Authors: Abby Johnson,Cindy Lambert
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Inspirational, #Biography, #Religion
I sighed with relief, and he turned back to his computer. He grinned and then mumbled to himself, loudly enough so I could hear, “Abby Johnson is not pro-life enough for herself. I love it!”
My gratitude to the Coalition for Life was beginning to prompt some deep introspection, driving me more and more to prayer. Frankly, I’d always been an action kind of person. But now I was in a period of stillness, of waiting, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I was waiting for. I only knew it was time to wait on God. The physician Shawn had connected with set up a time for us to meet, but not for another week. I wasn’t worrying about that, though, which reassured me that God must surely be in control, because I knew that on my own, I’d have been anxious.
One Friday evening, October 23, about 9:30, I was in the shower, praying. I found myself praying at all times of the day and night, truly enjoying my new sense of fellowship with God. I suddenly had an urge to go to the clinic fence and pray. At first, I dismissed it. Shawn and I had agreed that I should keep my distance from the clinic. We still didn’t want word to get out that I’d joined the Coalition for Life. Our inclination was to let some months go by, then ease me slowly into volunteer work at the Coalition. Otherwise, my sudden shifting of sides might attract accusations of conspiracy. After all, paranoia and distrust ran wild on both sides.
But the urge to go pray at the clinic fence was persistent, and I began to believe that it was from God. And just that fast, the thought of my own two abortions invaded my mind. I looked at my hands and once again thought how culpable I was for the deaths of more babies than I knew. Tears sprang to my eyes and mingled with the water from the shower coursing down my face.
Go to the fence and pray.
I felt compelled.
“If there’s one thing I should know by now, it’s that when God tells me to do something, I should do it,” I muttered. “But what will Doug think?” I toweled off, threw on a T-shirt and workout pants, and, hair still dripping, walked into the living room. Doug was sitting in the recliner.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” I announced, “but I need to go to the clinic.”
Doug looked at me, perplexed. “Are you going to vandalize it?”
“No, I’m not going to vandalize it!” I scolded. Good grief, the poor guy didn’t know what to expect from me these days! “I’m going to pray.”
“Oh. Abby, I don’t think that’s crazy at all.”
So we agreed he’d stay home with Grace. We kissed good-bye and I left. It was 10:00 p.m. We both knew that the 40 Days for Life campaign was still going on, which meant that at least two people would be praying at the fence. I was nervous. What would they say?
I need to call someone.
I thought of Elizabeth. We’d spoken several times since my e-mail to her the night of my resignation.
Yes, I need Elizabeth!
As I dialed her number, I started to cry. “I’m going to the fence to pray,” I said when she answered. “Do you think that’s weird?”
“Sounds to me like God is calling you there, Abby. I think it will be healing.”
“But Shawn told me that some of the volunteers have noticed that my car hasn’t been there, and they’re wondering where I’ve gone. What happens if I show up and people recognize me?”
“Just tell them the truth.” Elizabeth made it sound so simple. I talked to her until I parked.
Two young students praying at the fence looked at me as I approached. The night was dark, but the streetlight was bright and they could see me clearly. Not sure why, I walked up to them.
“Hi,” I said tentatively. “My name is Abby Johnson. I used to be the director of this clinic, but just about two weeks ago I resigned. My conscience wouldn’t let me stay. Please don’t tell anyone you saw me, but I just had to come here tonight to pray.” It felt so cleansing to say it.
The two hugged me. “That’s wonderful!” they said in unison, grinning from ear to ear.
I stepped off by myself. I closed my eyes and faced the building. I knew I needed to face this place. I had to face what I’d done. I had to acknowledge the part I’d played here. It was here that I’d aborted my second child. It was here I’d escorted women into the hands of Planned Parenthood. It was here I’d casually scheduled the deaths of countless children. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes.
I was standing face-to-face with my sin, embodied in that building. I allowed myself to feel the weight of it. I had to own it. And I did.
Sometimes, words fall too short.
