File: Abby Johnson Testimony for SB9 – Kentucky Duration: 0:08:57 Date: February 14, 2019 Speakers: Abby Johnson, Senator Matt Castlen.
Senator Castlen: This is Abby Johnson, and Abby, if you could introduce yourself for the record?
Abby: Sure, my name is Abby Johnson. I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years. I was an abortion clinic director. I listened to the testimony from the opposition of this bill and I want to sort of go through some of that interesting testimony that we heard and many non-factual points that were made in that testimony. One thing that I kept hearing was that ‘there’s no exceptions in this bill for any sort of rape or incest’, but let me be clear—but even if they were, the ACLU wouldn’t support it. Even if there were, Planned Parenthood wouldn’t support this bill. So, the fact that they’re even bringing that up is intellectually dishonest. Abortion can never on its face be safe, because in order for an abortion to be deemed successful an individual and unique human being with a beating heart must die. That can never be safe for that individual human life.
I want to talk specifically about what a first trimester abortion is and what it looks like from a person who ran a Planned Parenthood abortion facility and was there for eight years. First trimester abortions are by and large the most common abortion procedure we see in the United States. A transvaginal ultrasound is standard procedure inside of every National Abortion Federation clinic which includes every Planned Parenthood. That transvaginal ultrasound is done for primarily one reason: to determine how far along a woman is in her pregnancy so that we knew how much to charge her for the abortion. After the ultrasound is performed, the ultrasound machine is rolled away. The doctor comes in, who, by the way, has no conversation with the woman before the abortion. The fact that many people say, ‘abortion should be a decision made between a woman and her doctor’ is laughable. There is never a time when the abortion doctor goes in, sits down with a woman and goes over risks, alternatives, and benefits to the abortion. It does not happen. The doctor starts performing the abortion. He’s going to insert into the woman’s uterus—into the cervix—metal dilation rods. Graduated metal dilation rods. He’s going to dilate the cervix enough so that he can insert something called a suction cannula. That cannula looks like a straw. It is graduated; it gets bigger depending on how big the baby is in the womb so that the head will be able to fit through that suction cannula. He’s going to insert that suction probe inside of the woman’s uterus. Ultrasound guidance is not used. That is not the standard protocol inside of National Abortion Federation or Planned Parenthood clinics. He’s going to take that probe and he’s going to blindly poke around inside the woman’s uterus until he thinks he has enough blood and tissue in a glass jar. That glass jar is going to go into a lab called the ‘POC lab’. ‘POC’ in the medical community stands for ‘Products of Conception’. The Products of Conception is, of course, the baby, but you can’t say ‘baby’ inside of the abortion clinic, so we said P. O. C. or POC, or if the staff was feeling funny we would say that it stood for ‘parts of children. After all the parts were accounted for, the POC lab technician would dump everything out into a glass baking dish that sat on top of an X-ray light box and she would reassemble the parts of the baby. Please understand me, I am talking about first trimester abortion. Yes, there are parts. Yes, they must be reassembled. The baby is fully-formed; every internal organ is formed by 12 weeks gestation. So, yes, there are parts, even earlier than 12 weeks. Once all the parts are reassembled, that POC tech will take everything, dump it into a red biohazard Ziploc sort of bag, and those bags will go into a freezer in the POC lab that the staff jokingly called ‘the nursery’. And once a week, a company, a biohazard medical waste company like Stericycle, will come into the facility and they will pick up all the red bags of babies where they are taken to their facility to be incinerated. That’s if the abortion facility decides they don’t want to just put them into their industrial-sized garbage disposal and grind them up and put them into the water waste treatment facilities. That is first trimester abortion.
We have already heard the testimonies from the opposition calling women who are pregnant ‘pregnant persons’, because now we live in a time where people say, “it is not just women who get pregnant.” Now, apparently, men can get pregnant. And that shows you just how detached from science the pro-choice side is on this issue. Fact: only women get pregnant. You’ve got to have lady parts to have a baby. That’s science. Science also tells us that from the moment of conception, unique and individual and unrepeatable DNA is formed. That DNA is human. Never in the history of the world has a woman ever delivered a cat or a dog, or any other species other than human. That’s science. Our history tells us, time and time again, that it is unjust to take the life of an innocent human being. It was unjust to dehumanize an entire segment of people when we were working to abolish slavery. It was unjust to dehumanize an entire group of Jewish people in the Holocaust. But those two examples that I just gave you only exist because our society was willing to turn a blind eye, look a human person in the face and say, “That is not a human being.” That is not scientific. There was a time when it was sort of innocent and it was our ignorance and we said, “Oh, it’s just a blob of tissue; it’s just a mass of cells.” But anybody with a brain and anybody with any sort of understanding of science, and anyone with any sort of intellectual honesty can say, “It’s not a clump of cells.” We know better than that. Ultrasound technology has been around since the early ‘80s. We know what it is. We know inside of the womb it is a human being with a beating heart. And it was ‘innocent’ back then because we really believed that, and so we could sort of let that go. Well, people didn’t know any better. Now, we are living in such depravity that there are people, like the people that oppose this bill that are willing to say, “I know it’s a human being; I know it has a heartbeat; I know there is life there; and I know it is innocent; and I am willing to kill it.” We have sunk to a new low in our society. And it is time for us to rectify what we have done. So, if you are a person in here who has had an abortion, I encourage you to seek healing, because abortion is not normal. Taking the life of an innocent human being that is your own flesh and blood and your own DNA—it’s not normal, and there are healing resources available. And to the people in here who work in the abortion industry, I encourage you to seek healing from a ministry called ‘And Then There Were None’. We can get you out of the industry and we can get you into a line of work that you can actually be proud of. And to the ACLU, I can say affirmatively we look forward to your lawsuit.
Senator Castlen: Mr. Chairman, I have one more individual from my community that’s going to come forward…
