attorney, Tim Casey, based in Phoenix, never asked for any dollar amount during the trial. The damages awarded came directly from the jury.”
Many of Rodriguez’s concerns revolved around one doctor at the clinic. She said she’d noticed multiple reports of abortion complications from patients treated by this doctor and reported it to a lead clinician, but nothing ever came of her complaint. She also claimed that medical assistants told her the doctor was requiring them to sign affidavits certifying that abortions were complete and the babies were not born alive before the doctor had completed the abortions. In fact, “Rodriguez found an affidavit already signed while a doctor was still in the operating room completing the abortion,” reported the Daily Caller. In addition, the doctor in one case failed to verify that an abortion was complete and all baby parts had been extracted from the uterus before inserting an intrauterine device. Although an ultrasound revealed body parts still inside the mother, necessitating additional attention, the doctor did not report this incident as required.
Rodriguez also alleged that a minor with an adult partner came to the clinic, seeking an abortion, but the clinic did not report this likely case of statutory rape to the state within 48 hours as required by law. Instead, the clinic waited 10 days to report it — on the very day the girl obtained her abortion. Rodriguez said she reported this to a supervisor but never received a response.
Rodriguez’s lawsuit further states that she spoke to the same supervisor about her concerns that the door to the clinic’s medicine room was being left open during working hours, giving anyone easy access to it.
Soon after Rodriguez lodged her complaints, she received a memo giving her a final warning that she was in danger of termination. Then a supervisor claimed she found narcotics in Rodriguez’s desk. Rodriguez maintains the drug was not a narcotic and she was just following common practice by storing the medicine that way before transferring it to the purchasing department. She says she reported it missing to the supervisor, who told her she didn’t need to file an incident report. The next day, she was fired for violating the clinic’s controlled-substances policy.
“I had been complaining about certain things I saw at the clinic that I was managing. I was very vocal about these problems,” Rodriguez told the Daily Caller. “So then they terminated me.”
Fighting Planned Parenthood wasn’t easy and sometimes was downright hurtful, Rodriguez told LifeNews.com. Planned Parenthood executives and former coworkers said deceitful things about her, with executives calling her a “liar” because she is an illegal alien.
“Planned Parenthood publicly states they want to help and stand up for immigrants, that they care about these women, but it’s not true,” she said. “They shamed me for my immigration status.”
Rodriguez, who sought help from And Then There Were None, the organization founded by former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson to help workers leave the abortion industry, isn’t saying whether she has become pro-life as a result of her experience. But she did point out that one’s opinion of abortion shouldn’t affect his view of her case.
“It is not about pro-life or pro-choice,” she told the Daily Caller. “It is about women’s safety and about caring for women. It is about employees feeling like they can come forward when they see something being done wrong in their place of work.”
