I blogged about Abby Johnson’s story when it first happened (here and here). A little over a year ago, Johnson, the director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Texas, crossed the battle lines to join the pro-life movement.
Now the story again is expanding in a major way. Abby’s book about her experience, Unplanned, which is being released today, is now climbing Amazon’s bestseller list.
The book (so far I’ve only read excerpts) details how Abby Johnson had an abortion early in her college days, and began to volunteer at Planned Parenthood because she thought that by educating women and giving them contraception, they worked to prevented abortions. Later she found that they actually promoted abortion. Her clinic was trying to increase the number of abortions it performed. These revelations could hardly come at a more opportune time, because the new, more pro-life Congress is looking into stopping all federal funding for Planned Parenthood — it’s about time!
If enough copies are sold today, Unplanned could hit no. 1 spot on Amazon. I’ve just bought my copy. Why not buy yours now?
This story has been building for some time. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has targeted New York City’s Crisis Pregnancy Centers for unfair harassment. Saying that the centers lie to women and try to trick the into thinking they are abortion centers, they have proposed a law requiring the centers to post a long list of disclaimers saying that they do not provide abortion or contraceptives, and stating whether or not a physician is on the premises, on the front of their buildings, in their offices and in all their ads. If they don’t, they face shutting down of the centers, stiff fines and even imprisonment. Of course, Planned Parenthood and other other abortion centers are not required to publish any disclaimers at all.
No woman who has been treated at a CPC in New York City has ever filed a complaint or a lawsuit against the single Crisis Pregnancy center there. The only people complaining are the abortionists, who find the centers are eating into their business. The attack on the centers is part of a national effort by pro-abortion forces to attack pregnancy care centers; laws similar to the one in New York have been proposed in several states and actually enacted in Maryland.
This is not an especially good time for abortion providers to make their move. In the last few days, the city has been up in arms over the just-published data from the New York City Department of Vital Statistics on the numbers of abortion in the city in the last decade. In 2005, the year in which the numbers are lowest, New York had over 117,000 abortions, meaning that 41% of pregnancies in the city ended in abortion. For black women, it was 60% of all pregnancies. The numbers for the remaining years are all higher.
Most Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers are in minority neighborhoods.
Pro-lifers, especially African-Americans, are raising cries about black genocide. This is little surprise in regard to Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, was an ardent supporters of eugenics, a popular movement in the 30’s and 40’s, which suggested fewer children should be born to the “unfit,” including non-white races.
On Wednesday, Archbishop Dolan of New York said: “This is the first time in my happy 21 months as a New Yorker that I am embarrassed to be one. This New York community, which prides itself on its gritty sensitivity to those in need, is tragically letting down the tiniest most fragile and vulnerable, the little baby in the womb. We’ve got to do more than shiver over these chilling statistics. I invite all to come together to make abortion rare.”
A coalition has been formed to fight this law, and a petition to stop the law from passing has been set up. People not only in New York but around the country are signing.
Anyone who cares about crisis pregnancy centers needs to sign the petition, and attend the rally on Monday January 10 at 7 p.m. at the Manhattan Bible Church, where Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, and other pro-life leaders will be speaking.
See the ongoing coverage on Dr. Gerard Nadal’s blog, especially his hard-hitting interview with black pastor Clenard Childress, featured in the documentary Maafa 21, and how Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, and the eugenics movement have sought to reduce or wipe out the black race since their beginning. Here is the trailer for this excellent documentary
Update: January 11, 2011. The rally last night was fabulous. Many black pastors spoke, as well as activitists from all over, including Dr. Gerard Nadal (who I met for the first time last night, after knowing him online for months) and Chris Slattery, the great defenders of pregnancy care centers in New York. I was only able to take a quick cell phone video of Alveda King’s speech.
No, it’s not Advent yet, but this ad is too good to wait for. It comes from a British group called ChurchAds.net. It already has some “pro-choicers” howling.
But apart from that, “Mary’s Ultrasound” as it has come to be known, gives us a vibrant sense of the reality that Mary experienced, of our hidden Savior and how His life came to be, and of his revelation in the flesh.
Life Site News has an excellent – but very disturbing – series of articles on the ironically named “Women Deliver” conference held this past week in Washington D.C. The conference, supposedly intended to promote maternal health and reduce maternal mortality throughout the world, turned out to actually be all about pushing the abortion agenda. The fact that women deliver babies and that they have babies in the womb was virtually ignored, in spite of pro-lifers’ attempts to call attention to this fact.
