The helpless mother

Add me to the list of pro-life bloggers that has read Unplanned by former Planned Parenthood director, Abby Johnson, and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're pro-choice or on the fence this book is an eye-opener and you may relate to the authors journey. If you're pro-life, you may finally understand that the other side aren't always the enemy and sometimes they mean well and have good intentions and are also trying to make the world a better place. But their solutions are the wrong ones so we must pray for them. Many were praying for Abby Johnson and now she's a force to be reckon with against Planned Parenthood. She is very fair to both sides of the issue. As someone who used to be pro-choice I definitely understood where she was coming from and I too had the same disgust for the more fringe pro-lifers that used threats, graphic signs and hate to get their message across. These people actually only furthered her interest in helping the women into the abortion clinic when she was still unsure of how she felt about abortion. The prayerful loving witness of the Coalition for Life finally helped to disarm her distrust of the pro-life movement and were the ones she could finally turn to after witnessing the horror of an ultrasound guided abortion of a 13 week old baby. I had to skip through the description of this abortion. I just couldn't take it. It's just so heartbreaking. But it was the final straw for Abby Johnson and God was able to make a greater good come out of such a horrific event.

Leila at Catholic Bubble has a very good post of an excerpt from the book here that is a very powerful scene in the book. For me a scene that has haunted me is toward the end of Abby's career at Planned Parenthood, she assisted a young woman who called beforehand to say her mother and family were outside the clinic praying and she needed to sneak in. Abby describes the gut wrenching scene of this young woman's mother crying out begging for her not to abort her grandchild. The young woman had a 2 year old child already and the mother pleaded with her saying she'd help her and this child would be just as beautiful and precious as the 2 year old. The young woman was unmoved and basically blew off her mother's plea. Abby tried to convince the young woman also that maybe she should listen to her mom but nothing could sway her.
I had been contemplating what I would say to my daughters if they found themselves pregnant or even before hand. I thought about how I would tell them that I would help them take care of the baby and to not hesitate to tell me if they were pregnant so I could help them and reassure them that they must have the baby and if they didn't want to keep the baby they could give it up for adoption. So, upon reading this I was deeply saddened to think that no matter how much I beg them they could just ignore me and blow me off. I pray they won't find themselves in that situation and if they do, they'll tell me and they'll choose life. Besides losing her grandchild, the poor mother was also probably desperately trying to save the damage to her daughter's spiritual wellbeing. She was trying to stop her from making a mistake that could later regret and that can't be undone. How unbelievably helpless she must have felt watching her daughter choose destroy life and possibly herself. It just really stuck with me.

So, that's my thoughts on Unplanned. It's a page turner and it does leave one with a sense of hope in spite of the gruesome heartbreaking realities of abortion. It's a story of redemption and how no matter how bad we may sin and the bad choices we may make, God can lavish the repentant and uses them for a much greater cause. Abby Johnson is a modern day St. Paul of the pro-life movement.