Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line (11 page)

Chapter Eleven

The Boardroom

In May, there was even more bad news.

We entered the boardroom for our management meeting of clinic directors only to learn that our Title XX money had run out. Title XX is a section of the United States Code that provides funds for social services. Planned Parenthood was one of many recipients, since we provided birth control and family planning. Now that money was gone.
9

Our affiliate meeting that month was a bloodbath. I was told we were no longer going to offer birth control pills at a discounted rate to lower-income women. I asked why, though I feared I already knew the answer. The spreadsheets. The big red number.

“What?” I said. “So because we’re in debt, we suddenly don’t care if lower-income women get pregnant with babies they can’t afford to have or raise? We are just going to cut off these women on our birth control plan overnight?” And the conversation went downhill from there. Many people were angry and expressed their frustration that administrators at headquarters seemed to be more concerned about the bottom line than our clients.

Sure, I know that was unfair—you can’t spend money you don’t have. But financial woes or not, we saw ourselves as those who cared about the plight of women in crisis. At least, that’s how some of us saw ourselves.

“But we are nonprofit!” I declared in a passionate plea.

“Abby,” I was told pointedly, “nonprofit is a tax status, not a business status.” I was ordered to get my priorities straight—which meant I had to get my revenue up. As the meeting continued, I sat there stunned.

Get my revenue up? Since when has generating revenue been our goal? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Each year, each clinic has an individual budget meeting. With a feeling of dread I drove to Houston to meet with Cheryl and Barbara to receive the budget for my clinic. The assigned budget always includes a line for client goals under abortion services and a line for client goals under family planning.

When I looked at the numbers, I did a double take. I noticed that the client goals related to family planning hadn’t changed much, but the client goals under abortion services had increased significantly. My mind started racing.
Something’s got to be wrong here. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Our goal at Planned Parenthood is to decrease the number of abortions by decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies. That means family planning services—birth control. That is our stated goal. So why am I being asked, according to this budget, to increase my abortion revenue and thus my abortion client count?

And so I asked the question out loud.

I came away from that meeting with the clear and distinct understanding that I was to get my priorities straight, that abortion was where my priorities needed to be because that was where the revenue was. This meant that my job as the clinic director was to find a way to increase the number of abortions at my clinic.
10

To say the least, I was appalled.

“Abortion will
never
be my priority!” I insisted. “Never.”

The discussion continued for some time. Let’s just say it was pretty bumpy.

What had happened to my world? Following the instructions of my employer, rather than limit all abortions to every other Saturday, we now expanded medication abortions to every day of the week. If someone called for an abortion, they could have it the next day if they wanted to use RU-486 instead of surgical abortion. How easy and convenient that sounded to many clients, and sure enough, our abortion numbers started going up.

But this wasn’t what I’d signed up for.

Even so, I wasn’t ready to walk away from the career I’d been building. I loved serving women. I enjoyed my staff. Megan and Taylor had become dear friends by now, and the culture of compassion we all shared in the work we did—the good work of helping women—was a bond I treasured. I didn’t want to just walk away. I wanted to fight for the right to run my clinic according to what I’d always been told and always believed were our true purposes. Surely I could work to persuade my affiliate to honor its true mission, couldn’t I? I convinced myself that was my goal, and so I stayed.

As if May had not been bad enough, the last day of the month dealt a terrible blow to all of us at the clinic. Doug, Grace, and I were having lunch at a restaurant after church when my cell phone rang. It was Cheryl, with horrible news. Dr. George Tiller, the abortionist from Wichita, had been gunned down by an antiabortion extremist while attending his church that morning.

I was speechless when she told me. I barely managed to get the words out to tell Doug. I couldn’t eat anymore. Doug was terrified for my safety. I went out to the car with Grace, he boxed up our food, and then we immediately went home. A few minutes later, we saw it as breaking news on CNN. I remember feeling so exposed, like everyone suddenly knew I worked in the abortion industry . . . and maybe I was next. That first day was terrifying. Doug wouldn’t let me leave the house. He was scared. My extended family was scared. I was trying to downplay it . . . but unsuccessfully. I called all of my employees to let them know and to touch base with them and see how they were doing.

But the next morning my shock gave way to anger. When I went into work on Monday, I felt like I was going into battle—battle against the pro-lifers for my staff. I didn’t really feel that it was about me; it was about them and our clients. As I drove past a couple of people praying at the fence, I thought,
How dare they show up today
. I considered it disrespectful of them to be there on a day when all of us on staff were scared and grieving.

I had already received death threats . . . and now this. For weeks, every day when I went to work I would replay in my mind the escape strategy for my employees if someone were to come in wielding a gun or a bomb. I figured they would want me, the director. So every day as I drove in, I’d think through which employees were working that day, where their offices were, how I could get their attention to get them out of the building,
etc.
My goal would be to get them out and to leave me in. It was a stressful thought, but one that I constantly thought of. And it was a responsibility I was willing to accept. I figured that when I took on the job as director, my ultimate responsibility was to keep my staff safe . . . at any cost, even if it was my life. Dr. Tiller’s murder had given our work and our bond a new and deeper meaning. I truly felt like an officer in wartime who needed to protect my troops.

And my troops were scared. In the wake of the previous death threats I had assured them that they had been threats, nothing more. But now someone we knew and admired had been gunned down. The Web sites went wild with chatter, and the responses of pro-lifers to the murder just fueled our anger, no matter how they responded. We found it unconscionable that some celebrated his murder as a victory for the pro-life cause. How could a murder benefit a cause that stood for life? But it also made us angry that so many pro-life groups were coming out with statements condemning the murderer’s actions. It seemed to be false sympathy for the victim. The relationships at the fence cooled as well. Everyone was guarded and tense.

