Abby Johnson, Poor Planner
A convert tried to change a movement, and the movement changed her instead.
[If you are reading the email version of this piece, it may be truncated for length and you can read the full piece by clicking on the link in the title.]
One of the most disheartening things to watch in the American abortion debate is a showdown between actual legislators, whether at the federal or state level. You'll almost always see an overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white group of rich men, with a median age of about 72, argue over reproductive health while they loudly and proudly fuck up the basics of pregnancy or sexual assault or medicine. You just wish that somebody closer to these complex issues could have a voice in this thing, and that's where Abby Johnson comes in.
Johnson is not just a vocal anti-abortion activist, she is a convert to the movement. As a former Planned Parenthood clinic director in Texas, she was an ardent advocate for reproductive rights until, by her telling, she had a change of heart after observing a particularly difficult abortion procedure. With her new understanding of the sanctity of unborn human life and the threat that Planned Parenthood posed to it, she joined the very organization that had been protesting outside of her clinic and quickly began speaking out against Planned Parenthood as an organization, and abortion more broadly, eventually writing her 2011 memoir Unplanned, which got favorable blurbs from Catholic priests and bishops, and was later adapted into a 2019 film that grossed $21 million at the box office. After converting to Catholicism, she has built her faith life into her advocacy as well, and explicitly frames her conversion and ministry in both professional and religious terms. Further, she wasn’t just a Planned Parenthood director, she was a client, having terminated two pregnancies earlier in her life. So yes, Johnson’s conversion story is very compelling. It gives her a level of credibility that we don’t often see on G.O.T.H.S.. It makes it harder for me to criticize her, because she’s been there, she’s lived it, and she’s chosen the other side.
The most common critique of Johnson - one that has dogged her for the past decade - is that she's full of shit. Her stories about working at Planned Parenthood don't line up with the actual paper trail, and it's easy to wonder if she made the change in her career out of a desire for money and notoriety. But I don’t want to critique her for that, I want to do something different: I want to give Johnson every benefit of the doubt and assume that everything she has said about her journey from Planned Parenthood is 100% accurate (as we'll see, this requires a lot of benefits of a lot of doubts). When you do that, you end up with a piece that is not about a semi-competent, dishonest, hypocritical grifter trying to hustle around a hot-button political issue for her own gain. Instead, you end up with a piece about a woman who took big risks out of a legitimate and compassionate concern for the unborn, and over a very short period of time, got morally hollowed out by all of the alliances she had to make, to the point where she is now actively undercutting her own work by spending all day on Twitter shouting out Donald Trump for being a great Christian, denying the reality of the COVID pandemic, and condemning Black Lives Matter for being a terrorist organization.
In other words, you get the story of the Catholic anti-abortion movement in America.
CHAPTER ONE - THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE DIPSHIT, TEXAS
Johnson was not just a Planned Parenthood employee; she became a clinic director in Bryan, Texas before her thirtieth birthday, and was once named Employee of the Year by her regional affiliate. She first started volunteering for Planned Parenthood as a clinic escort when she was in college, and bought in fully to their mission of serving women in need. While her clinic performed abortions twice a month, and while she grew up in a relatively conservative Baptist household with a deacon for a father - she waited a very long time to tell her parents that she had started working at the clinic - Johnson was passionate about her counseling work, and believed that providing education and contraception at her clinic would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and by extension abortions, in her community.
All of that changed in 2009, when Johnson was in the room for an ultrasound-guided abortion and saw a thirteen-week fetus kick against and try to avoid the uterine probe that would eventually terminate it. The experience shook Johnson greatly, and she left the clinic shortly afterwards, with no prospects or real idea of where to go next. She turned to the Coalition for Life, the very group that would regularly protest outside of her clinic, and who had gotten to know Johnson through their frequent confrontations. Johnson had seen all sides of the anti-abortion movement protesting outside her gates, and respected the Coalition for Life for their willingness to be prayerful and respectful in their protest, as opposed to others borrowing from the Randall Terry playbook. Shawn Carney, who was director at the Coalition as well as an occasional host on Catholic network EWTN, was overjoyed that his movement was able to convert the actual clinic director to their side, and pledged to support Johnson in her job search.
Carney didn't find a medical or counseling job for Johnson, but he was able to get her media hits right away, thanks in part to a brief legal scuffle where Planned Parenthood sought an injunction to enforce Johnson's NDA after she left. The additional publicity vaulted Johnson to immediate fame in the anti-abortion movement, and as she relates in her memoir, requests for interviews began pouring in from some of the worst people on Earth. "Soon they started calling out things like, “It’s The O’Reilly Factor. They want an interview. What do I tell them?” and, “Laura Ingraham is on the line!” and “Fox News wants an interview!” and “Mike Huckabee wants you on his show! And you’re in the Drudge Report.”"
In addition to speaking out against abortion more broadly, Johnson also frequently targets Planned Parenthood in her work, accusing them, among other things, of widespread fraud, labor law violations, participating in child sex trafficking, and other “illegal abuses of women”. Johnson claimed, in a 2011 piece for The Hill, that 98 percent of the services provided to pregnant women at Planned Parenthood were abortions, and that the organization depended on abortions as its main moneymaker (for a nonprofit organization). In Johnson’s telling, Planned Parenthood deceived well-meaning and compassionate women like her into coming to work for them, lying about their actual objectives and simply pushing more people into terminating pregnancies because it was a more profitable procedure for them.
