A national abortion organization is distancing itself from a celebrated abortionist after allegations arose that he engaged in sexual misconduct.
The National Network of Abortions Funds (NNAF), an organization that provides funding for low-income women who want to have abortions, released a statement Monday informing its supporters that it was making changes to its funds in the wake of “allegations of improper sexual conduct” by Willie Parker.
“The National Network of Abortion Funds is in solidarity with those who have come forward,” the group stated, explaining that Parker has been, until recently, “the namesake of one of our internal abortion funds.”
To remedy its situation, NNAF said it would be merging two funds – the Willie Parker Fund and the George Tiller Fund – to “make sure to remove any and all obstacles to supporting abortion funding in the South without being concerned about whether doing so matches the values we all hold dear.”
Pro-life leaders weighed in on the allegations against Parker, who claims his Christian “calling” is to perform abortions for poor women.
“I’m not sure which ‘values’ the NNAF was referring to,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, whose pro-life organization has often exposed sexual misconduct within the abortion industry. “Was it the ones that embrace chopping innocent babies in the womb or the ones that castigate Christians for trying to stop the slaughter and the abuse?”
Live Action President Lila Rose tweeted, “No surprise here.”
“If you can kill fully developed babies in the womb in the name of ‘God,’ then such a twisted moral compass can easily justify sexual abuse,” she added.
Evangelist Alveda King, director of Civil Rights for the Unborn of Priests for Life, told Breitbart News, “Abortion is an intrinsic evil and those who perform abortions are not following the Will of God but rather are doing Satan’s work.”
“Dr. Bernard Nathason, the protagonist in our film at roevwademovie.com, came to that conclusion and repented of his life as an abortionist,” King said. “We must pray that Dr. Parker will do the same; come to see the light and stop killing little babies.”
In a post published at Medium on Monday, Candice Russell – an abortion advocate who says she has publicly shared her “abortion story,” revealed she had an unwanted sexual experience with Parker while she was intoxicated. Despite rumors about his sexual misconduct, she claims to have chosen to remain quiet until now about her encounter with him because she was enamored with his open promotion of abortion.
Parker, who has been celebrated by many abortion activists, including former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and actress Lena Dunham, claims his Christian “calling” is to perform abortions for poor women.
In May 2017, Dunham praised Parker as “the pro-choice hero we need.” The actress reviewed the abortionist’s book, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, in which Parker related his journey from being a faith-filled anti-abortion OB/GYN, to – as Dunham described – “being the person who did the terminating.”
“I have been amazed by Dr. Parker’s work: his heroism in comforting women who are, like him, religious and, unlike him, deeply afraid,” Dunham wrote at Lenny, her online feminist newsletter. She pointed to the African-American abortionist’s travels throughout the South, “performing abortions for women who would not otherwise have access due to changing laws and terrified doctors.”
In a glowing interview with Parker about his book, New York Times writer Ana Marie Cox described the abortionist as a man who made a “shift from someone who, for religious reasons, didn’t want to provide abortion to someone who, for religious reasons, did.”
Parker said during the interview:
Here’s the thing: Life is a process, not an event. If I thought I was killing a person, I wouldn’t do abortions. A fetus is not a person; it’s a human entity. In the moral scheme of things, I don’t hold fetal life and the life of a woman equally. I value them both, but in the precedence of things, when a woman comes to me, I find myself unable to demote her aspirations because of the aspirations that someone else has for the fetus that she’s carrying.
In 2016, Planned Parenthood’s Richards tweeted, “So proud to be in this fight with the always-inspiring Dr. Willie Parker – the real work starts now.”
In her post about her sexual experience with Parker, Russell wrote about her conflict with revealing it at a time when the pro-life movement in Mississippi was enjoying much success:
It has taken me days to finally finish writing this, each one reaching a part of me I tried never to go back to and hurting just a little more. And without an amazing group of friends supporting me I might not have made it through at all. I’ve lost a few along the way, especially after the Mississippi 6 week ban, because they feared that this wasn’t the time, that news like this would hurt our fight, and in the end cost us the war. I had to turn off the email on my rarely-touched website last night after I was spammed by a repeated message telling me that coming forward was selfish, and warning me of the blood that would be on my hands. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought it was just another hurtful threat from an anti, the sort of harassment I’d gotten used to since I first shared my abortion story in public. The kind of harassment that doesn’t phase me anymore. But it hurt like hell when it was coming from someone I thought was on my same side.
According to Operation Rescue, the abortion industry “has a major problem with sexual abuse, and Willie Parker’s misconduct is just the tip of a very large and nasty iceberg.”
The pro-life organization published an exposé in 2016 about many of the cases of sexual misconduct within the abortion industry.