Abby Johnson is one of those anti-abortion advocates. She has a different story, though: she was employed by Planned Parenthood for several years, and claims to have had an epiphany while participating in an abortion (a claim that doesn’t actually hold up), and become a forced-birth activist instead. She’s gone so far over to the Dark Side that she endorses Santorum for President, which means she’s a credulous dingleberry for god now.
But there’s one virtue to her: she’s such an awful liar for her cause that she inspires outrage in reasonable people who hear her, and they scurry out and do the research that shows she is making stuff up whenever she talks about abortion. In case you ever have to deal with Ms Johnson, she recently spoke at Colorado State University and motivated a couple of bloggers to do a very thorough takedown. Read why Abby Johnson is a liar about Planned Parenthood, and why Abby Johnson is a liar about biology. These are useful, concise resources in any argument about abortion.
My favorite one was the woman who claimed she remembers escaping from her own attempted abortion as a fetus and years later confronting the doctor who tried to drag her out of her mother’s uterus.
Or something. It’s so implausible, it’s a wonder even the female slavers listen to it.
I’ts almost as implausible as Rick Santorum’s wife living for a while with an abortionist MD who in fact, delivered her as an infant. Which, as it turns out, is true.
Or almost as implausible as Rick Santorum’s wife having a medical abortion to expel of dying fetus. Which is also true.
For anyone interested.
I’m not going to that link. My computer’s cpu started screaming about cruel and unusual requests.
All I can think of is the character from Blazing Saddles Gabby Johnson and his authentic frontier gibberish.
We have a Conservative MP in the UK, Nadine Dorries, who claims that she became pro-forced birth are witnessing two botched abortions when a nurse.
She has never offered any evidence to support the claim, and it seems she did nothing to report her concerns at the time.
Of course botched abortions are not an argument against abortions. They are an argument for proper training and supervision. Something that is made more difficult when artificial impediments are put in the way of those seeking to have an abortion and those willing to carry them out.
If these people are so adamantly opposed to abortion, why are they always so adamantly opposed to contraception? It seems to me that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to work towards making sure that every pregnancy a wanted pregnancy. Make contraception inexpensive, easy to obtain, and educate people on its use, and you are three quarters of the way there.
Yeah, yeah, I know. The issue has nothing at all to do with either abortion or contraception, and everything to do with controlling the nation’s wombs.
I completely agree with Gregory’s comment at #5. Personally, even though I’m pro-choice I see abortion as something we should strive to get rid of through good sex education and contraception policy. More honest and open sex-ed in schools, free contraception at ALL pharmacies, and get rid of the sexist hysteria from the likes of Rush Limbaugh who try to make women who make good choices look like sluts.
We really should redefine “endorsing Santorum for President.”
Not all abortions are carried out because the pregnancy is unwanted. In some cases it is because the foetus is not viable, or the women’s health is at risk if the pregnancy goes to term. You can have the best sex education in the world, and it will do very little to reduce incidents.
Still will not remove medically or economically necessary abortion
And that doesn’t account for contraception failure or when people just flat out make a mistake. It happens.
Matt Penfold #8
Absolutely, you’ll never be able to get rid of the need for medically-necessary abortions. My point was to agree with Gregory’s view that the best way to get rid of abortions (in general) was better contraception and sex-ed.
Audley:
Oh, yes it does. The one time I got pregnant (and subsequently had an abortion)? I was using more than one type of contraception. It definitely happens.
That is why I said “reduce” the number of abortions. I know that it cannot — and should not — be eliminated, recriminalized or otherwise made difficult to get. However, I would think that even the most adamant abortion opponent would understand that there is no reason to terminate a pregnancy that never occurs.
Johnson, according to Life Issues Institute, has filed a lawsuit against the Planned Parenthood affiliate where she once worked:
[Above link is .pdf, btw.] She’s using Alliance Defense Fund attorneys (or vice-versa). No mention (in any of the anti-choicer press releases I’ve seen, anyway) as to why she’s suing instead of reporting her evidence (if any) to appropriate law enforcement officers.