Johnson’s religious upbringing, as you’d expect, is also key to her story. She ended up leaving the Baptist church because of their disapproval of her work at Planned Parenthood. While she and her husband found a home in a more progressive and pro-choice Episcopal church, she was eventually booted out of there when she left Planned Parenthood and became an anti-abortion activist. Of course, the Catholic church was ready to welcome her with open arms, even though she said that she grew up thinking Catholics “were weird and worship statues”, and was at least half correct. As she said in an interview with EWTN, she loved the liturgy of both the Episcopal and Catholic churches, and compared the two by saying “the service is [the same], but the values aren’t”, which is a great slogan for Catholic churches to put on billboards outside of Episcopal churches. Or, depending on your point of view, a great slogan for Episcopal churches to put on billboards outside of Catholic churches.
From here, Johnson went on to found And Then There Were None, a nonprofit ministry named for an Agatha Christie novel in which a judge murders nine people and then himself. ATTWN serves clinic workers who, like Johnson, have had a change of heart, and helps with job searches and financial support for the “workers that have had conversions but don’t know how to leave...having the abortion industry on your resume is a big black mark.” And while that last part may not be true everywhere, I can certainly see it being true in Dipshit, Texas, and by Johnson’s telling, hundreds of workers nationwide have left abortion clinics to join her in the fight against abortion. Starting this ministry was important for Johnson, because she hadn’t seen anyone else, including in the Catholic church, doing the same thing for clinic workers. To Johnson, clinic workers are not “beyond saving”, that isn’t the message of Jesus. Johnson’s founding of ATTWN repeats one of the main refrains of her story: that antagonism and condemnation is not how the anti-abortion movement is going to win. Rather, Johnson wants - well, wanted - to approach the other side with love, understanding, and prayer.
Today, in addition to ATTWN, Johnson is still active in right-wing media, doing interviews with religious and conservative outlets - most recently to plug the film adaptation of her memoir - as well as writing on the anti-abortion beat for far-right blog The Federalist, whose official slogan is “Almost Six Months Since Our Last Labor Law Violation” (this recently replaced their two previous slogans, “Almost Four Years Since Condoning Pedophilia to Defend Roy Moore” and “Almost Four Years Since Removing the ‘Black Crime’ Tag From Our Stories’). Especially with the box office success of Unplanned, Johnson has become a media darling and the go-to mouthpiece for the Christian and Catholic fight against abortion, with the most unlikely of origin stories.
Johnson’s story is obviously incredible, by which I mean there were - and still are - a lot of questions about its credibility. Three different profiles of Johnson written in the early days of her anti-abortion advocacy - in Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, and Salon - all uncovered, amazingly, different inconsistencies in the story upon which she built her career. I said we were going to give her the benefit of the doubt in this essay, but we do need to spend a chapter running through these discrepancies to get a handle on just how many benefits and how many doubts there actually are.
CHAPTER TWO - NEVER POST
Now, a thirteen-week fetus possessing the ability to feel pain, to recognize the source of that pain, and to recoil away from it, would fly in the face of any medical understanding of pregnancy. What Johnson is describing in her career-defining story wouldn't (doesn’t) make sense to any obstetrician, and it's easy to throw out her entire story if you don't accept that the inciting incident is even possible.
But like I said, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she is just stating something incorrectly, or maybe the doctors are all wrong and Johnson's account of the ultrasound-guided abortion, like that Human Centipede movie, is 100% medically accurate. Does her story work then?
It does, but only if you assume that the ultrasound-guided abortion actually happened in the first place, which it may not have. As it turns out, Johnson's clinic has to file paperwork with the state of Texas for each abortion it performs, and not only were there no ultrasound-assisted abortions performed at the clinic on the date that Johnson has burned into her brain, but there were no abortions performed on any pregnancies beyond ten weeks on that date, so there was nothing that could conceivably require an ultrasound. Also, the demographic data in the clinic's paperwork doesn't match Johnson's account, where the mother in her story was Black, but no Black patients came to the clinic that day with a pregnancy that far along. And since the clinic only performed abortions on two days during the month in question, Johnsom has an awfully small margin for error on the details of her story.
But like I said, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume she's correct and there's an inaccuracy in the clinic records, or that, as she has alleged before, Planned Parenthood was falsifying medical records to discredit her and gaslight Salon readers. Does her story still work?
