Opinion

Are abortion clinic workers the enemy?

I am privileged to be the operations director for And Then There Were None, the new pro-life ministry geared towards converting abortion clinic workers and helping them out of the abortion industry. In the two weeks following the first webcast, five abortion clinic workers (both current and former) have contacted us in need of assistance.

I believe that one of the biggest road blocks we as pro-lifers face is our own attitudes towards abortion clinic workers. I’m sure many of you who read this have heard of or have participated in 40 Days for Life, which is rooted in prayer, fasting, and outreach in front of abortion clinics. Over sixty abortion workers who have quit cited 40 Days for Life as their reason for leaving the abortion industry. Imagine if the prayer campaign was instead based on screaming and condemning women and clinic workers outside abortion facilities. Would any hearts ever be changed?

This is but a summary of two former workers who have contacted us.

“Mary” is a single mother who is doing all she can to find a new job just to pay her bills and take care of her child. She even tried to get a job at a nearby Burger King because she has struggled to find work at a different non-abortion health center, since potential employers hesitate to hire her since she has worked in the abortion industry. It has put a black mark on her record.

Visit ATTWN.org to learn more.

Mary worked at the abortion center for eight months. She explained to me that she had quit because she couldn’t handle seeing the little body parts of the recently aborted babies anymore. The clinic contacts Mary several times a month to offer her more money if she returns, and she denies them, even though she is struggling financially. Just as she was facing evacuation from her home, And Then There Were None helped her pay off bills to keep her water and electricity running while helping her in a job search.

“Amy,” a single mother of four, worked in the abortion industry for four years. She started out doing office work, but over time, she got asked to help out during abortions, for which she was paid by commission. When she could no longer handle participating in abortion procedures, Amy reached out to a pro-life group who got her in touch with And Then There Were None. Amy witnessed illegal activity and fraud in the abortion clinic, but she fears what the legal repercussions for her and her family would be if she exposed it. Because And Then There Were None will provide legal help to former workers, Amy is going to be able to protect her family and still expose the illegal activity in the abortion clinic.

This is only the beginning of what will be brought forward when we reach out to abortion workers. They will be able to receive emotional and spiritual support and healing through ATTWN. There are clinic workers contacting us about some sick activity in abortion centers: unclean surgical equipment. Patient abuses and sexual harassment. Abortion doctors doing unspeakable things to aborted babies. Medicaid fraud and bribery. All this will come to light, and truth will prevail.

Consider this: there is overwhelming support from the pro-life community for the work that pregnancy resource centers do. Many of these centers provide options, financial help, assistance in job searches, and nonjudgmental emotional support for women, many of whom are contemplating ending the lives of their unborn children. Pregnancy centers are a vital aspect of the pro-life movement, and very few pro-lifers would dispute that.

Though the vast majority of pro-lifers have exhibited a strong support for the new ATTWN ministry, a few of the same pro-lifers who support pregnancy centers also hesitate to support or even outright denounce helping abortion clinic workers who want to leave the abortion industry. ATTWN provides options, financial help, assistance in job searches, and nonjudgmental emotional support for those wanting to leave the abortion industry, but some pro-lifers are claiming that abortion workers who have converted should be more content scrubbing floors at fast food restaurants than continuing to work in the abortion clinic.

I wonder if these people would be so righteous as to look an abortion-minded woman in the eyes and say, “If you really don’t want an abortion, you should be content cleaning toilets to make enough to get by” and leave it at that.

No?

Then how can one justify acting that way towards abortion clinic workers?

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  • Oldmanbob

    Read  in Acts about Saul before he became Paul.  After he was saved Christians were not so sure they wanted anythintg to do with him.  Nonetheless he was taken in to the Church.  We need to do the same. 

  • Guest

    LiveAction’s reason for existing is to produce videos that purportedly prove that clinic workers systematically facilitate and even encourage prostitution, the sexual abuse of children, and “gendercide.”  LiveAction clearly considers the workers to be willing participants in the alleged crimes, not pawns of their employers, because the videos make a point of showing the workers’ names and faces whenever possible.  So either LiveAction’s videos do not portray clinic employees accurately, or the workers are indeed the enemy.  You can’t eat your cake and have it too, unless you’re going to claim that the people on the videos are a few bad apples that don’t represent the industry as a whole. 

    • http://twitter.com/Astraspider Astraspider

      Very astute point.

    • Jimwyse

      Unless, of course, not all clinic workers are the same

    • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

      So exposing the misconduct of some people in the industry is mutually exclusive from reaching out to others in the industry? That doesn’t even rise to the level of logical, much less astute.

      • Guest

         So exposing the misconduct of some people in the industry

        “Some people” in the industry?  You appear to be underestimating the scope of the problem, Calvin.  According to LiveAction’s own Lila Rose, “Planned Parenthood workers across the board are happy to help [a supposed] serial abuser.”  (Emphasis added.)  According to her, LiveAction never encountered a Planned Parenthood employee who did not “assist” the purported trafficking of minors; rather, Ms. Rose claims that Planned Parenthood’s “staff–from managers, to supervisors, to clinicians, to staffers–unequivocally and without question show willingness to do secret business with a pimp.”  This has caused Ms. Rose to question whether it is even possible to train PP’s 11,000 employees to do anything other than facilitate sex abuse.  I realize that LiveAction has only made blanket allegations about PP workers collectively, not all abortion workers, so perhaps when you refer to the “misconduct of some people in the industry,” you mean that you believe workers at non-PP clinics behave differently than workers at the clinics that LiveAction has visited.  That’s nice of you, but it doesn’t appear to be based on any logical foundation.

        http://liveactionnews.org/investigative/top-six-planned-parenthood-deceptions/

        is mutually exclusive from reaching out to others in the industry?
        Not at all, nor did I say that they were mutually exclusive.  Miss Jennie professes confusion about why the mean pro-lifers treat clinic workers judgmentally.  I’m just trying to help make her brain stop hurting by explaining that perhaps it’s because groups such as her own have so shrilly and repeatedly judged those workers and found them guilty.

        • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

          And you appear to be reading more into my use of the word “some” than is really there. My comment made no claim about the prevalence of such crimes either way; I was merely pointing out that exposing the industry’s dirty laundry isn’t inconsistent with remaining open to those who want to escape it. I’m glad to see you seem to be walking back your insinuation to the contrary…though it’s disappointing to see you replace it with stigmatization of LA’s efforts to expose the truth.

          • Guest

            And you appear to be reading more into my use of the word “some” than is really there.

            I’m sure that ‘some’ means just what you choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

            I’m glad to see you seem to be walking back your insinuation to the contrary…

            There was no insinuation there in the first place.  And no, I don’t “stigmatize” LA’s efforts to expose the truth; I dismiss LA’s videos as self-indulgent exercises in confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.

          • Guest

             Addendum: “self-promoting” might be a better term than “self-indulgent.”

    • Emily

      You could say the same
      thing in a different way: “Either Live Action’s videos are an accurate
      portrayal, or clinic workers aren’t the enemy.” But I don’t see why that should be an either/or situation.
      “And” would be a better word. 

       

      The ideology is, you might say,
      the enemy. Human rights violations are the enemy. But ideologies manifest
      themselves in actions, so you have to film individuals in order to see them
      working. As far as workers beings pawns of their employers vs.
      willing individuals, my guess is it’s a little of both. Abby Johnson used
      to be a PP clinic director in Texas, and she is now the founder of And Then
      There Were None, as well as chief research strategist for Live Action. The last two might seem like a strange juxtaposition, but they really aren’t. 

       

      Abby says in her book
      Unplanned “Victims. Now I was so confused about who the victims really
      were….Were my staff and I victims, thinking we were helping women while working
      so hard on behalf of our clients, when our efforts seemed only to be used to
      move budget numbers from red columns to black? Another patient pulled up
      and parked. She hesitated before getting out of her car. Was she pregnant? If
      so, there were two new victims in that car….Everything seemed inside out.” But she also fully acknowledges her own responsibility: “How much
      damage have these hands done over the past eight years?.….What if I’d known the
      truth, and what if I’d told all those women?”

       

      Many people within the
      abortion industry are, as Abby says “driven by compassion and tenderness,”
      even if their motives are right and their actions wrong. Again, it’s clear that
      for some the appeal is money, and that abortion is a lucrative business. The
      people in any movement or organization are not all the same. But whatever the
      motive, actions are usually justified in the minds of people who do them.
      People don’t usually wake up saying “today I am going to do something that
      I consider totally evil.”

       

      When she was at Planned
      Parenthood, Abby continually encountered respect and compassion from pro-lifers
      and sidewalk counselors (one even gave her flowers), even though they
      wholeheartedly disagreed with her. It is 100% possible to disagree with someone
      and hate what they do but still love him or her as a person. Unfortunately
      people on both sides of the abortion issue sometimes forget this. I admit it’s
      difficult not to see someone like Cecile Richards (PP President) as the enemy.
      It’s just easier. But it isn’t productive, and it isn’t true. She’s simply
      happens to be wrong. And Then There Were None exists, as nearly as I can tell,
      not to rescue “the enemy,” but to rescue clinic workers from the
      enemy, an ideology that has caused tragedy and suffering for countless women,
      babies, and clinic workers. 

      • Emily

        That indented weirdly, sorry.

    • Michelle Stewart

      Our guest draws false conclusions by way of their own implications. Identifying a participant does not condemn the individual. Were LiveAction to obscure the identity of abortion clinic workers or the office location, the videos would be disregarded as fraudulent constructions. Identification is essential to authenticate abortion clinic practices, not indict the employees — as, I might add, the guest has by claiming that these employees were “a few bad apples that don’t represent the industry as a whole.”

      And Then There Were None offers abortion industry employees a compassionate escape from participation in a corrupt industry, much as other ministries to those entrapped in other types of unsavory conditions — runaway teens, prostitutes, victims of human trafficking, etc. — who also receive supportive ministry. 

      • Guest

        not indict the employees — as, I might add, the guest has…”

        No, I didn’t.   I said, “unless you’re going to claim that the people on the videos are a few bad apples…”  Perhaps you could go to the dictionary and look up the definition of “unless?”  And then you should probably look up “sarcasm.”  Maybe there will be a picture to help you recognize it in the future.

        Were LiveAction to obscure the identity of abortion clinic workers or the office location, the videos would be disregarded as fraudulent constructions

        Speaking only for myself, I can assure you that blurring the faces of the employees could not possibly have lowered my regard for LiveAction’s investigative integrity.