I think Audley was pointing out that such a situation is neither the result of inadequate sex education nor a case of the foetus not being viable or women’s health being at risk.
We’ve known for decades how to reduce the number of abortions.
Comprehensive sex ed and widely available and inexpensive contraception.
In European countries where this is done, the abortion rate is 1/6 to 1/10 that of the USA.
FWIW, in countries where abortion is illegal, it still occurs. The rates can be quite high. All that happens is that it becomes occasionally fatal.
Gregory,
I think we’re on the same side, here. As long as you think abortion should be legal and accessible, I’ve got no quibble with you.
She didn’t just work there… as a clinic director, she had systemwide access to the records she’s claiming were falsified by Planned Parenthood.
More on this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/11/planned-parenthood-accused-of-6m-fraud/?page=all
From Jezebel:
http://jezebel.com/5892914/extremely-fishy-planned-parenthood-lawsuit-just-a-sign-of-shit-to-come
And Matt,
I think Caine was agreeing with me. ;)
As for this:
From the Times article I just linked:
The suit’s from 2009 originally.
“If these people are so adamantly opposed to abortion, why are they always so adamantly opposed to contraception?”
Because in their minds, if people have access to contraception, then they will have more sex, and because they are having more sex, they will get pregnant more (even with contraception apparently), and as a result, people will have more abortions.
No, it doesn’t make any sense.
I won’t link to it, but the great font of fundie stupidity Mike Egnor has made this very argument on his blog. And he wasn’t making a joke. He really thinks more contraception means more abortions.
Because a medical procedure that saves vast numbers of lives and forms a critical element of the maintenance of the bodily autonomy of women is naturally exactly the same as the sadistic murders perpetrated by a serial killer in pursuit of his own twisted gratification.
There really are no depths to which the anti-choice brigade won’t sink, are there?
I imagine that these are set by Palin’s mythical ‘death panels’? Honestly, this dosn’t even make sense – what possible purpose or (credible) agenda would abortion quotas serve? Who would benefit? Johnson appears to be claiming that Planned Parenthood is engaging in a master plan to abort feotuses just for the hell of it. It comes across as less a political position and more a paranoid delusion.
And again with the craziness – does she seriously expect anyone who isn’t already a fully paid up, sex-hating, misogynist fundamentalist to buy into the idea that PP is teaching sex positions to four year olds? It would be funny if it wasn’t so sick.
Wrong, all wrong. It is the Catholic Church that is seeking to promote the spread of HIV by lying about microscopic holes being engineered into condoms.
Again, why even bother with such an obvious lie? I cannot decide whether Johnson is genuinely delusional or simply a liar for jeebus…
Ah, I see. Liar for jeebus it is then…
Which says to me, this is absolute and total BS. Texas miss a chance to pillory PP? Yeah, right.
Those lies aren’t particularly obvious to people who aren’t us, with our science-skepticism-critical-thinking backgrounds and fount of real knowledge to draw from. Sex ed is banned down here in the US south, remember? These are people who actually believe that Obama’s a Muslim, global warming’s a scam and evolution’s a discredited belief system of genocidal god-haters. They don’t know anything about Planned Parenthood that didn’t come from a church, CPC or right-wing-biased article.
For instance, see Zingularity and Brayton. (In general, not on PP.)
I have an uncle who has made that exact argument to me. But this is the same uncle who is against mandatory safety equipment for cars because he thinks if cars have seat belts and air bags, then people will drive more often and more recklessly and as a result, vehicular fatalities will increase.
Much, perhaps most, of the pro-life crowd believes that the sole valid purpose of sex is to try to produce babies (in the confines of a “traditional” marriage, of course). So the underlying factor in all of their positions is to stigmatize anything that will lead to sex without babies (including gay sex, masturbation, oral sex, etc.).
If their only concern was to reduce the number of abortions, they’d be handing out free condoms and ensuring easy and cheap access to pills, IUDs, and so on.
There really are no depths to which the anti-choice brigade won’t sink, are there?
