Planned Parenthood has been a part of Abby Johnson's life for the past eight years; that is until last month, when Abby resigned. Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.
"I just thought I can't do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that's it," said Jonhson.
She handed in her resignation October 6. Johnson worked as the Bryan Planned Parenthood Director for two years.
According to Johnson, the non-profit was struggling under the weight of a tough economy, and changing it's business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.
"It seemed like maybe that's not what a lot of people were believing any more because that's not where the money was. The money wasn't in family planning, the money wasn't in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that," said Johnson.
Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.
"I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don't have this guilt, I don't have this burden on me anymore that's how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion."
The strangest thing. Julie and I just finished watching the great German film "The Lives of Others," about how the surveillance state in East Germany dehumanized people. Sophisticated domestic spying technology in the hands of a police state turned people into monsters and their prey, and corrupted every human relationship. I saw the film when it came out, and was knocked out by it, and wanted to re-screen it to prepare for a column I'm going to write about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Checking the NYT website before turning in, I see they've already posted David Brooks' column for tomorrow. It's based on this article in New York magazine discussing how New Yorkers today are using cellphone technology to organize their sex lives, and to set up encounters on the fly. People who do this will sometimes be on their way to one sex date when another offer comes in over the text transom, and they change plans. Just like that. Brooks writes:
Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
In the Stasi state, you could not trust anybody intimately. But those people had an excuse: the government imposed this monstrosity on them. In our case, we're doing it to ourselves. We destroy our own humanity and call it freedom.
UPDATE: I can't sleep for thinking about this. And I am thinking about how, in the film, a turning point for Wiesler, the Stasi agent, is hearing a sonata played by a character mourning the death of another character (see that scene here, if you don't mind spoilers). He has seen the power of love and mercy bring hope and dignity to a relationship soiled by betrayal, and now, artistic beauty reveals to him his own capacity for humanity. And I'm also thinking about these passages from the foreword to "Witness," in which Whittaker Chambers tells his children, in the form of a letter, why he turned from the death-dealing abstractions of Communism. Excerpts:
How did you break with Communism? My answer is: Slowly, reluctantly, in agony. Yet my break began long before I heard those screams. Perhaps it does for everyone. I do not know how far back it began. Avalanches gather force and crash, unheard, in men as in the mountains. But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the Hoor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
For more than a year the Stansels had been relying on Dr. George Grunert, one of the busiest fertility doctors in Houston, to produce his industry's coveted product -- a healthy baby. He was using a common procedure called intrauterine insemination, which involved injecting sperm into Mrs. Stansel's uterus after hormone shots.
But something had gone wrong. In April, an ultrasound revealed that Mrs. Stansel was carrying not one but six babies, and Dr. Grunert was recommending a procedure known as selective reduction, in which some of the fetuses would be eliminated.
The Stansels rejected Dr. Grunert's advice and, since then, their vision of a family has collapsed into excruciating loss: the deaths of four children after their premature births on Aug. 4, including one who died late Sunday night. The two other infants remain in neonatal intensive care, their futures uncertain.
"I feel like we bonded with all of them, the short time they were here," Mr. Stansel said. "We were able to hold them before they passed away."
I don't wish to add to the pain this family is suffering, but this entire business strikes me as deeply wrong. I mean, God bless the Stansels for not exterminating selectively reducing the children they chose to conceive, knowing the risks, but still, this is a catastrophe -- a personal catastrophe for them, but overall, a moral catastrophe.
The key to this catastrophe is captured in a word in the passage above: "product." Babies as products. As consumers, we believe we have the right to fulfill our desires, and technology is there to extend the power of choice, which is to say, of human will. But look how it turned out for them. I know I'll get nowhere with this; even many Christians have accepted IVF and fertility treatments. But how can you look at what happened to the Stansels, knowing the only way they could have averted this tragedy was by picking off a suitable number of their unborn children via an abortionist's needle?
To me, IVF is not part of the culture of life. It is part of the culture of death, insofar as it teaches us to consider babies, and therefore human life, as products.
We were recently visted by a British barrister working on a death row case here [in Texas] involving a British citizen. He admitted that the U.S. is seen by many in the world as behind the times on modern ideals of justice, mostly because of the death penalty, but not entirely. Whereas the EU can pressure developing countries to embrace higher standards -- like not executing the mentally ill and not electing judges -- they really can't do that to the U.S. All they can do is appeal to our better judgment.
But today's decision is appalling, even to me, someone who opposes the death penalty. A man responsible for the deaths of 270 people should serve his entire sentence. Ghadaffi has been fighting for his release for years, long before he was diagnosed with cancer.
If Scottish officials have no stomach for harsh sentences, then they have no credibility in their criticism of American justice. We don't let monsters out of their cage when they begin their natural decline toward death. We treat them humanely and with dignity -- and if it's their time to go, we let them die where their own actions put them: in prison.
We've just finished our afternoon leader conference at the Telegraph, in which there was passionate discussion about the deaths of the conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
Several of us found ourselves troubled by our reactions on hearing the news this morning, or rather our lack of reaction: "Heard of him ... Dignitas? ... Another one gone? ... Oh well ..." The fact is that there has been such a procession of the troubled and ill to Zurich in the past couple of years that the news of another two souls dispatched with the help of the Dignitas staff is, in itself, unremarkable.
