Abby Johnson, a former abortion clinic director at Planned Parenthood, joined Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily, telling host Alex Marlow how Planned Parenthood trains its employees in selling abortion to women — particularly Christian women — with religious objections to such measures.
“I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years,” Abby Johnson said, describing her time working with Planned Parenthood. “I was an abortion clinic director there. I left in 2009 after a few things were happening. One, we were opening our country’s largest abortion facility in the Western hemisphere. We were going to be doing abortions through six months gestation, which was problematic for me, because I knew those babies could live on their own.”
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Johnson continued, “Then I was instructed to double our abortion quota — the number of abortions we had to sell to women coming in — which was also shocking to me. Ultimately, I left after witnessing a live ultrasound-guided abortion procedure, where I saw a 13-week old fight and struggle for his life against the abortion instruments. And I knew then that there was life in the womb, and that there was humanity in the womb, and if those two things were true, then I was on the wrong side of this debate. So I ended up leaving and starting really trying to speak out about the things that I had seen inside the abortion clinic.”
In a January interview with Breitbart News, Johnson explained how she became pro-life after witnessing the aforementioned abortion.
Johnson described Planned Parenthood’s “constant sell and push of abortion.”
“I got involved with Planned Parenthood truly believing that our goal there was to reduce the number of abortions,” said Johnson. “That was sort of what everybody talked about during that time, ‘Let’s keep abortion safe, legal, and rare,’ right? Obama said it. Everybody said it. We started seeing a shift inside of the culture of the abortion industry many years ago, and that was that we weren’t trying to keep abortion rare. We were trying to keep abortion accessible. Accessible at any cost.
Johnson went on, “So if the woman dies on the table, fine, at least she was able to have access to an abortion. If we perforate a woman’s uterus — if we perforate a 1000 women’s uteruses — then it’s fine, because at least they had access to get an abortion. If a woman has an infection after an abortion because we’re not properly sterilizing the instruments, well, at least she had access. So we started seeing that shift, and that was very troubling for me. As someone who got involved in this with — honestly — good intentions. It was scary to me, what I was seeing inside the clinic, and how things were really changing.”
Johnson is currently promoting a new film, Unplanned, which depicts Johnson’s pro-life story and is slated for theatrical release on March 29.
Mike Lindell, the founder and CEO of My Pillow, invested $1 million in Unplanned‘s production.
“I’m pro-life and I’m happy to do it,” Lindell told the Hollywood Reporter about his contribution to the making of Unplanned.
Marlow asked Johnson also talked about the genesis of the film Unplanned with producers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon.
“We started really talking about it, and what it could look like. I said from the beginning, ‘I will not be part of anything that is just a cheesy Christian movie. It’s got to be real. It has to be raw. It has to be honest. … Abortion is gritty,” Johnson explained. “The abortion industry is gritty, and so I thought, ‘I’m not going to do this if it’s going to be something really cheesy. They totally agreed and said, ‘This is going to be something really awesome. It’s going to be your story.’ So we moved forward. That was about four years ago. It took awhile to get the screenplay perfect, but we finally did it.”
During the film’s production, Ashley Bratcher — the actress portraying Johnson in Unplanned — learned that her mother came close to aborting her in utero.
Johnson shared Bratcher’s “amazing pro-life story.” She said, “We couldn’t have planned it any better than how it’s gone. Four days after being on set, she got a call from her mom, and she was telling her mom what she was doing — the role she was playing — and her mom got really upset and ended up disclosing to her that when she was had gotten pregnant with Ashley, she ended up going to an abortion clinic to have an abortion, and she was on the table waiting to have an abortion with Ashley, and the nurse, who was going to be assisting the abortion doctor walked in, and she was very visibly pregnant, and Ashley’s mom was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She just felt sick. ‘I can’t do this.’ She ended up getting up and leaving the clinic and chose life for her baby, which was Ashley. Ashley had never known that story.”
Marlow asked Johnson if left-wing news media had previewed or examined Unplanned.
“They’ve been really quiet about it,” responded Johnson. “Not surprisingly, they’ve been really quiet, and I mean we haven’t even heard criticism. I think they just want to ignore it. … They don’t want to give it any attention. It’s like, ‘Well, we’ll just pretend like it’s not happening.'”
Marlow said, “If they can’t destroy, they ignore. If they can destroy easily, that seems to be the plan. but if they can’t do that then they just pretend that you don’t exist.”
In discussing New York’s latest abortion law, codifying abortion without any temporal limits as a “fundamental right” across the Empire State, Johnson speculated on a shift in public opinion on the issue of unborn children’s personhood.
“I talk to pro-choice people all the time [ and] see their comments on social media,” stated Johnson. “It’s been a little heartening, because so many pro-choicers have expressed on social media, ‘Look, this is too far.’ Most people who are pro-choice have a line in the sand. There are very few people who support abortion who think, ‘Yeah, you should be able to kill a baby for any reason up until the date of birth. For most pro-choicers, that line is viability. So it just shows how out-of-touch these Democratic legislators are with even their own constituents. This is so radical. It’s so far. We look at [Andrew Cuomo’s] approval rating, now, abysmal, in New York, in a place that’s supposed to be mega-blue and mega-Democrat. Even his own people are saying that was too much, that was too far. Not even having protections for babies who happen to be born alive after an abortion, that’s not abortion. We’re now moving into the crime of homicide. I just feel like they’ve moved the pendulum so far left that they’re even losing their own people.”
You are essentially trained to become an abortion salesperson when you work at the clinic. There are many times – the women who come in to have an abortion more often than not are religious, they have some sort of faith background. So one of the things that we hear a lot from them is, ‘Well, I don’t know if God is going to forgive me.’ Well, you’re trained to answer those questions. So our scripted answer that we would give to that particular concern was, ‘Well, don’t you believe in a forgiving God? Don’t you believe that God understands your situation? He understands that you’re making the best decision for you, right now.'”
So there’s all of these talking points and scripts that we’re given to help sell abortion, particularly selling abortion to Christian women who come into our doors, and that’s what you becomes. That’s what you become as an abortion clinic worker, is you become a slick salesperson.
More information on Unplanned is available at its official website.
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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