Yes, her story of being a clinic director so shaken by witnessing an abortion that she changed careers still works, as long as she didn't do anything stupid like give a radio interview extolling the values of Planned Parenthood between the date of the alleged abortion and her resignation. Unfortunately, she definitely did that, literally the day after the horrifying abortion that I'm assuming happened through the benefit of the doubt, on a show called Fair and Feminist. Johnson's response to critics pointing out this glaring inconsistency in her story is simple: she was so stunned by what she witnessed that it took her almost two weeks to process it and arrive at her decision to resign. Which means that she was somehow so floored by the horror of abortion that she needed time to process how to deal with her job, but could still do a radio interview about how great her job was. In her book, she asserts that she did the interview out of a sense of professional obligation and just went on autopilot to repeat Planned Parenthood’s talking points. But, she also asserts in her book that the abortion left her "right there, standing beside the table, my hand on the weeping woman’s belly, this thought came from deep within me: Never again! Never again," which doesn't necessarily sound like someone who would feel bound by a sense of professional obligation the next day. Neither does “in that moment, I knew that my life was going to have to change. I knew that I couldn’t walk out of there the same way that I had walked in,” which she wrote in the National Catholic Register in 2011. Neither does the Abby Johnson in the actual interview who, among other things, complained about the death threats she was receiving from anti-abortion activists.
But like I said, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume she was in some sort of dissociative state during the interview, or employing some sort of coping mechanism. Does her story about leaving Planned Parenthood in protest over their abortion policies work? Yes, unless Planned Parenthood had kept a paper trail detailing that Johnson was on her way to getting fired anyway.
Unfortunately, they had done exactly that. In fact, Johnson had been put on a "Performance Improvement Plan" - in corporate-speak, this is how employers cover their ass by officially declaring you a shitty employee before firing you later - and had her change of heart three days later. As Johnson puts it, this was actually retaliation from her employer over her objections to Planned Parenthood's alleged push to increase their number of abortions to grow their profit dollars. Assuming that such a strategy even existed and made sense financially, the timing and awfully big assumption it requires - of borderline-genocidal intent on the part of an underfunded women's clinic in Texas - further undermines Johnson's story.
But like I said, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume Planned Parenthood actually was that nefarious and was quashing any and all concerns from employees who dared to express reservations against a seemingly far-fetched plan to increase the number of abortions being performed at the Texas clinic. Does Johnson's story still work? It does, just as long as there weren't other reasons for her reprimand that directly contradicted that story. Let's see if the Texas Observer found anything:
"Johnson quit Planned Parenthood for entirely nonreligious reasons. [Johnson's friend] Kaminczak said Johnson’s reasons boiled down to workplace drama. Kaminczak had been promoted to assistant director at another clinic, she said, and she and Johnson had kept up via e-mail. Those e-mails contained graphic talk about Kaminczak’s sex life, as well as “inappropriate discussion” of their respective employees. One of Kaminczak’s “problem employees” saw the messages on her boss’s computer and, when Kaminczak pushed for her to be fired, complained to regional supervisors. Kaminczak wouldn’t be more specific about what was in the e-mails, but she said that it was bad. When Planned Parenthood read the exchanges, she was fired for “inappropriate use of work e-mail.” Johnson was placed on a “performance improvement plan"".
Okay, so maybe Johnson had a conversion experience, or maybe she was dicking around all day discussing lady-boners with her friend on the work Outlook system. Let's assume Planned Parenthood is still just making everything up, and now convincing Johnson's friends to make stuff up, in an attempt to smear Johnson. Does Johnson's story still work? It actually does hold together pretty well, just as long as Johnson didn't ever publicly post on social media about how much her job sucked and how she felt underappreciated for her dedication to Planned Parenthood.
Unfortunately, Johnson was - and still is - unfamiliar with the first rule of effective activism, "Never Post". Here's Texas Monthly:
"Postings on Johnson’s Facebook page, obtained by Texas Monthly, suggest an employee worn out by her job and feeling hurt, angry, and unappreciated—not one struggling with the morality of her profession. On September 24, two weeks before she resigned, she wrote, “So tired. Want a day off. Too busy. Blah.” Similar sentiments followed, along with expressions of dread over her coming disciplinary meeting in Houston. This is what she wrote on the night she quit: Alright. Here’s the deal. I have been doing the work of two full time people for two years. Then, after I have been working my whole big butt off for them and prioritizing that company over my family, my friends and pretty much everything else in my life, they have the nerve to tell me that my job performance is “slipping.” WHAT???!!! That is crazy. Anyone that knows me knows how committed I was to that job. They obviously do not value me at all. So, I’m out and I feel really great about it!” Johnson insisted that the Facebook posting was merely a cover story, designed to buy her time to decide how and when she would reveal her real reasons for quitting."
Taking Johnson at her word, her whole big butt was just running a long con on Planned Parenthood this whole time, who by my count had to be running at least three separate smear campaigns on her for this story to be at all credible at this point.
Johnson continues to refute any version of events but her own - the press she did for the 2019 film adaptation of her book brought all of these questions up again, and she had all of the same answers as before, although now she also adds a sentence or two about how those outlets that covered her a decade ago actually had a disgusting liberal pro-abortion bias. Like I said, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, because "she's making it up" is, in my opinion, not the most effective critique of Johnson's work. You actually can accept everything she says as true, and still, as we'll see, believe that she's doing far more to hurt the image of the anti-abortion movement, and the Catholic church, than she is doing to help it. But know that in order to get on board with Johnson’s story, you have to reject the much simpler idea that a woman had a hard job she hated and jumped ship for a cushy media gig at the first opportunity, and instead accept Johnson's narrative, which requires you to ignore or reject court documents, medical forms filed with the state, Johnson's own posts on social media, Johnson's own media appearances from this period, accounts from Johnson's coworkers and bosses, a trove of what I assume are very horny emails, and any realistic understanding of obstetric medicine. As the Observer put it:
"These things add up. Johnson can’t stop talking about the people who wronged her, about how hard she worked, about how little she was appreciated. She’ll talk about how nasty her boss was, how her co-workers sold her out, how no one cared for the women as much as she did...The more she talks, the more Abby Johnson’s issue with Planned Parenthood seems to be its treatment of Abby Johnson...The inconsistencies in her story won’t matter to Johnson’s future listeners. She’s going to have a long, profitable career in the pro-life movement, telling cheering audiences about the day that God reached down and showed her the truth.”
