By DEXTER DUGGAN
The Walls Are Talking: Former Abortion Clinic Workers Tell Their Stories, by Abby Johnson, written with Kristin Detrow, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2016, ISBN 978-1-58617-797-3, 155 pages hardback, $17.95.
Book reviews usually don’t include advice on how to read the book. Read it as you please. Read it while drinking orange juice, coffee, something else or nothing. Read it while snacking or fasting. Read it lying down or sitting up. In the morning or the evening. With a colored marker or a notebook, or scribble in the margins.
But it’s probably best to begin reading former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson’s latest, The Walls Are Talking, by beginning at the end, first reading chapter 17 and “Final Thoughts From Abby.”
Because the shocking, disgusting facts that come earlier in the book are so likely to leave readers fuming with revulsion and indignation that they need an initial reminder these abortion workers are misguided sinners, too, like the rest of humanity, but are capable of conversion. And conversion is best attained through others’ love and prayer.
Johnson, who was director of a Texas Planned Parenthood abortion clinic before becoming a pro-lifer in 2009, writes in her “Final Thoughts” that if someone says abortion workers should “burn in hell,” “it hurts a little, because that was me.”
Why isn’t Johnson making six times the money as COO of a big Planned Parenthood affiliate today? “Because of forgiveness,” Johnson writes. “Because of mercy. Because of grace. Because of God. And because of real pro-lifers. The people I turned to accepted me for me — baggage and all. They knew that I was a broken person, and they loved me anyway.”
Chapter 17 describes abortion workers as believing they’re involved in a vital civil-rights issue. Concern about danger to their physical safety only hardened their resolve.
“In our minds, we were fighting against a movement that wanted to rip away the rights of women — a battle similar to the one fought to give women the right to vote, and to end segregation.”
Johnson emphasizes that a pro-life presence is vitally needed outside the clinics, but not in Grim Reaper costumes or blaring Bible verses at potential clients. “All too often, the insane, self-righteous behavior drove them into our waiting arms.”
Highly trained pro-life sidewalk counselors need to be there “to connect with women and help them find a solution for their unique situations. Remember, inside the clinic, we don’t offer options or solutions. We only offer abortion.”
However, every single person’s prayers on the sidewalk make a huge, irreplaceable difference. “I cannot stress that enough. Show up. When it is hot and humid, show up. When it is freezing, show up. The prayers of the people outside were a big factor in my ultimately leaving the abortion industry.
“If the prayer volunteers hadn’t shown up each and every day, I wonder if I would have been able to suppress or somehow justify the truth of what I was doing when it was finally revealed to me. . . . Without people standing outside the fence praying, just praying, I don’t know if I could have left.”
In 2010, Johnson explained her decision to leave the business in her debut book, Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line. In one incident, she told of the impact a praying nun in full habit outside the fence made inside the clinic — a nun who truly seemed to be suffering at what PP was doing.
In a 2011 interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Johnson explained the impact:
“I didn’t like the thoughts that came into my head, because I had worked so hard at getting to where I was and defending what I was doing. For a nun to be incredibly pained by the sight of my clinic, by the sight of me and my co-workers and the women and men exiting our clinic, was heartbreaking and brought up a lot of tension inside of me that I didn’t know could be brought out of me. Abortion was more real to her than it was to any of us.”
Although pro-life can be understood as a secular human-rights issue, some nuns may want to consider the impression that the addition of their prayerful presence could make outside a clinic. As nuns, they pray anyway, and here would be a way directly to touch the world, out in the open.
The book title The Walls Are Talking is a play on a 1990s made-for-TV movie using actresses to promote abortion, If These Walls Could Talk.
In her introduction to The Walls Are Talking, Johnson writes that the movie with the rather similar name “succeeds in completely glossing over the fact that for every woman daunted by an unwanted pregnancy, there is another life at stake: an innocent human — a life easily marginalized and depicted solely as a burden; a quandary; an affliction from which hapless women can only be rescued by safe and legal abortion.”
Indeed, the reader notices the abortion staffers’ attitude that a problem pregnancy is nothing but a little ghost that should be made to fly away; then all will be well. Who’d possibly insist on keeping a trifling, nagging ghost around?
However, many if not most problems in people’s lives are caused by other people, whether the troubling neighbor, the unpleasant co-worker, the boss, the friends and relatives. Killing them isn’t the allowable legal answer. But for the personhood of the innocent preborn baby, who doesn’t intend to be a problem at all, the U.S. legal system has been perverted into making death the automatic and very final solution.
After she left Planned Parenthood, Johnson founded “And Then There Were None” (abortionworker.com) to provide a way out of the abortion industry for others.
They have stories to tell. They’re not identified by name in The Walls Are Talking.
Some of the abortion workers in the book mention having had more than one abortion themselves. Johnson herself had two. A speaker at a pro-abortion conference said approximately 70 percent of Planned Parenthood employees were post-abortive.