Why should this be so? It must have something to do with the benign name Dignitas, its grim appropriation of the word "clinic", and the fact that its staff are virtually anonymous (I've had to look up Dignitas to remember that its founder was a lawyer called Ludwig Minelli). The process is unsensational, banal. For better or worse, we are getting used to the idea that we can be terminated at a time of our choosing.
Preston goes on to mention how people used to react to Dr. Jack Kevorkian's work, and contrast that with the lack of reaction today to news of assisted suicide. I think he has a good point: what was once almost unthinkable and horrific is becoming, as Preston says, banal, the sort of thing that barely elicits any reaction at all.
And if you are not a believer, if you see man as nothing more than an accumulation of carbon who is every moment gathering pain as he heads inexorably toward oblivion, then the lack of outcry at the news of someone's act of euthanasia probably pleases you. I can understand that--but what I can't understand are those who wish to reconcile euthanasia with faith, particularly Christian faith. So far, Christians who openly support physician assisted suicide or other forms of euthanasia remain in the minority, but there are some who advance the argument that euthanasia is compatible with Christianity--and there are others who have adopted a "personally opposed, but..." line of argument which promises to do as much to prevent euthanasia as that argument did to reduce abortion.
Creating a culture in which physician assisted suicide is seen as an acceptable way out for anyone who chooses to avail himself of this "exit strategy" is bound to have an impact. We can look at England to see what a culture looks like when it has reached the point where the reaction to the news of a prominent person's choice of euthanasia is the equivalent of a shrug. Here in America, those who oppose euthanasia on moral grounds may still have time to be heard on the subject, though thoughtful arguments against self-destruction are often dismissed out of hand because they draw their inspiration from a notion of man and his inherent dignity which has completely gone out of fashion.
A prominent English orchestral conductor decides he's tired of life, flies with his terminally ill wife to a Swiss clinic, accompanied by their adult children (!), then, along with the missus, drinks a cup of suicide sauce. Given the fact...
Recently I had dinner with a friend who teaches in a private (secular) high school. He mentioned at one point how much he worried about his students, who were heavily into watching pornography. Notice the placement of the comma in...
In the most recent Eminem thread, Nick the Greek said he doesn't want to live in a society in which artists are compelled to create only art that's safe for children if they are to be thought of as morally...
Just read the long Eminem comments thread. A few remarks: 1. It seems clear now that the report that the Arizona killer quoted Eminem lyrics as he killed members of his family was not true. The lyrics are not from...
Man in Arizona stabs his family to death, singing a line from the Cole Porter of our time as he carried out his homicidal act. Excerpt: Miller told detectives he was possessed and he visualized his wife, Adreana Miller, as...
A man in his late 80s has shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum: WASHINGTON (AP) -- An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial...
An interesting article in Time covers Budwiser's new Internet-only ad, which features a man buying some Bud light--and a porn magazine. The shopping experience unravels into cringing humility followed by national attention as the protagonist of the ad first meets...
When news of George Tiller's murder made its way across the blogs yesterday, some conservatives asked this question: if a member of the Islamic faith shot and killed somebody in an isolated incident (e.g., not part of a terrorist act...
Like Amy, I despised the "Body Worlds" exhibit, considering it to be defiling the human body for entertainment purposes (despite its scientific pretensions). Guenther von Hagens, its originator, has now tipped his hand, showing what a sick SOB he's always...
My pal David Rieff writes: I haven't read the comments on your post about the 'religious v. secular people's attitudes toward torture' poll, but selfishly I would hope it would provoke a debate on what I believe at least to...
Culture of death alert: Apple has removed a downloadable iPod/iPhone game from its online iTunes App Store where the point is to shake a crying baby to death. The $1.19 game - one of thousands of so-called "apps" that Apple...
The Holocaust was the most important event of the 20th century, and the most important cultural event in the West since the Enlightenment -- and in fact, bookended the Enlightenment. Why? Because it proved conclusively that there is no such...
Uh-oh.: During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers "on behalf of the American people," after asking...
Sen. Charles Grassley seems to think so: "I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Grassley said. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd...
William Saletan shows where this embryonic stem-cell research line of thinking is headed. Here's a quote he pulls from a Daily Mail article: Professor Stuart Campbell, who has argued for the abortion time limit to be lowered, had no ethical...
Charles Krauthammer supports embryonic stem-cell research, within certain limits. But in a very powerful column today, he blasts Obama's new rules as "morally unserious in the extreme." Excerpts: I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred...
What do you think of the Suleman mess in California? When I first heard that Nadya Suleman had had eight babies, I was thrilled. When it came out that not only did she already have six kids at home, but...
A long-expected Vatican document discussing bioethics has been released: The Vatican issued the most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the church's...
A single judge in Montana has declared that terminally-ill patients in that state have the right to obtain medicines with which to kill themselves, essentially declaring that Montana residents have a right to physician assisted suicide; the man who brought...
If you're going to go down, better to do it like Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg did: fighting the culture of death. Now that's what you call nobility....
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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