Helping Workers Quit
Hundreds of miles away in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, Texas, one of the pro-life movement’s more controversial figures pursues a different tactic.
Abby Johnson, herself a former director of a Planned Parenthood facility, wants to convince abortion clinic employees to quit. She started an organization last summer to help them do so.
“There are probably about 3,200 abortion clinic workers in the United States and we’ve already reached 50,” Johnson said of workers who’ve quit after contact with her group. “So we’ve almost reached two percent of that population in a year.”
Johnson worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years, the last of those as a director at their Bryan, Texas, clinic. But she suddenly quit in 2009 and began working with the pro-life group, 40 Days for Life.
Other pro-abortion defectors in the past have made a good living doing speeches and appearances before pro-life groups, which is pretty much what Johnson is doing full-time now.
But she insists her goal is much bigger than making money. She said she has a vision to help kill off the very abortion industry she once worked for.
Witness to Death
Johnson tells in her autobiographical book, Unplanned, how her pro-choice outlook changed when a visiting abortionist to her clinic asked her to do something unexpected during a day in September 2009—help with an ultrasound during an abortion.
“I was holding the ultrasound probe,” Johnson told CBN News. “And I stood there and watched as a 13-week-old unborn child fought and struggled for his life during that abortion.”
Johnson related how Planned Parenthood told its people to inform clients that young fetuses couldn’t feel pain. But that didn’t fit with what Johnson saw as she watched the abortion.
In Unplanned, she describes what happened as the tube used to suction out the unborn baby approached him.
“As the cannula pressed in, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that the fetus could feel the cannula and did not like the feeling,” she writes.
A few seconds later Johnson saw “the cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it.”
“For the briefest moment, it looked as if the baby were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed,” she said. “And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes.”
Starving Abortion Clinics
Johnson told CBN News she knew at that moment she’d been lied to by Planned Parenthood.
“But then I, in turn, had lied to thousands of women,” she admitted.
She said the question she’d most been asked by women planning to get abortions was, “Will my baby feel this?”
Around the same time Johnson witnessed that abortion, she had come to realize Planned Parenthood’s goal was not to make the procedure safe and rare, but to sell abortion.
“To Planned Parenthood, abortion always is the best thing for a woman,” Johnson stated. “Ninety-eight percent of women who are pregnant that go into a Planned Parenthood clinic will get an abortion.”
And she’s come to believe one of the best ways to stop this is to starve the clinics of their employees.
And Then There Were None
Which was the reason to start the group And Then There Were None. It offers abortion clinic workers who will quit up to three months of financial support while they look for another job.
One of Johnson’s allies in this fight is nurse Angie Andino, also a former worker at Planned Parenthood. She offered a challenge to those still at the clinics.
“Listen to your heart. Pray about it. Let God show you the truth,” she said.
Andino fell into deep depression after her Planned Parenthood work. But she told CBN News that it lifted after God woke her up late one night and whispered, “Save the babies.”
“And I thought, ‘Wow, God. Save the babies. Okay. I don’t know what that means right now, but I’m sure you’re going to let me know,'” she recalled.
Then a job opened providentially at a nearby pro-life pregnancy center where Andino began a career saving and delivering thousands of babies. It was a turn-around she believes could happen for any abortion worker who flees the industry.
“Their stories can be just like that,” Andino said.
And if they all fled the abortion industry, that would fulfill the vision statement of Johnson’s group.
As she says: “No abortion clinic workers—no abortion clinics—no abortions.”
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