Keeping the above considerations in mind, now we can move to the earlier parts of The Walls Are Talking.
Open Their Eyes
One worker in the book who previously had a surgical abortion liked the idea of having a medication abortion. She wasn’t warned of anything in her counseling session to cause her concern.
She took the pills at home and cozied up in bed to watch TV. Then the excruciating reality hit. “Suddenly, I was blindsided by a pain in my abdomen like nothing I had ever experienced before or since. Then came the blood in a proverbial tidal wave.”
Her hours of agonies in the bathroom, and lying on the bathroom floor when she thought she dare not even step out of the bathroom, made her think she was having a bizarre, rare reaction. But when she called the clinic to report “the gruesome details of my ordeal,” she was infuriated to be told, without an expression of concern, “That’s not abnormal.”
What a contrast, she thought, with the full medical information she received before her tonsillectomy. “The organization that I had given so much of myself to had completely failed to protect me.”
When she asked why women aren’t being told of the risks, “My supervisor’s answer mortified me. ‘We don’t want to scare them’.”
That’s a strange answer, she thought, coming from an “abortion spin machine” that says, “Trust women.”
“I now understand that the abortion industry is not concerned that women will be ‘scared.’ They are the ones who are scared — scared that if women did get accurate information and were aware of the risks of the lethal options on their malevolent menu, they would walk right out the door; and terrified that they would consider choosing life for their children” — which means lost abortion revenue.
Another former abortion worker tells of a 16-year-old hemorrhaging on the abortion table during a supposedly routine legal procedure — just like a friend of the worker’s previously was injured — then being pumped full of sedation for three hours when she continues bleeding. Her father is kept in ignorance out in the waiting room.
After the abortionist rejects a suggestion that she be taken to the emergency room, the worker reports this to her supervisor, who also rules out a trip to the hospital. “I didn’t have to ask why. I knew. Nothing looks worse for an abortion clinic than an ambulance pulling up outside.”
The worried father is told the lie that it’s taking so long for his daughter behind the wall because the clinic’s workload just got backed up. When she finally leaves the clinic that same day leaning on him for support, “Neither one of them had any idea of the nightmare she had endured that day or how close she had come to losing her life.”
Being “nonjudgmental” about clients’ harrowing lives was placed above concern for their welfare. One longtime client, a prostitute, instead of being provocatively dressed, “often came in filthy,” the same as some other prostitutes who visited. “The clinic’s unofficial position on prostitution was identical to its stance concerning abortion. A woman had the right to choose what she did with her body. Period. End of story.”
One day this prostitute, Diane (names were changed for the book), “bruised and battered as usual,” came in with her hulking, vicious pimp. Her “black eyes or busted lips cried out to us, begging us to care. But we failed to even ask the most basic of questions because we didn’t want to judge her way of life.”
Another client, a “gaunt little girl” who didn’t speak English, came in with “an older and rather menacing American man” who insisted on handling all her paperwork. The abortion staff pondered this “extremely shady situation,” but decided to take no precautionary measures. “In the end, we decided that it was better to leave it alone and mind our own business — the business of abortion.
Then there was the abortionist specializing in destroying advanced pregnancies who, along with his assistants, dragged an out-of-town client from her hotel and sedated her after she insisted she’d changed her mind about continuing the three-day abortion and instead wanted to save her baby. Back at the clinic, he gave the unconscious mother’s baby another shot of poison.
When she awakened and realized what had happened, she started shrieking to hold her dead baby. “I just need to hold him. Please.” Instead, the clinic called the police to remove her from the premises, still crying out.
The POC labs are where the clinics’ mangled “products of conception,” a/k/a babies, are reassembled, to make sure all the parts were removed from the womb, with none left behind to cause infection.
“By throwing the newbies (workers) into the trenches of the POC lab, the ‘weak’ ones were weeded out; the ones who managed to stomach it the first time or two promptly toughened up,” says one former abortion worker.
The “lab is a horrific place full of unspeakable gore. I know that now. And the higher-ups in the abortion industry know it, too.”
“Frequent fliers” is a clinic term for repeat customers. Angie was one of them, smiling, joking, and in for her ninth abortion. When it was over, Angie said she’d like to have a look at “it,” seeing as how she’d “had it done so many times.”
Although this was an unusual request, a worker brought her the remains of the 13-week-old fetus. Shocked, Angie promptly broke down: “That’s a baby. That was my baby.” She began weeping, then screaming, and asked to take the small, mangled body home with her. Impossible, she was told. “I can keep it in the freezer,” she whispered.
The clinic called her current boyfriend, who finally coaxed her to leave. He put his arm around her shoulder and cried. The clinic never saw Angie again.
Send a copy of this book to fervid pro-abortionists like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Cecile Richards, and their enablers like Notre Dame President John Jenkins, CSC.
They may try to shrug it off, just as the elite did about the incontrovertible Center for Medical Progress videos last summer. It may seem impossible to open blinded eyes. But this whole book is about such eyes opening.
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