Nobody can deny that Abby Johnson has had a long, profitable career, and we should look at the book that got her those cheering audiences in the first place.
CHAPTER THREE - THAT SWEET SWEET ABORTION CASH
Look, I've read a lot of garbage for this project. I've read two books by Taylor Marshall, one by Sohrab Ahmari, one by Randall Terry so bad that reading it legitimately counts as self harm, a fawning biography of Tom Monaghan, insufferable blog posts by Rod Dreher, insufferable blog posts by Rusty Reno, endless insuffable blog posts from Rick Heilman, an onslaught of unbelievably stupid pieces at First Things, and the unintentionally hilarious dispatches from Church Militant. Unplanned is, by and large, more palatable than all of those; I would even say that the first half of the book borders on being interesting. I would certainly take it any day over Taylor Marshall attempting to Defeat The Pope With Logic And Reason.
Co-authored with Cindy Lambert, a self-described “collaborative writer privileged to chronicle God’s astonishing handiwork in the lives of others,” Unplanned is at its best when Johnson is writing candidly about her beliefs and how they've changed over time, and acknowledging the complexity of her own lived experience "on both sides of the life line". Because there is a lot of complexity there! Johnson notes, correctly, that the anti-abortion protestors outside of her clinic were not monolithic:
"By 7:00, pro-lifers had begun to show up outside the fence...As I waited, I was caught off guard by a few protesters on the other side of the fence. One fellow was dressed up as the Grim Reaper—he even carried a scythe. A woman took a spot outside the fence and began waving a huge placard with a picture of an aborted fetus on it—a grotesque image. I couldn’t imagine why she’d be so cruel as to show it in public...I didn’t yet understand that the pro-lifers outside the clinic that day weren’t a unified, like-minded group."
Drawn in contrast to the protestors pulling from the Operation Rescue playbook are the angelic members of the Coalition for Life, the protestors who instead approach the clinic with prayer and compassion - in one anecdote in a 2014 interview, Johnson shares a pretty funny image of her leaving the clinic at the end of the day to clean up all of the Miraculous Medals left at the fence. The Coalition worked hard to change the tone of the protests at the Bryan clinic, and soon enough, Johnson could walk from her car to the clinic without seeing the Grim Reaper, but instead having protestors learn her name, try to befriend her, and offer her support if she ever wanted to quit her job. In Johnson’s telling, the Coalition’s approach worked, and “I was convinced they cared about these women, just like we did,” while everyone else’s more aggressive tactics just drove her to be more resolute in her support for abortion rights. Her final thoughts on the Coalition for Life, with whom she continued to protest at clinics, leaves no doubt as to what Johnson views as the most effective tactics for ending abortion in America:
“We work hard to make sure all volunteers understand that this is not the time for them to wave their placards, shout insults, or be obnoxious or confrontational. We are there to stand and pray. We are there to bear witness to what we know, to what we’ve already experienced ourselves. We are there to love and befriend and pray for the clients who enter abortion clinics and the workers who staff them. Just as I was prayed for, loved, and befriended."
Discussions about care and compassion run throughout the book; that’s what she’s talking about when she writes:
“To this day I have friends on both sides of this polarizing debate. We all long for a story that shows that “our” side is right and good, and “their” side is wrong and bad, don’t we? But I testify that there is good and right and wrong on both sides of the fence. And even more shocking—we have far more in common with the “other” side than we might imagine.”
This is what Johnson praises the Coalition for, and what she criticizes Planned Parenthood for - the latter had too much of an us versus them mentality, seeing their workplace as a brutal moral battleground, while the former were the true radicals, in their compassion and honesty. That difference just gets exaggerated more as Unplanned goes on (and becomes a lot worse): Planned Parenthood urges Johnson, now a clinic director, to ratchet up the number of abortions performed at the clinic, to push more people into getting abortions, so that her organization can rake in that sweet sweet abortion cash. In the traumatic abortion that jumpstarted her career, the heartless doctor even says "beam me up Scotty!" before removing the fetal tissue.
