The Walls Are Talking

Former Abortion Clinic Workers Tell Their Stories

By Abby Johnson, With Kristin Detrow

Ignatius Press, 2016

155 pages, $17.95

To order: ignatius.com

 

 

Few may relish reading more than 15 at-times graphic accounts by former abortion business workers detailing the tragic realities of their work.

 

 

But like accounts of war, famine, genocide and other atrocities, survivor accounts — in this case, stories by workers who broke free of the bonds of the abortion industry — are necessary to document the past in order to educate the present and the future.

In The Walls Are Talking: Former Abortion Clinic Workers Tell Their Stories, Abby Johnson, the Planned Parenthood administrator-turned-pro-life advocate, and collaborator Kristin Detrow have produced a powerful volume of accounts from those who similarly earned their livelihood in the abortion field. Like Johnson, these former employees are powerful witnesses of the horrors of abortion, and their testimonies warrant reading.

The book’s title is a play on a ’90s-era TV movie that presented abortion as a necessary societal remedy for the “problem” of an unwanted child. The authors pull no punches in detailing their at-times grizzly personal involvement in providing abortions, and many touch on their own abortion experiences, as well.

One of the most wrenching chapters tells the tale of a worker who observes a late-term abortion: It was a boy. I remember being taken aback by how beautiful he was. The doctor snatched him, snipped the cord, wrapped him in blue paper, and tossed him into a red biohazard bag like so much garbage, then handed it off to a worker. “I’ve taken care of everything for you,” he hissed to the lifeless young woman lying on the table. “Now everything can go back to normal for you.”

Another account is just as wrenching: Abortion clinic workers have experienced evil in a very tangible way. We have seen it in the glass dishes that hold the parts of the aborted babies. We have touched evil as we reassembled those parts. ... That evil becomes a part of you. It’s what numbs you to the brutality. It’s what keeps you there every day, until the evil all around you is just all in a day’s work.

Thankfully, this author and others like her have escaped such evils and have become apostles for life. While their stories are difficult to read, how much more painful were they to experience and write?

The book includes important messages to the pro-life community, particularly the need for continued perseverance in prayer and support when it comes to conversions of those still working in the industry and a spirit of mercy and compassion rather than condemnation. Readers interested in better understanding the psyche of those in the abortion industry will find tremendous value in The Walls Are Talking. Its graphic accounts may be too much for some, but these are stories that must be told.

Nick Manetto writes from

Herndon, Virginia.