Abortion clinic director: Viewing ultrasound made me pro-life

November 30, 2009

Abby Johnson, the 29-year-old director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas, became pro-life after viewing an ultrasound of an abortion. Asked, “What exactly happened? This had been going on for a long time: a lot of women had been coming in and having abortions, so why did you leave at this point?”, Johnson responded:

The difference is this: Most abortion procedures are not done with ultrasound guidance. So that means that they go in, and they do the abortion. They do an ultrasound before the procedure is done. They don’t do an ultrasound during the procedure, so you don’t actually see what is going on inside the uterus during the abortion procedure. The reason they don’t do it is that it takes longer, and industries like Planned Parenthood, who are trying to pump out as many abortions as possible per day, don’t want to take the time to do a more accurate procedure. They just want to do them as quickly as possible to get more women in and out the door.

But this particular physician, for whatever reason, chose to do an ultrasound-guided procedure on this patient and called me in the room to assist, which was not something I usually did as director. But I did go in to assist, and my job was to hold the ultrasound probe on the woman’s abdomen during the procedure so he could visualize the uterus during the abortion. What I saw during the procedure was so gruesome to me, and something I had never experienced before, that I just thought, “I’ll never do this again.”

 

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Further information:

• Abortion clinic director becomes a pro-life advocate (Our Sunday Visitor)
• Planned Parenthood clinic director joins pro-life forces (CWN, 11/2/09)