By Dave Andrusko
In Part One today, we remind you of important event—the upcoming National Right to Life Convention to be held June 23-25 in Jacksonville, Florida. For those who can make it a little early, we also layout the papers that will be delivered at the annual meeting of The Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Values and Social Change, which will be held Wednesday night, June 22.
The first afternoon session of the first day is titled, “Planned Parenthood: The Hyper-Political, Under-Regulated, Out-Of-Control Mega-Marketer of Abortion.” The speakers include NRLC experts Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon and Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D.
But the session will also include Abby Johnson, who once managed a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Texas. Her conversion testimony is captured in Chapter One of her book, “unPlanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Lines.“ (You can read the entire chapter here.)
I mention Abby’s story because I happened to re-read “Mugged by Ultrasound,” written by David Daleiden and Jon Shields which appeared last year in the Weekly Standard. They use Abby as an example of people caught up in the abortion industry who finally fled.
(Why more don’t is an open—and troubling—question. Daleiden and Shields speculate there might be others who are also “haunted by their work” but “Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.”)
Of the examples used in the Weekly Standard story, a common denominator is a first-hand look at the victim of “choice.” One man’s turning point came when “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.”
Another had to dispose of the unborn child’s remains. “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job,” she said. “I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.”
Johnson’s story is eerily similar. She is drafted into participating in an ultrasound-guided abortion. (By way of background, the cannula she describes is a hollow plastic tube that is attached to a suction machine by a flexible hose. “Grace” is Johnson’s daughter.)
In her book Abby writes,
“The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and I now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment it looked as if the baby were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then everything was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty. …….
“The image of the tiny body, mangled and sucked away, was replaying in my mind, and with the image of Grace’s first ultrasound——how she’d been about the same size.
“ ……[Thinking back to an argument she’d had with her husband] And now it hit me like a lightning bolt: He was right! What was in this woman’s womb wasn’t just tissue, just cells. That was a human baby——fighting for life! A battle that was lost in the blink of an eye. What I have told people for years, what I’ve believed and taught and defended, is a lie.”
I would hope that, if you haven’t already, you go to www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/Docs/ConvoAd.pdf where you can find all the details about registering for National Right to Life 2011.
After this, if you have 5-7 minutes, please go to www.weeklystandard.com/articles/mugged-ultrasound and read “Mugged by Ultrasound.”
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