Among the conference attendees were many of the world’s ministers and parliamentarians, including: Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund; Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization; Gill Greer, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who gave the keynote address.
Conference sponsors included several UN agencies, government departments from the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the U.S. (USAID), and Canada, as well as fortune-1000 companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, and Merck & Co.
The speakers at the conference put forward strategies for how to get past laws banning abortion in countries where it is illegal, how to legalize abortion where it is illegal, and of course, to expand contraception everywhere. The claimed that the best way to reduce maternal mortality rates throughout the world was to promote abortion. They also constantly trashed religion and “fetus fundamentalism.”
Pro-life leaders who attended the conference, however, point to a Lancet study published in April that showed, contrary to what the UN and the international pro-abortion lobby have long claimed, that maternal mortality around the world has dropped drastically in recent years. In addition, the study nowhere mentioned legal abortion as a significant causal factor in the reduced death rate.
“This is a classic case of their ideologies trumping the science,” said conference attendee Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women of America. Even when the science contradicts their goal, they don’t change their ideology.”
The science of fetal development was also completely unwelcome at the conference.
Volunteers from the National Right to Life Committee were handing out pink “Celebrate Motherhood bags outside the conference. They contained a small plastic fetal model of a 12-week-old unborn child, a small replication of an unborn child’s feet at 10 weeks gestation, a brochure on prenatal development, and a brochure containing information on proven means of reducing maternal mortality rates worldwide (the supposed focus of the conference).
Many attendees took them – only to have them confiscated by conference staff once they got to the door of the convention center, by staffers who told them they were “anti-life” and “anti-woman.”
One attendee who received a bag told LifeSiteNews.com that she was interrogated in an intimidating manner by an organizer who said that “you need to throw away” any pink bag handed out by the “anti-woman” demonstrators, because “they’re trying to ruin our conference.”
However, one pro-life volunteer said that the aggressive approach taken by conference staff may have been for the better: when attendees, including UN delegates, asked about the confiscated material in clear plastic bags, they were told by pro-lifers that the materials could not be handed out because “they don’t want you to have this information.”
“It was great for what we’re getting across,” said the volunteer.
The pro-lifers were later able to collect the confiscated bags.
Jeanne Head, NRLC Vice President for International Affairs and UN Representative for National Right to Life, and a registered nurse, said she was frustrated at how the conference hijacked the issue of maternal mortality to push an agenda harmful to women.
“We’ve known how to save lives in the developing world for over 70 years, and women are still dying in the developing world,” Head told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN). “It’s aggravating to me that they’re spending all this money and all this talk about how to save women’s lives and it’s very simple.”
“Good health care, prenatal care, emergency obststetric care, antibiotics, clean blood, clean water, good nutrition. And they’re talking about all this garbage instead of doing the job.”
Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright, who was present at the conference, said the treatment of the pro-life materials illustrated the conference’s hypocritical message.
“Here they are the whole conference saying: information, give women information and they’ll have power,” Wright told LSN, “and then they take that information away so that they’ll be powerless to argue against the indoctrination they’re getting.”
Wright further noted that the conference revealed how the pro-abortion movement’s “zeitgeist” is “all about power.” “They think that we’re driven by the same things that they’re driven by. They’re driven by rage and power. It’s just the opposite for us - we’re driven by love to serve others,” she said.
For starters she has her feast-days wrong. Today is not the feast of St. Joseph the Worker (that’s on May 1), but the feast of St. Joseph the Husband of Mary, not to mention protector of the Christ Child.
Just think of it: Joseph agreed to protect Mary and take her into his home as his wife when (for all the neighbors knew) she was carrying another man’s child. He watched over Mary as she gave birth. He took the Child and his Mother to Egypt when Herod was slaying the innocent babies of Bethlehem to try to get to Him.
In other words, Joseph protected Jesus against the threats on his infant life.
No wonder Madame Speaker “forgot” to mention this aspect of the feast and of St. Joseph’s life!! How on earth can she think it proper to suggest that St. Joseph might support the passing of a bill that will lead to more slaughter of the unborn? Even worse, she is proclaiming that the bill is “life-affirming!” I hope some bishop calls her out publicly on this.
Even though Pelosi has forgotten St. Joseph’s role, let’s not forget it ourselves.
St. Joseph, Patron of the Unborn, pray for our nation, and for all those babies now being sacrificed on the altar of self. Protect those unborn children who are in danger of abortion as you once protected the Son of God on earth. St. Joseph, pray for us!
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
