Authors: Abby Johnson,Cindy Lambert
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Inspirational, #Biography, #Religion
Shawn, I knew, was a good guy who wouldn’t purposely damage my reputation. Still, given the horrible letters and the pain of the former church rejection, I was concerned. So I approached Shawn at the fence one day and said, “I hear you’ve been filming over at my church. I know you have good intentions, and I know you think you’re doing the right thing. But I’m prochoice. There are other people at my church who are prochoice—I’m not the only one. My church has no problem with my working here. In fact, I have a lot of supporters there.”
I know it was a foolish way to handle it. I’d actually kept quiet at my church about my job. But a few people there knew what I did, and news gets around, though I doubted the pastor knew.
Shawn smiled. “I think of that as a pretty pro-life church. But you know, just because you have a few people there who agree with you doesn’t make it right. Even if everyone agreed, it wouldn’t make it right.” Then he promised he wouldn’t mention me or my job to the pastor or anybody else there. He suggested I not talk about it either.
I remember thinking as I walked away,
He didn’t know I went there? I should have kept quiet. But it sounds like he won’t tell anyone.
And he didn’t. In fact, as I discovered later, he felt some concern for me after that conversation. He knew my church well enough to know that it was predominantly pro-life, and he was afraid that if I went around talking about my prochoice beliefs, I’d get thrown out of my own church. He had no idea, of course, that I’d already been through a similar experience and hoped to never feel that rejection again.
My experience with depression reminded me of how much I loved working directly with patients. Though I was enjoying the role of director of community services, I deeply missed working directly with women in crisis. Cheryl must have sensed it. She had been promoted to regional medical services director for our affiliate and recommended I apply for the job of director of the clinic. Knowing she felt I was up to the task was a huge boost to me. I decided to take the leap.
“Hey, Mom—big news today. Cheryl is encouraging me to apply to be director of the clinic.”
“Abby, have you thought about the fact that, as the director, you’d actually be in charge of the abortions in your clinic? Do you see that as different from counseling women about their choices?”
I was frustrated—partly at my mom but mostly at myself for inviting this conversation. How had I expected her to respond? “Mom, as director I can do even more to bring abortion numbers down. I can make ours the best clinic in the affiliate, increase our education services, build a closer connection to adoption services, and draw in more clients for contraception to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies. This is an opportunity to really make some changes.”
She didn’t sound convinced. “Abby, what do you want me to say? You tell me how bad it makes you feel when people don’t like what you do. You’re even afraid to tell people at your church what you do for a living. But many people don’t like abortion.
I
don’t like abortion. I’m proud of your capabilities and accomplishments, but I can’t pretend to like your choice of career.”
Later that evening, I tried a new thought out on Doug: “I’m going to pray that if I’m not supposed to be working at the clinic, I won’t get the promotion.”
He looked thoughtful. “You applied for the job already, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re asking God to show His will by stopping something you’ve already set in motion?”
“Well, God can intervene. If I pray that way and still get the job, I’ll know it’s God’s will that I run the clinic.”
Doug didn’t look any more convinced than my mom had sounded. But I told myself this plan made sense.
I do want God to show me if He wants me out.
“Dear God,” I prayed later than night, “if You don’t want me at Planned Parenthood, please don’t let me get the promotion. Amen.”
The next day I got the promotion.
I’d been naively stepping closer and closer to darkness and further and further from the light for several years by then. I’ve since owned up to the fact that if I had truly been seeking God’s will, I would have been reading the Bible and spending time in concentrated prayer, listening for His wisdom. I would have been seeking the counsel of spiritually mature believers rather than hiding my livelihood from them.
Instead, I made a childish bargain. In so doing, I thought I won. I accepted the job and cheerfully celebrated that God had blessed my career move. In reality, I lost. Because now, as my mother had pointed out, I had taken upon my shoulders the mantle of responsibility for everything that happened in that clinic.
Chapter Eight
My Enemy, My Friend
I was surprised how ready I felt for my first week as director of the Bryan clinic. There were so many changes I was eager to make, and I didn’t want to waste a day getting started. I was ready to roll. The first major change was one I would not announce. I would model it instead. I was determined to build a positive, cooperative relationship with the Coalition for Life.
“I’ve made a vow about something at the clinic,” I told Doug as I dressed for my first day as director.
“A vow? About what?”
“I vow never to call the police on the Coalition—unless, of course, someone is violent or lighting a fire or actually damaging property. But if anything like that happened, it wouldn’t be the Coalition anyway. That would be some troublemaker they have no control over.”
Doug smiled. “That
will
be a change. Seems to me the clinic has always called the police for every little thing. I’ll bet the police hate it when your clinic calls.”
“I think you’re probably right. But I’ll call them in for real crimes only. If a problem comes up with the Coalition, I’ll just call Shawn and discuss it with him.” I told Doug I wanted to build a strong relationship between the community and the clinic and get rid of the adversarial distrust. It’s not like either of us had a secret agenda. They believed in wiping out abortion; we believed in reducing unwanted pregnancies and protecting a woman’s reproductive rights. But I’d watched them at the fence for a long time. I was convinced they cared about these women, just like we did.
