‘Nothing is truly lost’ - Speaking against lies of the abortion industry

By Maria LeDoux
Associate editor, The Catholic Free Press

Patricia Sandoval, a pro-life and chastity speaker, spoke personally about her journey of healing from abortion, what it was like to work at Planned Parenthood, and overcoming addiction, at this year’s Worcester Catholic Women’s Conference, Oct. 7.
Mrs. Sandoval described her Catholic upbringing to the extent that her family went to church when “there was a wedding or a quinceanera.” She stated, “We never practiced our Catholic faith as the center of family or the center of our hearts.”
She did, however, go to religious education classes when she was a child and recalls coming home afterward, going into the backyard and looking up at the sky so that she could talk to God. She told her mother she wanted to write a “love note” to God. So, she did and tied it to a balloon her mother gave her. 
It was after her first Communion that she “forgot about God.”  Mrs. Sandoval recalled her mother’s interest in the New Age movement. “She let Satan into our home,” she said. 
“I didn’t know what virtue was, that I needed to be a saint. You cannot give your children something you do not have,” she said.
She said her early formation came from Planned Parenthood in the sixth grade when she was taught about contraception, abortion, and “safe sex.” At the age of 12, the “deception and lies” began to fill her head. She was taught that when a woman becomes pregnant, the pre-born child is not really a baby until five months, and if you find yourself in an unwanted pregnancy that abortion is your only answer.
In 1992, her mother left the family home saying she wanted to “start living” because she felt like a bird stuck in a “little gold cage.” Her mother believed that success came from “a good career, making good money.”
“That’s a lie society tells women,” Mrs. Sandoval said. 
At 19 she became pregnant. She thought sex was love. 
“I didn’t know what true and authentic love was. It is a love that sacrifices. [It is] dying of yourself [and saying] I love you so I will put my passions and desires to the side because I want to be a saint,” she explained.
The first time she became pregnant, she said “It wasn’t fear. It was panic mode.”
She did not want to be the “little bird in the little gold cage” her mother had claimed to be years prior. 
Her boyfriend was very supportive of her, encouraging her to keep the baby. At four months pregnant – thinking that it wasn’t a baby until five months as her friends reminded her and as they were taught by Planned Parenthood – she had an abortion and told her boyfriend it was a miscarriage. 
She was not allowed to look at the ultrasound, despite asking the abortionist because she “wouldn’t see anything … it was only a clump of cells.”
“[The abortionist] never told me about the emotional effects after that abortion – the mental and physical damage. I thought when I walked out, I was liberated. But I walked out in bondage, chained up.”
The second time she became pregnant, she didn’t tell anyone.
The third time, she told her boyfriend that she was going to have an abortion. He opposed, but she told him it was her body and her choice to do it. In “the reality of it all, I did take that right away from him … it’s taking the rights of the whole family away,” she said.
She said she was “very suicidal” by the last time. Her “womb became a tomb, this spirit of death inside of me,” she said.
Mrs. Sandoval noted that her boyfriend was experiencing the same psychological symptoms she had even in the first two pregnancies when she had never told him that she had abortions. 
“There are men are in crisis … If every father, educator, president, lawyer, (etc.) If every man were to defend life, I don’t think abortion would exist,” said Mrs. Sandoval.
Following her abortions, she said she was traumatized to see children in public. “I was in this trap that the abortion industry set up for me when I was 12 years old,” she said. 
Despite not having nursing credentials, Mrs. Sandoval was hired to be a “back-office nurse” at Planned Parenthood. “This is not medical care,” she said. 
Her job was to prepare women and girls for abortions, to make sure they go through with their appointments and confirm the abortion was successful by identifying body parts of the fetus, as tissue left behind could cause infection in the mother. The first instance of this she said, “The baby’s mouth was screaming in anguish, wide open. Nobody [was] present to defend his life or hear his cries. Only heaven heard his cries.” 
“The baby was thrown away in the garbage. ... Women faint, scream, and hemorrhage. The abortion industry does not care about women. At the end of the day, the trash can was filled.”
 She explained how the abortions were performed, with a vacuum 28 times stronger than a household vacuum and an abortionist searching blindly with his sharp tools. She was told not to tell anyone what happened there.
“Martyrs of our time are our unborn children. Not persecuted by their enemies but their own family,” she said. “Those who look most like Christ are the unborn children – innocent, pure, without fault or condemnation. They are martyred in the purest form just as Jesus was crucified in the cross. When we hear this, we give them dignity. … They are praying for us now. Interceding for us and for the salvation of their parents. That their parents make it to heaven and be reunited with their family.” 
In order to cope, she turned to drugs. She found herself addicted, emaciated, and homeless. “I was a dead woman walking with no hope,” she said.
 One day as she wept in despair, she remembered sending “love notes” to God. “I felt the presence of God the father. Then I realized that not all was lost. I looked up to the sky, saying I don’t know you, but I know that you exist. Forgive me for all that I have done.”
Mrs. Sandoval ended up back at her father’s house and her mother moved back to the area in search of her. She said that when she had gone home, her mother had come back to the Catholic faith and was praying for her, offering every Mass for three years. 
Unable to forgive herself for her abortions, she went to a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat and said she had a vision of her aborted children dressed “just how she liked.” She said, the Virgin Mary dressed them. They called her mother as she called herself a murderer.
She said, “All the unborn children are under [Mary’s] care. Nothing is truly lost. Everything in Jesus is restored because he is victorious over death on the cross.”