Authors: Abby Johnson,Cindy Lambert
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Inspirational, #Biography, #Religion
A silence fell over us all for a time. Several of our clinic staff were Catholic, but even those of us who weren’t sensed a shared discomfort, as if we all felt embarrassed or ashamed. We tried to get back to work, but every few minutes someone would look out the window and offer an update on the sister, like, “She’s still weeping,” or, “Look, one of the pro-lifers is consoling her now.” It was agony just knowing she was out there.
Over the next several months, we learned her name was Sister Marie Bernadette. She visited the fence, week after week, on abortion days. One of the clinic staff who often joked that she was a “recovering Catholic” complained one day at lunchtime. She had been planning to go out for lunch that day but said there was no way she was leaving the building because she didn’t want the nun to see her.
The truth was, the sister’s simple, prayerful presence bothered most of us, Catholic, ex-Catholic, Protestant, and unchurched alike, as if she somehow represented our consciences. The sister was small, bubbly, and joyful. She had a radiant smile, yet clearly over the months we could continue to see that she was deeply and personally grieved by abortions.
How many other people cry outside my workplace because of the work I am doing?
I wondered. I didn’t like the question.
Over time we found ways to tease ourselves about the “power” of Sister Marie Bernadette as we came to realize we all avoided going outside when she was present. I found it eerie that her presence seemed to pervade the entire clinic every time she showed up at the fence.
Her simple presence always reminded me of confession.
Chapter Ten
The Hurricane
This period of my journey began with a hurricane—maybe that should have told me something.
From the fall of 2008 on, I faced increasing challenges both inside and outside my clinic, and my place within the movement for which I’d worked so hard was swept in a new direction seemingly overnight.
Everyone remembers Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Alabama Gulf coast with such force in 2005, and Hurricane Rita, which came shortly thereafter and devastated Houston. Except for those of us who lived through it, fewer remember Hurricane Ike, which hit the Caribbean and the Texas and Louisiana coast in September 2008, even though Ike was in fact the third costliest hurricane in U.S. history. It also killed forty-eight people in the United States; twenty-three others are still unaccounted for.
Fortunately those of us in the Bryan/College Station area were far enough inland to escape the worst of the storm, but we still experienced harsher weather than many people will see in a lifetime. It’s not surprising, then, that as the hurricane approached, nearly everyone in the Planned Parenthood hierarchy expected we would close the clinic until the storm passed. As director of the clinic, I reported to Cheryl, who was now our regional director, and Cheryl, like everyone else, urged that we close the clinic.
I understood their reasons for wanting to close. We didn’t yet know how bad the hurricane would get, even this far inland, and if we stayed open, our clients, staff, and visiting doctors risked injury from flooding, falling trees, and automobile accidents caused by dangerous road conditions and poor visibility—all the things that claim lives in any hurricane. But there was another concern, one that to my mind trumped the safety issue. We offered abortions only every other Saturday. If we closed the clinic, we would miss one of our abortion Saturdays, and those women who had been waiting would have to wait at least another two weeks. I was concerned that this delay could jeopardize their physical health since later abortions pose more risks. Not only that, from my own experience I knew how emotionally wrenching it would be to have to postpone the procedure.
Cheryl agreed it was unfortunate but said the clinic needed to be closed anyway.
At that point, I made it a personal campaign to keep the clinic open. Understand that at this point I had completely personalized my relationship with the clinic. I was the clinic, and the clinic was me. I took both our successes and our failures personally, and my self-respect was closely tied to how well the clinic performed. I got on the phone and talked to our staff and to the visiting doctors.
I may be stubborn, but I would not put my staff at risk. I knew that if the weather got bad enough, we simply wouldn’t be able to stay open. And the worst of the storm was expected to hit on Saturday, September 13. Our affiliate leadership told me that I absolutely could not open the clinic that Saturday. So I arranged with the doctor to come in on Friday instead. Then my assistant and I called every patient scheduled to come in on Saturday and rescheduled their appointments for Friday. Every other Planned Parenthood clinic in the path of the hurricane was closed that Friday—except for us.