“Sometimes I think we have more in common than we do differences,” I told him. “It’s just that our differences are so . . . well . . . drastically different!” I was on my soapbox.
“Okay, Abby. You go single-handedly change the nature of the pro-life/prochoice battleground. I’ve got students to teach.” He kissed me good-bye and left. I finished going over some details with Grace’s new nanny and cuddled my daughter for a few more minutes before heading in to work.
I didn’t have to wait long before testing my new approach. One of the staff came to me that week and said, “Abby, I have another client complaining about the camera out front.”
“Ours or the Coalition’s?”
“Theirs. She’s asking me if they plan to show the pictures someplace, revealing that she came here.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to the Coalition about it.”
We had our cameras mounted along our fence. The Coalition for Life’s practice for some time had been to set up a manned camera and tripod each day. As I understand it, there had been a lawsuit long before between a clinic worker and a pro-lifer, and ever since, the cameras were there. There had been times when a pro-lifer was overly aggressive with the camera, following us closely or sticking it in our faces as we walked. I’d seen Coalition volunteers, including Shawn, put a stop to such tactics, as this was not their style, but a few zealots occasionally misbehaved. Today this was not the case. The pro-lifers’ camera was properly resting on its tripod next to our driveway.
I was actually glad to have an opportunity to test out my new face-to-face approach, with no police involved. Here was my chance.
I looked out the window and saw Shawn.
Guess I’ll just tackle this head-on.
I went outside and walked over to Shawn, who was standing out by the fence.
“Shawn, some of our clients find your camera intimidating. Is there some way you could move it out of sight?”
He seemed sympathetic. “I can understand that. But unfortunately, it’s necessary. It’s not just for our protection; it’s for yours as well. If anything were to happen, there’s a photographic record.”
I shook my head. “Shawn, you don’t need to protect
us
. We have our own cameras. Look—can you at least move your camera to the other side of the driveway so it’s a little farther away? It wouldn’t be as obvious that way, and maybe our clients wouldn’t be so afraid they could be identified. That’s their fear. They’re concerned someone is filming for the purpose of revealing their identities.”
He shook his head. “Can’t do it. We need a good angle on what’s actually happening here at the fence. If there were ever any questions, we’d need it to be clear.”
“It’s just such a personal and vulnerable decision for many of our clients to come here—they have parents or husbands or boyfriends or coworkers or friends who have no idea they are pregnant or need medical attention or contraceptives. So the last thing they want to worry about is the fear of a video in someone’s hands that shows them walking into our clinic.”
My patience was getting a little thin at this point. I was trying hard to find some compromise, to work with them, to keep things positive and conciliatory, and it seemed to me that Shawn wasn’t working with me.
When it was clear I wasn’t getting anywhere, I turned to head back into the clinic. But I’d only taken a step or two when I turned back to him and said, “You know—” He looked taken aback, as if he thought I was going to get nasty. But I just thought he should see our point of view. “There have always been people like us—like Planned Parenthood—defending the rights of women and human rights in general. Isn’t that what the emancipation movement was about in the 1800s, and then in the early 1900s, the suffrage movement? In World War II, people tried to stand up for the Jews. And now there are people like us, standing up for the reproductive rights of women, just as the suffrage movement stood up for their voting rights.”
He listened respectfully, and then he simply said, “Abby, you don’t have to justify your job to me.”
What?
Justify
my job? “I’m not justifying, ” I said. “I just want to explain—”
“And you don’t have to explain what you’re doing either. The truth is, you just cited two instances of injustice—the slaves and the Jews—that could only exist because a whole segment of our population was dehumanized. Society’s acceptance of that is what allowed injustice to continue. And that’s exactly what Planned Parenthood does to the unborn.”
I was speechless. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have come back with a thoughtful response. I could have. But there was such a simple, straightforward logic to what he said. I looked away from him for a moment or two to process his words.
Then I looked back at him. Shawn would tell me a few years later that he remembered that I put my hand on my hip, and he wasn’t sure what I would say—he thought I looked as if I were about to light into him. But all I said was, “You aren’t going to convert me.” And I turned and went back into the clinic.
Shawn says he chuckled as I walked away, amused by my defiance. But he also began praying for me immediately. He believed I would not have said what I said about his converting me if I hadn’t, at some level, considered it a possibility.
It wasn’t quite the new start with the Coalition for Life I had in mind.
In my first weeks as director I wanted to set some new best practices. One of the first was to emphasize to my staff that the reason we were here was to help our clients. For instance, I reminded them that if our posted hours said we were open until 4:30, we didn’t lock the door until 4:30, even if that meant we’d be there until 6:00. “We are a service organization,” I said again and again. Also, on very quiet days, I would send staff out to put up flyers at apartment complexes, Laundromats, and the A&M campus to get the word out about our free annual exams, Pap smears, and birth control. We didn’t have the money to advertise, but flyers were inexpensive.
