I was driving to the East Coast this week for business when I caught part (alas, not all; I would have loved to hear the whole thing) of a show where Abby Johnson, pro-life activist and former Planned Parenthood employee, was a guest on an upstate New York NPR radio station.
The show's host, whose name I didn't catch, reminded would-be callers to keep things respectful, and so the one call I heard was from a guy who was quite civil but seemed very concerned that Abby Johnson might be willing to relegate poorer women seeking abortions in an era after Roe v. Wade were overturned (since richer women could more easily travel to other abortion-friendly countries) to resorting to the much defamed back alley abortions.
Johnson pointed out that the statistics on back alley abortions before 1973 were grossly inflated, as had been admitted by the former abortionist (who also had had a change of heart) who inflated the statistics. She then gave the example of a woman--her name was given, but I don't remember it and the Google results are sketchy, so if you know please post it in the comments--who went in for an abortion to a clinic, and afterwards continued to hemorrhage for four hours while the clinic didn't call for an ambulance, and the woman died from blood loss waiting at the clinic. Following that up with the example of Kermit Gosnell, Johnson pointed out that illegal back-alley clinics don't get much worse than what he was doing.
The show's host then said that she thought she might have to go into the other room to help her sound engineer pick his jaw up off the floor.
It made me wonder: why? Did he not know this kind of thing went on? Did he just not follow the abortion issue very closely, or did he only pay attention to information sources that believe that women dying of complications from abortion distracts from the "true and consistent compassion" message?
I pray it's the latter. But either way, there's a lot of ignorance to be overcome.
The show's host, whose name I didn't catch, reminded would-be callers to keep things respectful, and so the one call I heard was from a guy who was quite civil but seemed very concerned that Abby Johnson might be willing to relegate poorer women seeking abortions in an era after Roe v. Wade were overturned (since richer women could more easily travel to other abortion-friendly countries) to resorting to the much defamed back alley abortions.
Johnson pointed out that the statistics on back alley abortions before 1973 were grossly inflated, as had been admitted by the former abortionist (who also had had a change of heart) who inflated the statistics. She then gave the example of a woman--her name was given, but I don't remember it and the Google results are sketchy, so if you know please post it in the comments--who went in for an abortion to a clinic, and afterwards continued to hemorrhage for four hours while the clinic didn't call for an ambulance, and the woman died from blood loss waiting at the clinic. Following that up with the example of Kermit Gosnell, Johnson pointed out that illegal back-alley clinics don't get much worse than what he was doing.
The show's host then said that she thought she might have to go into the other room to help her sound engineer pick his jaw up off the floor.
It made me wonder: why? Did he not know this kind of thing went on? Did he just not follow the abortion issue very closely, or did he only pay attention to information sources that believe that women dying of complications from abortion distracts from the "true and consistent compassion" message?
I pray it's the latter. But either way, there's a lot of ignorance to be overcome.
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