I will say this. Good Friday has never been the same for me since.
Jesus took upon Himself the weight of the world’s sin on the cross. I cannot fathom such a weight. Yet I had a sense of the weight of the lives of my two unborn children and thousands of others I had willingly forfeited at the hands of an abortionist.
But Christ didn’t stay on the cross.
He arose.
And that is what I experienced that night. Once I truly owned the weight that night, I gave it to Jesus Christ at the fence. And He lifted it off my shoulders and off my soul.
As I looked upon the building between the bars of the fence, I knew that it was here that God called me out. I was not only facing the place of my sin. I was facing the place of my deliverance as well.
I prayed. The sounds of the busy street at my back faded away. I heard only silence. I was alone with God, communing with Him, meeting Him here in this place. Peace enveloped me, and I knew it was the peace that only God can give.
At the fence, beyond a shadow of doubt, my healing had begun.
On Wednesday, October 28, Taylor had an interview scheduled at a medical clinic in town. She called me later that day and asked, “Want to have dinner with me?” We met at a Mexican restaurant. Over dinner, she excitedly filled me in on her job search and talked about her desire to go on to nursing school. While we were at the restaurant, we both got text messages from Megan. She’d had meetings at the Houston office with other Planned Parenthood nurse-practitioners, and she’d ridden there and back with Cheryl. While they were in the car, Megan had received a call from someone who was considering my application and was calling her as my reference. From her text, I got the impression Megan found this funny, and Taylor and I shared a laugh over it.
I needed to get to choir practice at my church, so we prepared to go our separate ways. After hugging me good-bye and promising to call the next day, Taylor told me that Barbara, along with the CEO of the Planned Parenthood affiliate to which the Bryan clinic belonged, were coming down the next day for their annual planning meeting. She said she hoped it would be her last meeting. “It won’t be the same without you,” she called as she climbed into her car.
I smiled. I felt so free no longer having to wrestle with my conscience or the budget crunch and mandates and priorities of Planned Parenthood.
I didn’t hear from Taylor or Megan the next day, Thursday. I assumed their meetings had run late and didn’t give it much thought. I texted both of them but didn’t hear back. Friday, all day, I expected a call or text from them, but nothing.
Then Friday night, while watching a movie at home with Doug, I got a call from a good friend who worked in another Planned Parenthood clinic. She was one of the few I’d called the day I resigned, just to give her a heads-up so she’d hear the news directly from me rather than through the grapevine—though, of course, I’d not mentioned anything to her about the Coalition.
“Abby, I have a question for you. Are you working in any way with the Coalition for Life?”
The question startled me. I’d been very careful not to mention my connection to the Coalition to anyone, and I knew that Shawn had stressed secrecy to his team. I wondered what her source was, but her question was direct and I wasn’t going to lie.
“Yes, I’ve been talking with them.” I held my breath, waiting for her reaction.
“Okay, Abby. Well . . . ” I assumed the long pause was because she was trying to decide how to respond to what I was sure was not the answer she’d been expecting. “Well, when I’m not legally bound to Planned Parenthood anymore, I’ll call you back and ask you more about that.”
“Okay, sure,” I responded. She quickly said good-bye and hung up.
Well, that’s really weird,
I thought.
No longer legally bound?
What on earth does that mean? Does it mean that Planned Parenthood knows about my connection to the Coalition for Life? She actually sounded scared.
I dialed Megan, wondering if these two days of silence from her and Taylor were connected somehow.
Her cell phone number was no longer in service.
“What?” I asked aloud. Was something wrong with my phone?
“What’s wrong?” Doug asked.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked Doug. “Something weird is going on.”
Using Doug’s phone, I called Megan again. The same recording.
I explained it to Doug, then said, “Maybe it’s a phone service issue. Megan has an out-of-state area code. Maybe she switched over to a new service or number.”
So I called Taylor’s number.
It, too, was no longer in service.
I felt the air being sucked out of my lungs. Something ugly was about to unfold.