Dr. Tiller’s death so solidified our cause, so rallied our sense of being the despised yet brave advocates for women’s health and well-being, that my concerns about budgets and abortion goals faded to the background. I was no victim, and Planned Parenthood was no ill-willed organization, I told myself. I was a warrior in a noble battle. I do realize how melodramatic that sounds, but such was the impact of the murder of one of the pioneers in our realm of women’s reproductive rights.

It was in August 2009, only about a month before my experience with the fateful ultrasound-guided abortion, that the receptionist at the clinic referred a call to me. “I think you’ll want to take this one.”

“Do you have a back parking area at the clinic?” the caller asked. “One where I can’t be seen from the road?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “All of our parking is in the front. Is there a problem?” It hadn’t yet been three full months since Dr. Tiller’s death, and security was still a major concern to us.

The young woman hesitated. “No, it’s not that big of a deal,” she said. “It’s just that my family is outside the clinic praying.” Well, yes, that could be a problem. “They know I’m having an abortion today,” she added. “They’re trying to talk me out of it.”

“How about this,” I suggested. “You park as close to the building as you can. We’ll come out and escort you in. But you should understand that you will be visible from the fence.”

Cheryl was at the clinic that day, since she always came in on the days we provided surgical abortions. She and I watched for the woman from the window. And naturally, the client did
not
park close to the building—she parked right next to the fence. I could see her family group outside the fence—there were several of them. One woman, who seemed particularly upset, seemed the right age to be her mother.

Usually I was busy with administrative work inside and let our volunteers go out to escort the women in. But this time I told Cheryl, “I’m going out there.”

Cheryl suggested I bring her in the back entrance. She’d bring the paperwork there so the client wouldn’t have to go through the waiting room at all. I thought that was a good idea, figuring the young woman would be a basket case by then.

As I approached the girl’s car, she got out on one side and the friend who had accompanied her got out on the other. Her mom was standing just outside the fence calling to her, obviously in real emotional pain. The rest of the family stood in a semicircle behind the mom. I stepped up beside the girl and put my hand on her back. “I’ll bring you around to the back entrance. It’ll be quicker that way.”

The girl didn’t answer. The mother’s voice, through her weeping, was filled with desperation. “You don’t have to do this,” she called, her voice anguished. “We want to help you. We can support you. You can live at home. We’ll give you money—whatever it takes! Don’t do this.” Her mother’s pleas were so heartbreaking that my heart was pounding with the tension.

And as I stood waiting, the back door of the car opened and a little girl got out—maybe two years old. It was the daughter of the girl who’d come in to have the abortion! And as she stepped up beside her mother, she saw her grandmother on the other side of the fence. “Hey, Mamá!” she called innocently.

The grandmother wept even harder. Hanging on to the fence now as if to support herself, she cried out, “The baby you’re carrying will be just as beautiful as the daughter you already have! Just think if you had decided to abort her—think of all the joy she has brought into our lives. Imagine a world without her! Please—you don’t have to do this!”

It was the most intense moment I’ve ever witnessed between a mother and daughter. Clearly, here was a woman who felt that her child was about to make one of the biggest decisions of her life—and was making the
wrong
decision. One this mother clearly believed her daughter would regret the rest of her life.

I was so conscious at that moment of the meaning of the fence, both physical and symbolic. It was a physical barrier between that young woman and the mother who so clearly wanted to scale the fence and take her daughter into her arms. And it was a symbolic barrier, too—symbolic of the divide between the mother who valued the life of this unborn child so much she pled for it, begged for it, wept for it; and the daughter who didn’t see what the big deal was.

And she didn’t. I escorted her inside. “Are you all right? Do you need to talk about this first? Are you sure this is what you want to do? Because it sounds like you’d have a lot of support from your family if you were to keep the baby.”

I am not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw next. She shrugged it off. “Oh, that’s just my mom,” she said. “That’s how she is. I’m fine.”

Fine
? How could she be
fine
? If that had been my mother I’d have been a wreck! As a matter of fact, I
was
a wreck. I was deeply shaken by her mother’s pleas. They had pierced my armor. I stepped back, somewhat stunned. I turned and went back to my office, sat at my desk, and began to weep. I couldn’t have told you, at the time, why I was weeping. I’d have said maybe it was because of the emotional intensity of it all. Or maybe because of the rift between mother and daughter. But from some deep well within me, the tears came.

Maybe, just maybe, that secret box hidden deep within me, nailed shut so that my two abortions couldn’t speak to me, was crying out that my babies hadn’t had anyone pleading for their lives when I stepped into a clinic to abort them. Of course, I’d never told my mom and dad I was pregnant. But if I had and they had met me at the abortion clinic to offer to help me through my crisis pregnancies, would I have gone through with those abortions?

I checked the window occasionally to see what the family would do. They continued to stand and pray for an hour, then another hour. Then finally they left.

The young woman had her abortion, spent her time recovering, and three or four hours after she arrived, she took her daughter and her friend and left. I never saw her again. But I never forgot her mother’s anguished pleading for the life of her grandchild through the fence.

The scales were beginning to fall from my eyes. This family’s attempt to save the life of the baby they were ready to love and care for woke me from the haze of Dr. Tiller’s murder and brought to the surface my discovery of Planned Parenthood’s revenue agenda. I’d always believed everything Planned Parenthood told me—that our purpose was to fight for and provide for the reproductive and health rights of women, that the organization had been born out of a desire to help women in crisis. But when the bottom dropped out, financially speaking, it suddenly seemed to me that the organization was getting off track.