So as you can tell, the book is not perfect, or really anywhere close to perfect; Johnson’s depiction of Planned Parenthood starts to veer into cartoonish villany towards the end, which the film adaptation will later take and run with. She over-dramatizes the legal battle over her NDA, which is treated as a massive climactic moment, when, in reality, it was a ninety-minute bench hearing that ended before the defense could even call a witness. Johnson also has a strange tendency to write in other characters who talk at length about how great and respected Abby Johnson is, like her friend responding to Johnson’s anxiety about possibly getting fired from the clinic:
“Fire you? Abby, how could they fire you? You just got the Employee of the Year award, for goodness’ sake. You ace all the inspections. You’re a star employee. How many times has [regional director] Cheryl told you, ‘One day my job will be yours, Abby’? They’re not going to fire you. You’re being paranoid. Just go to the meeting—you’ll see.”
Or, in another part of the book, the Coalition staffer musing on Johnson switching sides, in a transcript of a conversation that Johnson admits she did not witness: “I mean, that’s Abby, isn’t it? We’ve watched her through the fence long enough to know that she just tells it like she sees it. What you see is what you get. Whatever she thinks, she says. It’s hard to picture her keeping this under wraps at her office.”
One of the more interesting omissions from the book is that Johnson never mentions that, legally speaking, she lived and worked in an environment that was incredibly hostile to Planned Parenthood. She describes the increased pressure to perform more abortions to keep her clinic in the black, and the challenge of staying afloat after government funding cuts, but never spares a moment to think about who is actually cutting that funding or why they would be doing it; the answers were “the psychopathic Texas state legislature” and “to score political points”. The Texas statehouse is basically the site of a new bloody-knuckle fight over TRAP laws and abortion regulations every eighteen months. In the epilogue to Unplanned, Johnson celebrates the closing of the Bryan clinic, which she attributes to the power of prayer and the work of the Coalition for Life - and in the film, no reason is given at all - but the more direct cause of the closure was Rick Perry signing a new bill that gutted the clinic’s funding even further and would have forced it to get certified as an ambulatory surgical center, a restriction basically meant to be so arduous as to result in a de facto closure. She marvels at the low security at the Coalition’s headquarters contrasted with the high security at Planned Parenthood, not stopping to think that only one of those establishments really tends to be the target of bomb threats.
But those aren’t the main messages of Unplanned. To recap: being prayerful, loving, and friendly is more effective than being loud and vile. Being compassionate and empathetic is how you win. The abortion debate has become too polarized, and we can save it by being radically honest and willing to listen instead of shouting over each other, waving around pictures of mangled fetuses, or looking for the worst in people. Would anyone like to guess where this is all heading?
CHAPTER FOUR - PREGNANCY SCIENCE THEATER 3000
The first thing I should say about the 2019 film adaptation of Unplanned is that Abby Johnson didn’t write the script and didn’t direct the film, so it may not be entirely fair to associate her with the film’s many, many flaws. But Johnson also did a lot of press for the film leading up to its release and continues to enthusiastically plug it - she’s at it again right now as the film arrives on major streaming services - so there’s no reason to believe that she is anything less than one hundred percent on board with the film and its departures from the source material. The movie actually comes From The Twisted Minds At Pure Flix, and co-writers/co-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who gave us God’s Not Dead, the infamous 2014 film where Kevin Sorbo plays an evil LIBERAL college professor who requires all students in his introductory philosophy class to sign a document saying that God is dead (a thing that definitely happens in college philosophy classes), and a student converts him by revealing that the professor is actually just psychologically scarred from the premature death of his mother.
In the film, Abby Johnson (left in the photo below) is played by Ashley Bratcher (right). While I would like to focus my critique of Johnson on the substance of her activism and not on any superficial judgments, I do have to say: come the fuck on with this casting choice.
It would be damn near impossible to capture everything going on with this film in a written piece, but let me try to summarize: if I were writing a screenplay that was meant to be an absurdist parody of anti-abortion propaganda, it wouldn't be as funny as this 100% earnest film, a mesmerizing mix of Arial-font credits, public domain music, thumbless attempts at dramatic irony, shoehorned straw man arguments, and roughly twice the amount of stage blood and gore that Quentin Tarantino used to shoot The Hateful Eight (this is the first Pure Flix production to earn an R rating).
"Wait," you might say, "blood and gore, isn't that exactly the thing Abby Johnson said wasn't persuasive in the anti-abortion movement? Wasn't that one of the major themes of her book?" Folks, she's really fucking changed her tune over the past decade. The depictions of abortion in the film - most notably Johnson's chemical abortion, in which rivers of blood and clumps of purple Jell-O spurt out of her crotch while she cries in the shower for five minutes, captioned with “[audio distorted, drips echoing]” - are so over-the-top that with different lighting and music, they could work as Tim and Eric sketches. It's difficult to even take the ultrasound-guided abortion seriously because the animation of the kicking fetus looks too much like that dancing baby screensaver immortalized in an episode of Ally McBeal.
What about another major theme of the book, the idea that Planned Parenthood workers enter the field out of a legitimate, if misguided, desire to help women? All of that is undercut by antagonist Cheryl, a Planned Parenthood girlboss so sadistic, so heartless, so opposed to the idea of any pregnancy being carried to term and preventing her from living in a Children of Men situation, that Abby's coworkers can't even throw Abby a baby shower at work until Cheryl leaves for the day. This raven-haired PROBABLY FEMINIST villain, at one point, urges Abby to terminate her own pregnancy so she can spend more time working at the clinic instead of raising a child. She urges all Planned Parenthood directors to give clients the hard sell on abortions, comparing it to the low-cost high-margin soft drink sales at fast food restaurants. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman, in the middle of laughing off the film, describes Cheryl’s character as “a corporate witch — the Cruella de Vil of abortion — who greets any questioning of her methods as heresy”.