The weather was strange that day, as it often is when a hurricane is approaching. It was so still, gray, and eerie. It was hot, but every now and then the weather would turn oddly cool, and we’d say, “It’s coming—we’ve got to move these women through here and get them home.” But when we’d finished, the hurricane still hadn’t hit. We had turned no one away, and everyone was able to head home with a reasonable expectation of arriving there.
And sure enough, on Saturday the weather was horrible—trees down across the roads, power out, flooding, high winds. There was no way we’d have been able to open on Saturday.
About a month later our statewide director made a statement celebrating the fact that even in the midst of a hurricane, our clinics had been open to provide services to women. Of course, only one had been open in the area affected by the storm—mine! You have to remember that when Hurricane Ike struck, I still fully embraced Planned Parenthood’s prochoice position. The organization—and what I saw as our shared mission to help women in crisis—had become of paramount concern to me. I was willing to risk anything to do what I thought was best for our clients.
A couple of months later, at our affiliate meeting in Houston, we had our first chance to get together and debrief about the hurricane and the resulting damage. We’d all seen plenty of destruction driving to the meeting that day, because Houston had been pretty well devastated by Ike. There had been serious flooding and lots of broken windows and damaged roofs. Power had been out in some areas of Houston for a full month after the hurricane, and grocery store shelves had been empty for weeks—not just because people immediately bought up anything the stores were able to stock, but also because they weren’t able to get trucks in with food.
Our boardroom was on the first floor of a clinic in Houston—quite a large building, with administrative offices downstairs and a clinic upstairs. The boardroom was typical—lots of large tables set in a rectangle, with room for probably fifty. Barbara, the chief operating officer, had brought Christmas cookies. She and the other officers, senior VPs, and directors sat at the head, with the rest of us from the affiliate clinics filling up the rest of the rectangle. Our affiliate had twelve clinics: ten of them in Texas and the other two in Louisiana.
The meeting started with small talk, mostly about the hurricane—the devastation to so many homes, which areas had been damaged, which clinics had been hit, and so on. We snacked on Barbara’s cookies as we chatted. Generally, our affiliate meetings didn’t dwell to a large extent on financials, so we didn’t expect that this one would. But partway through the meeting, Barbara announced that she had some really bad news for everybody. The projection screen had been pulled down from the ceiling, and now she raised it—revealing the whiteboard, on which she had already written a column of numbers. And believe me, the bottom line was not good.
Barbara’s demeanor (despite the cookies) had been unsettled throughout the meeting, and by this point she looked not just stern but angry. Some of the bad news on the whiteboard was because of the costs associated with the hurricane, but some of it was due to not bringing in as much money as we were spending.
It was horrible news, of course. But most of the others felt as I did:
How is this our fault? We’ve had a hurricane, the economy is in crisis, and we’ve been working as hard as we can.
Some weeks I’d been spending nearly sixty hours on the job. If our finances were in bad shape, it wasn’t from lack of trying.
Barbara referred us to the information packets we had been given, where we would find a list of the cost-cutting measures every clinic was to put into effect.
So we opened the packets and took a look. And were confused.
“Barbara,” I said, “are these kinds of measures really going to make a difference?” Most of the emphasis was on conserving supplies—cutting down on the amount of cleaning supplies used, recycling envelopes, and conserving paper. Were we really so bad off?
She explained that it all came down to trying to get the affiliate’s finances under control, and despite our best efforts, that hadn’t been happening.
Even so, after that meeting, I was optimistic. Sure, the previous few months had been financially difficult. But we would put some of these cost-cutting measures into effect at all of our clinics, and hopefully by the next affiliate meeting the ugly numbers we’d seen would look a lot different. I really didn’t think that our Bryan clinic was a problem—we were already following many of the cost-cutting measures Barbara had suggested anyway, and we started implementing the others. I figured that the other clinics just weren’t being run as efficiently as ours. The Bryan clinic, I proudly believed, ran like a well-oiled machine.
Our next affiliate meeting was a few months later, and sure enough, the financial figures Barbara unveiled looked very different from the ones at the previous meeting—they were worse. The bottom line was truly ugly and truly scary.