“Let’s decrease those unwanted pregnancies,” I’d remind the staff. “If a patient comes in for any service, make sure you ask about their use of contraception. We need to be advocates for the cause.” Now that I was director, I was beginning to learn about our financial reports and was surprised to discover that we sometimes lost money on the family planning side of our business. Because our clinic did abortions and because those abortions were lucrative, our bottom line seemed okay to me. I knew we got grants from a government title funding source and that most of our clients’ contraceptive and testing bills were partially paid by government funding, but I discovered that often those funds covered only half of the expenses. We had to make up the difference by charging the clients, but if they didn’t have the resources, my clinic provided the service anyway. After all, we weren’t in the business of making money. We were a service provider for the good of the community. Or so I thought. So in spite of the loss, I stressed to my staff that we were to reduce the number of abortions by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, and that meant proactively advocating contraception to our clients.
Also critically important to me was informed consent about the medical risks of procedures, especially about medication abortions.
6
I’ll confess I had a pet peeve about those. Remembering the horrible experience I’d had with my own, I urged the staff to make sure that, when counseling clients, they clearly emphasized the severe side effects of RU-486, especially for patients who were past week six or seven. Many women seemed to think that by choosing a medication abortion, they’d have more control and wouldn’t be subjected to anesthesia or surgical risks. Or perhaps they believed a medication abortion would be easier to hide from their families. After all, perhaps they thought they could just complain about having a bad menstrual cycle rather than needing a recovery period. But that wasn’t true. Many women called us back, thinking they were dying because the cramping or bleeding was so intense. And I wondered how many other women, like me, never called, choosing instead to suffer in silence.
If a client insisted on a medication abortion, I told my staff, they should let them know it might be bad—really bad. I didn’t want any surprised patients. I asked them to talk patients out of the procedure if they were past seven weeks. Beyond that point, too many attempts failed. Finally, I told my staff to make sure the women agreed to come back for the mandatory four-to fourteen-day follow-up and ultrasound so we could verify that the uterus was empty. Don’t give up if they don’t return, I told them. Keep calling. I became increasingly concerned about the number of medication abortion patients who had to return for a surgical abortion because the medication abortion didn’t completely work.
One day I was at the front intake counter when a girl in her twenties came in carrying a little bag with four pills in it.
“I’m pregnant,” she told me. “I need to have an abortion, but I don’t have any money, so I’m going to take these pills. I know you can’t give me any advice or anything, but I need you to tell me when I would need to go to the emergency room.”
“Whoa, whoa, I can’t let you do that,” I insisted. “You have no idea how seriously wrong this could go. And where did you get those pills? How do you know what they are?”
“They’re abortion pills. I’m supposed to take four, but I can’t tell you where I got them. I’ve got to have this abortion, and I don’t have any money.”
“I don’t want your money. But there are risks, possible complications. . . . I’d rather do an abortion for free and make sure you’re safe.”
It took a while, but I finally talked her into setting up an appointment for a few days later. She was at six weeks and wanted a medication abortion, so it was performed. A week and a half later she returned for her follow-up, but her ultrasound now showed that she was seven and a half weeks. The medication abortion hadn’t worked. The fetus was still alive and growing! Good cardiac activity, apparently healthy.
“Well, maybe this is sign from God,” she said. “Maybe I should have the baby.” Her clinician freaked out, trying to explain the risk of damage and complications to the fetus from the failed abortion pill. But there was no changing the young woman’s mind. She insisted that this was a sign she was to have the baby. She left, and we never heard from her again. We have no idea what happened to her or the baby.
With my new “never call the police” policy, it seemed that tensions between the clinic workers and the Coalition for Life continued to decrease—except when it came to Jim or a few others like him. Every now and then, he or someone with similar tactics would resurface, and trouble came with them. From where I stand now I can imagine that Jim, like many other zealots on either side of an issue, believed that extreme actions win victories for their “side.” In truth, everything Jim did for the cause of life instead fed the strength and resolve of the prochoice side. Even as a believer in women’s right to choose, I hated to see such actions strengthen the cause of abortion, and that is precisely what they did.
At the end of one hard day at the clinic, I climbed into my car and spotted a note on my windshield. When I opened it, I felt a flash of anger followed by a foreboding anxiety. It was a typed death threat, promising to do to me what we at the clinic did to babies. Two other threats followed within a few weeks, one mailed to my home, one to the office. One of them read, “It’s too bad that Grace won’t have a mother.” That one sent me over the edge.
This was a situation for the police, who in turn called the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Marshals office. Law enforcement sent the notes off so that fingerprints and DNA evidence could be collected, but in the end they came up empty. It was a horrible ordeal. Planned Parenthood, concerned for my safety, had cameras and a security system installed at my house.
Not long after, Jim was spotted at the clinic taking pictures of the license plates of our clients. I called the police. When I went out for lunch that day and climbed into my car, Elizabeth, one of the regular Coalition for Life workers who was always friendly, called out a greeting to me through the fence. The timing wasn’t good. She had a young volunteer with her I’d not seen before. I later learned her name was Heather. I stepped out of the car, slammed the door, and marched over to the fence. My frustration and anger must have been clear—I heard Heather, whose eyes were wide open in apprehension, say, “Oh no, what’s she going to do?”