Abortion: The Removal of Tissue?

On January 10, 2011, LifeSiteNews.com excerpted a portion from the first chapter of Abby Johnson’s forthcoming book. For two years, she had been the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic, until she was asked to assist in an ultra-sound, which accompanies abortions. What she saw totally undid her orientation towards abortions:

• What was in this woman’s womb just a moment ago was alive. It wasn’t just tissue, just cells. It was a human baby. And it was fighting for its life! A battle it lost in the blink of an eye. What I have told people for years, what I’ve believed and taught and defended, is a lie.

She realized in an instance that abortion was more than a surgical procedure to remove an unwanted and uninvited package of impersonal tissue, but how had she been deceived to believe this:

• How had it come to this? How had I let this happen? I had invested myself, my heart, my career in Planned Parenthood because I cared about women in crisis. And now I faced a crisis of my own.

She now painfully realized that those women she had wanted to help and comfort, she had instead irrevocably wounded:

• How much damage have these hands done over the past eight years? How many lives have been taken because of them? Not just because of my hands, but because of my words. What if I’d known the truth, and what if I’d told all those women?

Johnson may always live with regrets for the things she has sponsored, but it sounds like she is aware that our Lord is willing and able to forgive her and to cleanse her of all her guilt (1 John 1:8-9). However, many others refuse this forgiveness in favor of an endless struggle to convince themselves that they had done the right thing.

Johnson’s account makes us wonder how an intelligent professional woman could have fallen for the line that the fetus was merely “tissue” – merely a part of the mother’s body. Was it a matter of the media incessantly repeating their erroneous dogma or the university disparaging anyone who disagreed with its “wisdom?” It also should make us wonder how many other “truths” we have been made to mindlessly swallow.