“For the briefest moment it looked as if the baby were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed,” Johnson writes. “And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then everything was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty.”

When Abby Johnson quit her Planned Parenthood career, she didn’t expect to receive more criticism from people in the pro-life camp than from those who are pro-choice.

After watching an ultrasound abortion that left her deeply agitated, Johnson took an unexpected turn when she left her job as director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, in October 2009. She immediately joined forces with Coalition for Life, whose members she had watch protest the clinic during the eight years she worked and volunteered there.

But crossing to the other side of the abortion divide was disappointing in some ways Johnson did not expect. The pro-life community does not focus on community, she says, at least not like the pro-choice community. There, everyone is united behind the common goal of keeping abortion legal, she says.
From Johnson’s perspective, pro-life activists and policy groups spend too much time bickering over details like whether to protest using graphic signs depicting photos of aborted babies. She says she has been ridiculed for her opposition to engaging in any type of illegal activity or using violence.

The infighting has been her biggest surprise since joining the pro-life movement, she says.
“There are all these different facets of the movement [that] just argue constantly and that has been really disheartening for me,” Johnson says. “People ask me if I’ve been hit hard by pro-choicers, and I say no, I’ve been hit hard by pro-lifers.”

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