Dear God,
I prayed,
what’s happened with my friends?
Chapter Nineteen
The Injunction
After the phone call from my colleague from the other clinic, I was sure everyone at Planned Parenthood, all the friends and coworkers who’d been my daily companions for years, now knew or would shortly know that I’d defected—that I hadn’t just left Planned Parenthood, I’d joined “the enemy,” the Coalition for Life.
When I’m no longer legally bound.
My friend’s words were echoing in my thoughts.
I knew this organization well. Terribly well, with an emphasis on “terribly.” I’d seen firsthand how quick they were to take legal action. I thought back to my earliest days at the clinic, before I’d become director, and recalled that their first course of action, whenever they felt they had the slightest justification, seemed to be to call the police. As an organization, their practice, by my observation, was to look for any opportunity to draw media attention that might make them seem the underdog. I felt a wave of shame that I’d been a part of their efforts, as one of their media spokespersons, spreading their talking points every chance I was given. Some kind of litigation was coming down. I could smell it.
Worst-case scenarios flew through my mind: Would I need a lawyer? Would Doug and I lose everything paying for my defense? I could just imagine Doug standing there, forlornly watching the police haul me away in handcuffs to serve out some unjust sentence, and the bank foreclosing on the house we lost in our vain attempt at my defense.
God is in control,
I reminded myself.
Trust Him.
I texted Shawn: “The cat’s out of the bag. I think they know.”
And I didn’t have to wait long. His text came back: “Yeah, I know. Just don’t say anything else. And our attorneys . . . ” And his text stopped there! He’d run out of characters! What a place to stop, mentioning attorneys! In my frame of mind, already imagining all kinds of legal repercussions, he mentions attorneys.
So I texted him back: “WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Just basically sitting on the exclamation point, making sure he got the message.
A short time later, though it felt like hours, he called, explaining why he hadn’t been able to call immediately. When I’d first texted him, he’d just finished a family shopping trip and had been in the parking lot of a grocery store, crammed in the back cargo section of their SUV, which was filled to overflowing with their three kids in Halloween costumes, Marilisa, and his mother-in-law. I suppose if I’d stopped to think, I’d have realized that since it was the evening of October 30, Halloween was the next day, which is a big deal when you have young children.
“So you see, Abby, since we’re still keeping quiet about everything, I couldn’t talk about it in front of my mother-in-law.” He told me Marilisa had sensed something was up, so the two of them exchanged eyebrow signals in the rearview mirror as she drove home with Shawn squeezed between the grocery bags in the back. He had called me right after he was finally able to fill her in.
I understood the explanation, but his tone sounded so lighthearted that I assumed he didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation.
“Shawn,” I said, “I just found out that somehow Planned Parenthood knows I am now associated with the Coalition. I know Planned Parenthood. I think they’ll come after me now with legal action of some kind.”
“Yeah,” he said, laughing, “I think so too.” Laughing! I couldn’t believe it.
“What’s so funny?” I said. “Don’t you realize how serious this is? They’re going to take me to court! And what did that text mean, ‘I know.’ You already knew? When were you planning to tell
me
?” And that just made him laugh even harder, but believe me, this was no laughing matter. My heart was pounding, and it wasn’t from joy.
Shawn then told me what he knew. Planned Parenthood was going to initiate two actions against us, probably on Monday. There would be a lawsuit and a temporary restraining order—basically a way to try to force us to keep quiet about everything that had to do with Planned Parenthood.
I asked him how he knew that much, and he told me that a copy of the temporary restraining order had been faxed to the Coalition for Life office that very night, since they were named as a defendant along with me. Unfortunately, only the first two pages had come through, so we didn’t yet have the full document.
“What are we going to do, Shawn?”
“Well, first of all, there’s not a lot we
can
do immediately since it’s Friday night. They’re no dummies. Their timing is deliberate—we have to just kind of cool our heels over the weekend and can’t do much of anything until Monday.”
