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In 2000, Abby Johnson had a surgical abortion. Still a college student at the time, she was afraid that having a baby would ruin her future. When she became pregnant by the same man in 2003, Johnson had an abortion again. This time, she did it using abortion pills.
But it didn’t turn out as well as she thought it would.
“I woke up in a pool of blood,” Johnson said. “I remember saying, ‘Oh my god! I feel like I’m in a crime scene.’ And I was, because I killed my baby.”
Johnson, a pro-life activist from Texas, spoke at the Student Union Building to a crowd of supporters Thursday night as part of a nationwide tour. The event was organized by pro-life UNM organization Students for Life. About 500 people attended the event.
The former head of Planned Parenthood in Texas, Johnson said she worked with the pro-choice reproductive health organization until 2009. She also became Planned Parenthood’s employee of the year before she resigned. She said she had participated in abortion procedures at a Planned Parenthood facility in Texas.
And she regrets it deeply, she said.
“I knew what the aftermath of abortion looked like,” she said. “I’ve pieced that child. I’ve seen the death of that child. I could hear the woman sobbing. I wanted to sit her up and say, ‘Your baby is in danger and is in desperate need of your protection.’ … The worst part is I just stood there and watched a person die.”
Johnson said according to Planned Parenthood statistics, one in three women in the country will have an abortion before they turn 45. She said 60 percent of women having abortions already have children at home, and that the organization conducts 334,000 abortions per year.
Planned Parenthood earns most of its money by marketing abortions, Johnson said. She said that although Planned Parenthood offers other services, such as family planning, “98 percent of women walk in a Planned Parenthood clinic will get an abortion.” According to Planned Parenthood’s 2011-2012 annual report, abortion services made up 3 percent of their services. Testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and disease were the most common services at 41 percent.
Abortion is a “blind procedure,” Johnson said. She said a doctor inserts a suction tube into a woman’s womb and runs it until it fills a glass jar. The glass jar, she said, then goes to a “product of conception” lab where technicians reassemble the parts of the fetus to ensure that no body part was left in the womb, because that can cause complications.
Once the parts are assembled, it goes into a bag and is stored in a “nursery” before it is incinerated, she said.
Johnson said she encourages pro-life supporters to educate themselves about abortion statistics in the country to better debate pro-choice people.
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“Don’t buy into their talking points,” she said. “We have to be equipped not just with prayer, but with knowledge.”
Samantha Serrano, president of the recently launched Students for Life, said her organization contacted Johnson to speak at UNM to open debate on abortion on campus. She said there is “so much diversity at UNM. Let’s hear all sides of the abortion issue.”
Serrano said the event was perfectly timed with regard to the abortion ordinance that will be on the ballot if a runoff election is held in November.
“This is a perfect segue into the elections,” she said. “We’re educating people. College students don’t know that Planned Parenthood does abortions. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to for a 20-week ban when the baby is capable of feeling pain and the woman has waited that long.”
The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance did not qualify to be on the ballot for the Oct. 8 elections because the city clerk only received 9,800 signatures, about 3,000 short of the required 12,091. But a petition organized by pro-life organizations in Albuquerque gathered 27,000 signatures to overturn the clerk’s decision and place the ordinance on the ballot for the runoff elections in November.
Serrano said the campus community has been very welcoming of her organization.
“It was mostly positive feedback,” she said. “People are really excited about it. I would say UNM is probably more pro-life than people think. It’s just that because abortion is such a sensitive issue, most people don’t want to speak about it in class.”
And it hopes to change pro-choice individuals’ minds through the event, Serrano said.
Johnson said she urges pro-life individuals in the city to fight harder to get their voices to be heard, for example, by picketing and praying outside abortion clinics.
And she is optimistic the ordinance will pass, she said.
“These abortion clinics in your town can close,” she said. “But they won’t unless people of faith go out there and do something.”
