I travelled to Texas to interview Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood Clinic director who founded And Then There Were None, a ministry to help abortion workers leave their jobs.
“Unplanned,” the recently released film adapted from Abby Johnson’s memoir of leaving Planned Parenthood and becoming a pro-life activist, is really just a prequel.
When Johnson quit her job in 2009, she could have lived off the notoriety of being a clinic manager who changed sides, telling her conversion story to pro-life audiences. Instead, she founded And Then There Were None (ATTWN) in 2011, a nonprofit that helps other abortion workers leave their jobs.
Johnson originally joined Planned Parenthood to help care for women and knows that clinics are full of workers just like her. At the time, she saved up stories of the unambiguous good she was doing (detecting uterine cancer, aiding women with postpartum depression), to defend her job to her pro-life family and husband.
Her view of abortion changed in the fall of 2009, when she was asked to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion just on the cusp of the second trimester. When the doctor positioned the thin tube called a cannula and turned on the vacuum, she saw the baby’s spine twist and crumple as it was sucked into the tube and out of sight.
Seeing the baby clearly as a baby made Johnson decide she had to leave her job. Remembering how she saw her co-workers made her pick her new one.