“Can’t we even—”
“Abby, try to calm down. I believe God is going to work everything out just fine. I’ve already talked to Jeff Paradowski, an attorney and friend, and he’s going to represent Coalition for Life in this action, and he’s also willing to represent you. So even though you didn’t know you were getting served, you already have an attorney lined up. How about that?”
Yeah. How about that? If he’d just found out, how had he secured an attorney already?
“Shawn—I don’t know what to say. An attorney? Don’t they cost a lot of money? I just walked away from my job, remember? I don’t have any money!”
“Jeff isn’t doing this for money, Abby. He’s a supporter. A friend. He’s doing it for the Coalition for Life. He’s doing it to help fight abortion.”
Shawn went on to explain that when the office alerted him to the fax, as he sat crammed in with the groceries, he’d texted Jeff: “Planned Parenthood director quit a month ago, is coming to us. We’ve been served with papers. Need help.”
And Jeff’s reply, which has now become near legend in our group, had been immediate: “I’m in, baby!”
All of this had happened just moments before I’d texted him. I thought of the verse in Isaiah 65:24: “Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.”
Shawn went on reassuring me that everything was fine, no problem. He’d already spoken to Jeff before calling me back. Jeff would represent us and we’d win, he said, and on and on. Frankly, I admit I suspected Shawn was making it all up as he went along because he hadn’t had much more experience with this kind of thing than I had. Maybe he was just trying to calm me down. And I needed calming down.
But of everything he said, the one thing that did reassure me was knowing that we had an attorney. Someone who knew what he was doing, someone to whom this world of lawsuits and injunctions and courtrooms was his day in, day out job. That’s definitely what I needed, and now that’s what I had. I decided I could take Shawn’s word for it that this guy knew his stuff. He told me some of the things Jeff had done, some of the cases he’d won, and it sounded impressive to me. I thought,
This guy Jeff sounds confident, and he sounds competent. Okay. This is good.
One other thing reassured me: Shawn sounded very confident and impressively relaxed. I trusted Shawn, and if he wasn’t worried about this, then maybe I didn’t need to be either.
Well yes, I did. Who was I kidding? I was petrified!
Shawn was right that there wasn’t much we could do until Monday. But there was one thing I could do—pray. I prayed all weekend that my friends Megan and Taylor had not been the ones to reveal my connection to the Coalition for Life, even though deep down I knew they must have. I hoped instead that Planned Parenthood had found out by some other means. In any case, it seemed that they had been forced to clam up. Perhaps the organization had made them turn off their cell phones, maybe by threatening to fire them or press legal action against them. Most of all, I prayed that neither had said anything untrue about me. I needed desperately to believe that, whatever had brought about this legal action and whoever had been behind it, it had not been a personal betrayal by Megan or Taylor.
I prayed for that, I hoped for that, but I also feared I had been betrayed. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have called or been in touch? The silence from their end was deafening. And it did not bode well.
I had lots of time to think about things over the weekend, because basically that’s all I did. And I cried. I cried all weekend. I was nervous, but as nervous as I was about the pending court action, there was something else I was even more afraid of.
I was afraid of finding out for sure that my friends, friends who had asked me to have the Coalition for Life help them find new jobs, had betrayed me.
Suspecting it, thinking it was likely, was one thing. Finding out for sure was something else, and I was terrified of how it would feel.
When I’m nervous, I have trouble sleeping. I wake up early, maybe 5:00, and can’t get back to sleep. My stomach gets uneasy, tied in knots, and that’s how it was all weekend. Doug and I went to church on Sunday morning, but I couldn’t concentrate on the sermon, couldn’t make my mind focus on what was being said because I kept thinking about Megan and Taylor and about the papers I would receive. What would they say? What would it mean for Doug and me?