It seems like between 2011 and 2019, Johnson shifted gears and fully embraced the brutal, gory politics of division that she had once denounced, although it’s possible that I’m jumping to conclusions, and it wouldn’t be fair of me to do that unless, say, there were a scene in the movie that explicitly stated that an evil Jew-Atheist coalition was in fact behind the plot to murder all babies. Anyways, let me just check this review of the film from The Hollywood Reporter:
“When Abby resigns and tearfully seeks emotional support from kind-hearted pro-life activists Shawn (Jared Lotz) and Marilisa (Emma Elle Roberts), Cheryl initiates legal action, threatening Abby that she's facing "one of the most powerful organizations in the planet," whose donors include "Soros, Gates and Buffett." Those boogie-man references are delivered very late in the movie, which is the nearest it comes to restraint.”
Let’s be clear: none of that is in Johnson’s book. Cheryl seems like a shitty boss in the book, but she’s not an actual demonic figure, and George Soros isn’t mentioned at all, likely because he wasn’t a widespread right-wing meme in 2011. It’s very much of a piece with Konzelman and Solomon’s work, and it seems pretty clear that Johnson was happy to let them run with this, even though it appears to directly contradict her original message. Hey, at least the production was impeccable, I think, let me just check another review from AV Club: “All speaking parts are for white people, with the exception of two black women who come to get abortions, one with her family praying and weeping for her outside the fence—a dog whistle for the folks who believe legalized abortion is just pursuing Margaret Sanger’s goal of using birth control as a way to euthanize African-Americans.”
Okay, well, seeing it written out like that is kind of horrifying. Another fun fact about the production is that The Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and One Direction’s “Story of My Life” are all songs where the labels denied licensing requests from Pure Flix; presumably the artists didn’t want to be associated with this film, although it’s also possible that The Fray thought the music cue would have been a little too on the nose. Overall, basically nobody liked this film, except for the already-converted. While Johnson’s book did make an honest effort to persuade, to say “I’ve been there and I’ve changed”, the film exists only as red meat for church groups renting out theaters. Catholic News Service published a glowing review of the film, worth reprinting in full:
“Hard-hitting, fact-based drama adapted from a memoir by Abby Johnson. During her rise to become one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the country, Johnson (Ashley Bratcher) gradually becomes uneasy about the organization's marketing of abortion, a process of conversion that reaches a dramatic climax when she is asked to assist a doctor performing the procedure and witnesses via sonogram what it really involves. Her new stance is welcomed by her pro-life husband (Brooks Ryan) and parents (Robin DeMarco and Robert Thomason) as well as by some of the activists (Jared Lotz and Emma Elle Roberts) she once considered adversaries. But it infuriates her ornery former superior in the organization (Robia Scott) who becomes the moving force in a lawsuit against her. Written and directed by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, the film is effective but unsparing in its effort to convey the full horror of slaughtering the unborn. So the parents of older teens will have to decide whether the informative value of the story outweighs its disturbing content. Not for the casual moviegoer of any age. Gruesome images of abortion and dismembered fetuses, much medical gore, a mild oath [I have no idea what this means], a few crass expressions, a vague sexual reference.”
Also worth reprinting in full is my running list of the moments in the film when I legitimately laughed out loud:
The access code for the clinic is 2229, which a nurse tells Abby she can remember because it spells “BABY”
Abby’s dad walks her down the aisle at her first wedding (to a husband who pressured her into getting an abortion), and refuses to smile.
At Abby’s second wedding to a good Christian man, which uses the same public domain music cue as the first wedding, they call back to the first wedding as Abby says “Dad, you’re not supposed to look happier than I do”. Also, Abby’s husband is so Christian-Mary-Sued in this film that there’s a scene where he intuits that Abby is pregnant before Abby is aware of anything.
The compliment from Abby “Cheryl, those shoes are amazing” and Cheryl’s emotionless “I know, thank you.”
Cheryl showing Abby a mangled fetus and saying “the first thing people do when seeing these? They cry. You don’t. That’s how I know you’re The One.”
Abby learns that she’s pregnant after taking a test in her office bathroom, and Cheryl enters with a dead-eyed “you know, I can take care of that for you if you like”
Abby asking Cheryl if her pregnancy will make clients uncomfortable, and Cheryl’s response that “if anything, it will encourage them to abort.”
A doctor rushing in to a procedure room to respond to an emergency and literally throwing Abby into a table of medical equipment to get her out of his way
A trucker wheeling multiple hazmat barrels (BARRELS! PLURAL!) of aborted fetuses out of the clinic, and then dragging it over to Shawn at the fence so he can pray over it
The construction worker, with an American flag sticker on his hard hat, about to take down the Planned Parenthood sign at the now-closed Bryan clinic saying “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life!”