7
Barbara launched into an impassioned speech about how this couldn’t continue, but after several minutes I interrupted her. “We’re doing everything you’ve asked us to do,” I said, frustrated. “If that’s not enough, stop yelling at us and tell us what else we can do, because if we’re going to turn this around, we need answers! And obviously that list of cost-cutting measures wasn’t it!”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Well, we’re wondering if we have too many people on staff.”
There it was. The answer you always fear. Are we going to have to lay off some of our staff?
“I can’t function with any fewer staff than I have now,” I said, “not if we’re to provide the same level of service. We’re already shorthanded because I haven’t been able to get permission to hire anyone.”
Barbara said she planned to meet with each director individually. In the next couple of weeks, each of us would need to come to headquarters for a day. Barbara would evaluate each clinic with the director. They’d look at the clinic’s schedule and discuss how to better schedule patients. They’d consider staff cuts if appropriate and necessary.
I feared their plan might be to increase the hours each of the staff would work, though they would be paid the same amount of money as before. Morale was already low. But it was about to get exponentially worse.
Or so I feared. But in a few days, when the scheduling of those meetings was to begin, Cheryl called with great news! The Bryan clinic was the only clinic that was meeting its goals. I was exempt from the meeting, she told me. “Congratulations.”
I admit, I felt pretty good about that. I thought,
Yes! I must be doing something right.
Actually, I had a few reasons to think that. For one, I’d just recently been named our affiliate’s 2008 Employee of the Year. And besides that, Cheryl asked me to help her set up improved scheduling and procedures for the other clinics. So not only was my clinic not asked to make any changes, I was entrusted with developing a plan to guide other clinics to greater financial health.
There’s one thing none of us mentioned, though. It was easier for my clinic to meet its goals and stay on sound financial footing compared to most others. We were one of the few clinics in our affiliate that performed abortions. And those abortions earned a lot of money. The clinics that didn’t perform abortions had little means of providing revenue.
Things got worse for our affiliate as the year progressed. We were moving further and further into the red, and by mid-spring of 2009 we were forced to lay people off. At first no one from my clinic was terminated—although good friends from other clinics were being let go—but then my clinic lost one part-timer.
The month after that second affiliate meeting, I was braced for more bad news, but nothing compared to what I received. And this time, it had nothing to do with the budget. Or did it?
Planned Parenthood, we learned, was planning to open a massive seven-story, 78,000-square-foot clinic in Houston, and supposedly an entire floor was being devoted to medical and abortion services. I understood that it could be the largest abortion clinic in the nation, and that plans were in place to seek an ambulatory surgical license, which would qualify the facility to perform late-term abortions, possibly up to twenty-four weeks.
8
My stomach knotted at the news. I’d always believed that late-term abortions beyond the age of viability (twenty-one to twenty-four weeks) were wrong. I’d always insisted I would never work for an organization that performed late-term abortions.
I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I’ve always said I’d draw the line there.
But rumors were flying, as any Google search will show you. They’d start the clinic going to sixteen weeks as their current license permitted. But I got conflicting reports, internally, depending on who I spoke to, about the actual plans for late-term abortions. I heard they’d never go beyond sixteen weeks, I heard nineteen weeks, and I heard twenty-four weeks. This was my affiliate. Why would they go that high? This wasn’t about access to care. I knew that. The percentage of late-term abortions is fairly low, and there was already a Houston abortion clinic (not part of Planned Parenthood) that performed that ghastly procedure.
Why was our leadership supposedly planning to get into the business? Wasn’t our stated goal to
decrease
the number of abortions? Hadn’t that talking point been drummed into me from the day I was recruited, to Lobby Day, to my media training? Didn’t I teach this to my own staff? There was nothing preventative about aborting viable babies. What greater good would be served? I didn’t like any of the answers that came to me.
I could only conjecture, of course, but in light of the budget discussions, I couldn’t help but do the math. The later the abortion, the higher the cost. A late-term abortion, I knew, could cost between $3,000 and $4,000. There was big money to be made. Could this be driving Planned Parenthood?
The question haunted me.