Sunday evening, around 8:30, the strangest thing happened, the last thing I would have expected. Shawn called and said, “You won’t believe this. A reporter with KBTX television just called. She got a press release directly from Planned Parenthood saying that they’re serving you and Coalition for Life with a lawsuit and a petition for a restraining order. KBTX wants to know if we want to make a statement.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Isn’t that a kick? They file for a restraining order against us to keep us quiet—and then they issue a press release to create news about it? What kind of sense does that make?”
I was speechless. But I was pretty sure I knew the kind of “sense” it made to Planned Parenthood. It created an opportunity to make news as the apparent “victim” of pro-lifers, it could intimidate their opponents, and it could either rally or intimidate their own staff. It also immediately poisoned my reputation, which could blunt any influence I might have were I to speak out about their internal agenda.
“So,” he said, “you want to make a statement?”
“Well—I guess. I mean—we’d better, hadn’t we? If they’re going public with this thing? We both know, of course, that the restraining order doesn’t take effect until a court official formally serves us the papers—right? And that hasn’t happened yet.”
“You don’t have to convince me. I already told the reporter to meet us at the Coalition office in thirty minutes!” I could hear the smile in his voice, and I was beginning to catch a bit of his amusement in this process.
While I’m recoiling in anxiety as this drama unfolds, afraid of what is coming next, Shawn is celebrating and watching as God reveals His plans. He’s trusting that God has a plan and is simply waiting on God to lead the way, knowing he will gladly follow. Maybe that’s what comes from years of serving God so deliberately. Is that what it could be like for me?
In that moment I sensed a deep internal stirring, which I have since come to recognize as the whisper of God’s Spirit. Something new was happening inside me. My faith was stretching, growing, widening, as if I were being given new eyes to see God at work. The best way I can think to describe it is to compare it to one of those nature films that shows a meadow changing over a season in ultrafast motion—where in a matter of moments we see a snow-covered field give way to greening, then wildflowers beginning to sprout, then an explosion of color and bees and hummingbirds hovering over a feast of nectar. We watch that all unfold in a matter of seconds, and suddenly we are blown away by the sheer magic of God’s creation.
And it’s not that we really learned anything new in such a moment. We already knew the change that happens over a season. But in normal time those changes are so tiny, so gradual, that they are invisible to us. Yet in high speed, when we can see with our eyes three months of changes in a matter of seconds, we are left in awe, stunned by the mystery of life sprouting from frozen ground into a magnificent nectar-rich canvas of color.
In that way I caught a glimpse of my spiritual life in fast motion. I saw myself grow from a little churchgoing girl to a teen who believed in and worshiped God to a college girl who abandoned God’s standards of living and let my faith wither in neglect as I struck out on my own to save the needy, while God still nudged and whispered and called to me. In the blink of an eye I could see how God kept invading my life through parents who never stopped loving me, words of confession written centuries ago, worship services that kept calling me back to the foot of the Cross, deep disquiet in my soul that left me longing for God’s peace, and . . . for eight years . . . faces and voices walking the fence, gently calling out offers of help, friendship, rescue, and the love of God.
And finally God put me face-to-face with the mangled brutality of the ultrasound-guided abortion, so I could see the destruction of life with my own eyes. At that point, God had finally broken through the wall I’d built. And once He had, I’d been undone to the point at which I’d looked out my office window and realized I needed to
run
to the life on the other side of the fence. And here on this side, God was now showing me, through circumstances beyond my control and through the faith of Shawn Carney, that I could trust Him.
I knew I was new at this trust thing. The difference between Shawn’s reaction and my own was showing me that. But just like the fast-forward opening of a flower, I could see that my trust was beginning to blossom. God was doing His magic on me.
So around 9:00 that Sunday evening, Shawn and I met at the Coalition for Life house with the reporter and cameraman for KBTX. As we took our seats in the conference room, side by side, it dawned on both of us that this was our first official appearance in front of media representing the same cause, rather than opposite causes. The irony that it was Planned Parenthood who gave us this opportunity, thanks to their press release, felt like a gift from God and filled us both with a sense of God’s commissioning of us to work together as a team.