So, as you can probably tell by the views she was broadcasting and promoting in 2019, Abby Johnson is also a big fan of Donald Trump. You can see it in the film's hard reactionary politics, embrace of Soros-fueled conspiracies, and weird dehumanization of people of color. Was Johnson always a fan of Trump? Well, that's where things get interesting. Because in 2017 Johnson flew to DC to participate in the Women's March.
CHAPTER FIVE - GRINDING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
Even though she attended the Women’s March, and was profiled in multiple outlets as one of the “pro-lifers who chose to march anyways”, Johnson had a weird way of talking around her feelings for Donald Trump, telling The Atlantic:
““I’m not going to protest Trump’s presidency. It’s done. It’s over...But I do think he needs women to hold him accountable.” She listed workplace inequality, the pay gap, and women’s lack of access to health care as issues she wants to see highlighted under the next administration. “I’m just planning to go and join the march,” she said. “I have no desire to protest or anything like that.”
So, she wouldn’t describe herself as ‘protesting’, although she said she had legitimate concerns about the presidency that she wanted to see addressed. Since the official line of the March organization was to support “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people,” several anti-abortion groups who had originally signed up to co-sponsor the March found themselves suddenly on the outs. One of those groups was Johnson’s And Then There Were None, so I understand that her relationship to the Women’s March was complicated. Overall, there were still plenty of reasons for her to attend, as BuzzFeed News reported:
“While the majority of the anti-abortion marchers who spoke to BuzzFeed News would not support a woman choosing abortion, their reasons for attending included, “representing pro-life feminism,” wanting to “hold Trump to his pro-life word,” being “concerned about the way [Trump] speaks about women,” and “general lady parts solidarity.””
Johnson’s experience at the actual March was also complicated, since she was involved in a kerfuffle when the anti-abortion Students For Life clashed with actual Marchers:
“Students For Life began the day by walking along with the other marchers. While some people looked askance at the identical “Abortion Betrays Women” signs they held, their interactions with the crowd were peaceful. It wasn’t until they stopped marching and stood by the the side of the march route, unfurling a large banner reading “We don’t need Planned Parenthood,” that interactions between them and the rest of the marchers began to get volatile….Three marchers barreled into the group from behind, knocking a woman pregnant with twins, Abby Johnson, into the people in front of her...Eventually official Women’s March organizers were called over to the group, holding hands in a line in front of them to protect them. “That part felt like a counter-protest, which was never our intention,” [said] Johnson.”
It’s very possible that Students For Life never intended to counter-protest. Possible, but unlikely, since they explicitly told The Atlantic, in the same piece that interviewed Johnson so there’s a really good chance she actually read it, that they were definitely there to counter-protest: “Some groups seem more interested in spinning up controversy than actually participating, though. Students for Life of America has invited hundreds of women to attend on Facebook, proclaiming that “we will not sit by as Planned Parenthood, our nation’s abortion Goliath and a sponsor of this march, betrays women into thinking abortion is their only choice.””
Now, after seeing all of that alongside the shit that Johnson likes to post in 2020, you might be a cynic and suspect that Johnson never had any concerns about Donald Turmp, but knew she'd get more media attention as "a pro-lifer who came to march". She once wrote about sealing the memory of her abortions in a box inside of her soul, and that "the box in my soul wasn’t sealed as well as I’d thought. It was releasing undetectable yet poisonous fumes that wafted through my soul in silence and contaminated my heart." If you were cynical and not inclined to believe Johnson, you might think that she had actually been using that box to contain her own racist and authoritarian views, while her presence at the Women’s March was nothing but a cheap stunt to goose her PR, and that the election of Trump finally let her open the box and let all of those fumes out.
But again, let's give her every benefit of the doubt. She was a woman concerned about healthcare access and Trump's general misogyny, and now she's leading his cheering squad on Twitter. What happened?
Well, this is where the anti-abortion movement leads, even for a woman with a bulletproof a resume as Johnson; years of Fox News appearances and alliances with Evangelical Protestants and watching Taylor Marshall's show, and you end up humorless, fascist, and extremely online. Of course Trump is her guy. She loved the anti-abortion grind when it was praying with the Coalition For Life, but the grind is different now, with a different coalition, one that's more open about being an authoritarian anti-science death cult.
The most damning critique of Johnson in 2020 is to simply observe her - a woman with two degrees in counseling who worked in a medical clinic alongside real-life doctors and nurses - weigh in on the COVID pandemic, actively discouraging people from wearing masks and pushing for a “herd immunity” strategy - which, conservatively, would require an infection rate seven times higher than our current nightmare, and result in one million dead Americans, most of which we could theoretically prevent if we took mitigation seriously - as late as mid-May. She even branched out from her normal anti-abortion beat at The Federalist to write some brief anti-mask thoughts, sharing an anecdote about a man she met while grocery shopping:
“Then he embraced me. We didn’t have masks. There was no Centers for Disease Control-recommended distance between us at all. All we had was our humanity. And that’s exactly what is being lost during this pandemic...yet we are fighting over masks, sitting in our privileged homes and pounding away on our phones, sending tweets and posting Facebook comments demeaning other people in the harshest of ways. Masks are the last thing a person is thinking about when he cannot make ends meet and is trying to figure out how much rice and beans he can afford with an almost empty bank account.”
