In one of the most honest, straightforward testimonies about the abortion industry, Planned Parenthood employee turned pro-life advocate Abby Johnson painted a simple but brutal picture during her speech at the Republican National Convention.
“The tipping point came a month later, when a physician asked me to assist with an ultrasound-guided abortion,” Johnson said. “Nothing prepared me for what I saw on the screen — an unborn baby fighting back, desperate to move away from the suction. And I’ll never forget what the doctor said next: ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ The last thing I saw was a spine twirling around in the mother’s womb before succumbing to the force of the suction.”
The point of Johnson’s story was this: Abortion is the destruction of an innocent life, but it’s easy to ignore the reality of the procedure when you don’t see it for yourself. Johnson did see it, and it changed her life completely. She left Planned Parenthood and became an advocate for the unborn because she could not live with the brutality to which she had been a party.
“For most people who consider themselves pro-life, abortion is abstract. They can’t conceive of the barbarity,” Johnson explained. “For me, abortion is real. I know what it sounds like, what it smells like. I’ve been the perpetrator … to these babies … to these women.”
It’s impossible to argue with Johnson’s message, just as it is impossible to look at the hands and feet being knit within a mother’s womb and deny that the child inside is alive. But the Left has certainly tried. Immediately after Johnson’s speech, the Washington Post and New York Times published their “fact checks.” Not one addressed the crux of Johnson’s address, but instead focused on innocuous details.
The Washington Post took trouble with Johnson’s claim that “almost 80% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically placed in minority neighborhoods.” And the New York Times decided to contest Johnson’s allegation that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, “was a racist who believed in eugenics” and aimed to “eradicate the minority population” through abortion.
In regards to the Washington Post’s fact check, I can’t speak to the number of Planned Parenthood locations positioned in minority neighborhoods, but it is undeniably true that black women undergo more abortions than white women. So, the point Johnson made still stands: Minority women and children disproportionately suffer because of the abortion industry.
As to the New York Times, the publication is just flat-out wrong about Sanger. She did support eugenics, and she was a racist. While promoting birth control, she advanced the controversial “Negro Project” and spoke to a Ku Klux Klan group about “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
At one point, Sanger urged one of her doctors to hire an African American physician so the “colored Negroes … can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubt.” She then attempted to enlist a minister to advocate for her cause. Sanger urged the doctor to enlist the help of spiritual leaders to justify their deadly work, writing, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Yet, this is the woman the New York Times sought to defend.
Clearly, Abby Johnson struck a nerve. The Left couldn’t argue with her firsthand experience, so they chose to fixate on details they labeled inaccurate in an attempt to undermine her. But it won’t work. Johnson’s testimony was powerful because it cut right to the heart of the issue and forced viewers to ask: What is abortion? What does it require, and what does it entail?
And once you find the answers to those questions, the debate will change — just like it did for Johnson.
