An ‘unPLANNED’ path

PALMER — Sunday marks Planned Parenthood’s 100th birthday, but at least one ex-employee won’t be celebrating.

Former Planned Parenthood Clinic Director Abby Johnson, who worked for the organization for eight years in Bryan, Texas, made national headlines in 2009 when she reported pressure from her superiors to increase abortions for profit. She cited her “horror” at watching a 13-week-old fetus aborted as another reason for her resignation, and sued the Texas clinic for engaging in “fraudulent billing practices,” according to court documents.

The lawsuit was later dismissed because a similar suit was first posed by another former employee, Karen Reynolds, against another Texas clinic, which resulted in a $4.3 million payout by Planned Parenthood (PP) in 2013. Still, the organization “denied any wrongdoing,” according to an article by The Wall Street Journal.

Since Johnson’s resignation, she has toured the world speaking against abortion and PP, releasing a book in 2010 called “unPLANNED: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader.”

Last week, Johnson took her talk to Alaska, supporting the Anchorage-based organization Alaska Right to Life at four fundraising banquets in Fairbanks, Kenai, Anchorage and, finally, Palmer.

At Farm Loop Christian Center on Saturday, Johnson kicked off her speech with jokes about being a Texan subjected to Alaska’s brisk, fall weather and being a “natural family planning instructor” with five children and a newborn on the way.

“I hear it works, if you use it,” she quipped, regarding her advice to others in her current occupation.

The humor in Johnson’s story began to wane as she told the audience that one of her sons, whom she and her husband adopted from a woman who was raped, almost didn’t live to see the light of day.

“She went to many of her family and friends and people in her church … and they looked at her and said, ‘Well you know what, this is the one time that abortion is OK,’” Johnson recalled.

But neither Johnson nor the pregnant woman — a married, mother of three at the time — ultimately agreed with that perspective.

“She just said, ‘No — it’s either a baby all of the time or it’s a baby none of the time,’” Johnson said.

PP reports that 3 in 10 women in the United States have an abortion by the time they turn 45.

“Abortions are very common,” the organization’s website reads, and “Women have abortions because they care about themselves and their families or their future families.”

Again, Johnson doesn’t see abortion that way, but it took her years to truly identify as “pro-life.”

“I would love to tell you I’ve always stood up here and defended life, but you know that’s not true,” she told the Palmer crowd.

Johnson said she grew up in a “pro-life” home, though her family never expressed the most passionate opinions on abortion. As a college student, she said she found herself “unprepared,” and was won over by a PP representative who told her that being “pro-choice” meant preventing otherwise inevitable illegal and unsafe abortions.

Johnson herself would later have two abortions before undergoing what she called a “conversion of the heart.”

“People ask me all the time, they say, ‘Abby, how is it you went from being this good Christian kid to being someone who ran an abortion clinic?’ … I don’t really have a silver bullet answer for you except to say that it happened just a little bit at a time,” she said.

It was only when she had risen high in the chain of command and earned the title of “Employee of the Month” at PP that she witnessed an abortion and changed her perspective on life.

About a month before she left PP, Johnson was invited to a private practice to watch an ultrasound-guided abortion, which was different than the “blind” abortions conducted at PP clinics. At PP, the doctor would “poke around” in the woman’s uterus with a tube attached to a suction machine “until he thought he had enough blood and tissue in a glass jar,” she said.

“It was no wonder that we had so many uterine perforations … ’cause they could not see what they were doing,” Johnson said.

When she asked her supervisor why abortions weren’t performed with ultrasound guidance at their clinic — if it was indeed safer for the patient, as the supervisor acknowledged — she was told it was a matter of time.

“Using an ultrasound during the abortion procedure takes about an extra 3 minutes of time, and our goal inside of Planned Parenthood was to have a woman on the table, off the table, abortion complete in five minutes,” Johnson said.

She took the answer in stride, reasoning that “in the abortion industry, time is money.”

When Johnson was asked to assist the visiting doctor in an ultrasound-guided abortion, she accepted what she deemed a “good learning opportunity,” a matter of course for a PP clinic director.

“My job was to hold the ultrasound probe on the woman’s abdomen, so that the doctor could, in his words, visualize his target,” Johnson said.

With the ultrasound, she and the doctor determined that the woman was 13 weeks pregnant, at which point a human fetus has arms, legs, fingers and toes, internal organs, a heartbeat and brainwaves.

“I could look at the screen and see, it looked like a baby, but I knew it wasn’t, because, see, in the pro-choicer mindset, a baby is a baby if the baby is wanted. A baby is tissue if the baby is unwanted,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the church shares some of the blame for what she sees as an epidemic of apathy. She said almost 70 percent of women who have abortions in the U.S. identify as Christian, “because they’re ashamed. Because they feel guilty. Because our church has been silent, and they don’t know the church is a safe place to go, because the church has never told them that it is a safe place to go.”

Johnson encouraged her audience to change that, and to actively protest abortion outside the Planned Parenthood in Anchorage.

“This is a problem that is happening right here, in your community,” she said

According to the Alaska Bureau of Vital Statistics, 1,334 induced terminations were reported in Alaska in 2015 — a decrease of 12.1 percent from the 1,518 reported in 2014.

Johnson said she hopes to see decrease continue, but that it won’t without activism.

AK Right to Life is also sponsoring a screening of “Voiceless,” a feature film about a soldier-turned-pastor who protests an abortion clinic across from his church, at The Valley Cinema in Wasilla on Friday, Oct. 21 through Monday, Oct. 24.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.