Johnson laments the loss of our humanity and the financial security of so many, but doesn’t seem to realize that we’ve lost that because there’s a fucking virus going around right now that’s killing people, and we can’t even take the guidance of medical professionals seriously enough to slow the spread of that virus and get back to something resembling normality. Even if you give her every benefit of the doubt and assume that her life story is 100% authentic, that story still leads to Catholicism’s foremost “pro-life” voice, on a reactionary blog that once made a case for fucking teenagers in the name of raising a large family, urging us to embrace preventable mass death. I can think of no better story to define the anti-abortion movement in 2020.
EPILOGUE
Abby Johnson has every bullet in the chamber that she needs to be an effective fighter in the anti-abortion movement, and every day she makes the decision to point the gun directly at her own foot. She has the best possible life story that the movement could ask for, and she can’t end abortion because she’s too busy buying pallets of canned beans to own the libs.
Here’s the thing: if you’re a Catholic who wants abortion to end, Abby Johnson is the best you’ve got, and you have to admit what a tragedy that is. She has a huge platform and a story that gives her unmatched credibility. She wrote that the only hope for the anti-abortion movement lay in prayer and humility and a willingness to listen, but if you’re prayerful and humble and willing to listen, you sure as shit aren’t going to get interviews at Fox News or freelance gigs at The Federalist or a biopic produced by Pure Flix. When you sign up for the anti-abortion movement now, it turns out you are signing up to embrace Donald Trump, and you are signing up to drink in stupid conspiracy theories, and you are signing up to spout racist talking points and buy a MyPillow out of spite. The bishops do it every day, Randall Terry did it back in the eighties, and Abby Johnson is doing it now. All of this isn't solely the doing of Donald Trump, but he’s certainly part of the reason that there's no way to disentangle the anti-abortion movement from all of this now. If there was a way to steer the anti-abortion movement into something based on compassion and humility, Abby Johnson was going to be the one to do it, but instead the woman who once wrote "I had to admit that the pro-life movement had a lunatic fringe" is too busy plugging her movie where George Soros tries to abort an American flag.
There's one footnote to Johnson's story, which is that her journey from Planned Parenthood didn't actually end with the Bryan Planned Parenthood closing. In the epilogue of the Unplanned book, Abby celebrates the 2013 Texas law that would lead to more closures of abortion clinics across the state, but another one of those Texas clinics, Whole Woman’s Health, sued the state in response to that law, claiming - correctly - that the law was written purely to make it harder for women to obtain abortions in the state. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2016, and they ended up agreeing with Whole Woman’s Health. The case was decided by a single vote, and while I don’t know what tipped the decision, the Solicitor General of Texas certainly didn’t help his case when he tripped over his own dick during oral arguments. See, Texas claimed that the law was necessary to ensure medical and safety standards across clinics, but denied that it caused any undue burden on patients seeking abortions since they could simply travel out of state for abortions. The five justices in the majority pointed out, in the middle of oral arguments, that this undercut the whole “medically necessary” argument, and that the Solicitor General had committed, in legal terms, an “uh-oh”.
In many ways, the Whole Woman’s Health story and Abby Johnson’s story are the story of the anti-abortion movement in America: concerned only with the raw exercise of power, willfully ignoring the needs of women, and dumb enough to repeatedly self-sabotage. The author of Unplanned should have done a better job planning for all of that.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments. The current series covers anti-abortion activists in the Catholic church.
Sources used for this piece include:
Abby Johnson and Cindy Lambert, Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line (2011)
Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, dir. Unplanned (2019)
National Catholic Register - “What Abby Johnson Saw at Planned Parenthood” (2011)
Catholic News Agency - “Abby Johnson Reveals Details of Pro-Life Turnaround and Catholic Conversion” (2011)
The Hill - “Exposing the Planned Parenthood Business Model” (2011)
Catholic News Agency - “Abby Johnson Launching Ministry Focused on Abortion Workers” (2012)
Catholic News Agency - “Judge Prevents Planned Parenthood From Keeping Abby Johnson Quiet” (2009)
The Coming Home Network - “Abby Johnson, Former Planned Parenthood Employee” (2014)
The Coming Home Network - “Abby Johnson, Former Baptist and Episcopalian” (2019)
Salon - “The Conversion of a Pro-Choice Warrior” (2009)
Texas Monthly - “The Convert” (2010)
Texas Observer - “Conversion Story” (2010)
The Federalist - “Yes, I Really Did See an Ultrasound-Guided Abortion That Made Me Pro-Life” (2019)
Variety - "Film Review: Unplanned" (2019)
Hollywood Reporter - "Unplanned: Film Review" (2019)
Catholic News Service - "Unplanned Review" (2019)
AV Club - “Unplanned is an Abortion About Abortion” (2019)
Spin - "Cyndi Lauper, One Direction, The Fray Licensing Rights Denied to Anti-Abortion Film" (2019)
BuzzFeed News - “The Anti-Abortion Women Who Still Marched” (2017)
The Atlantic - “These Pro-Lifers Are Headed to the Women’s March on Washington” (2017)
The Federalist - “Our Coronavirus Response Is Making Us Lose Our Humanity” (2020)