Well, since we’ve already got them bragging about lying, rape, and murder I’d have to say, probably not. Once the one bishop admitted that he preferred murdering women to allowing them to have an abortion, there really was no further down for them to go.
Stop right here.
These people want to punish women for having sex – and they want to use pregnancy as a punishment.
Or, rather, he tries really hard to believe that, because even he can see that punishing women for having sex is just too unreasonable.
See? HIV is God’s punishment for having more than one sex partner !! By lyingly claiming there’s no way to prevent it, the Catholic Church wants to scare people into monogamy.
(If you got HIV from a blood transfusion or something, well, I suppose that’s collateral damage.)
Or birth, at least, for in pain shalt thou bear thy children, saith the LORD thy God.
(whoops, screwed up my Brayton link in 24.)
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/03/15/why-the-southern-strategy-works/
Pteryxx @ 24;
I keep forgetting just how much control fundies have over education and popular media in some quarters of the US. As a Brit, I have the good fortune to live in a country where the god-botherers don’t have that much power… at least, not yet.
As you say, this is mostly just preaching to the choir – fodder for those who have already drunk the kool-aid and have become marionettes of the church.
The funny part is that some cretins like Johnson will role up to a place like this and still expect the arguments that go down so well with brain-washed god-bots to simply blow rationalists and skeptics away, and then feel oh-so persecuted when we all whip out our Occam’s razors and slice their argument to pieces.
Of course, back in the day they would have simply burned pesky atheists like us, and now that option is off the table they have had to resort to plan B – character assassination and disinformation… and now we are back to why so many people would believe these lies again.
I agree.
What absolutely nauseates me is the medical misinformation that these lunatics like Abby Johnson spread about prenatal development and care; and with a sickening self-righteous smile on their face, as if by merely opening their mouth they were somehow knowledgeable about anything other than their own self-promotion. ugh. I need a shower.
Probably not. It’s religion after all.
The forced birthers/female slavers have been sponsoring xian terrorism and murdering MD’s for decades.
oligarchyofwimmin
There’s nothing suspicious about that moniker, none at all.
David Marjanović @ 28;
False fear as a means to control – many oppresive states (and notionally ‘liberal’ ones – the UK and US in recent years spring to mind) may use the technique, but they should really be paying royalties to the religions that invented it.
Or just another exmple of the sky fairy’s poor aim – afterall, he apparently flattens half a state with tornadoes becaue he is angry about ‘teh ghey’, and low-cut tops result in earthquakes that cause damage in an area measured in hundreds of square miles. A sharp-shooter he is not…
raven @ 34;
Yup, they prove their supposedly great respect for human life by… murdering people.
Violent and stupid – it’s the fundie way.
——————————————————————
Brownian @ 35;
What’s the betting that this is Matriarchy attempting a little light morphing?
Actually, god intended HIV to be punishment for eating chimps; everything else is collatoral damage.
I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet. For someone supposedly smarter than most, he’s not all that clever, unless complete and obvious telegraphing of your moves is all the rage among the brainies these days.
I’ve met Abby – she’s unpleasant in person also. She was out protesting my clinic not too long ago, and I swear our regular antis were practically falling down to worship.
Gregory @31:
Um, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t follow. This isn’t preaching to dedicated allies, it’s poisoning the discourse. Right? By ensuring that ordinary rank-and-file citizens react with bias against any mere mention of Planned Parenthood, thus predisposing them to reject accurate information.
Something similar happened to me with evolution… as a biology TA, I had a student ask me “But you seem like a decent person, how can you believe in evolution?” So they’re trying to create the situation where failing to hate Planned Parenthood makes you suspect.
Gregory, I think the claim about abortoin quotas is to imply that Planned Parenthood is promoting abortion to make money off the proceedure. I’m pretty sure more than a few anti-abortion types openly state the goal of PP is to make money off abortions.
The obvious solution to this is to exterminate all males and promote lesbianism! I volunteer* to be one of the androcidal commandos! There will never be another abortion ever once the world is made only of womyn-loving-womyn as Goddess intended from the beginning!
Oh, wait, this isn’t really about abortion? It’s actually about making sure those with two X chromosomes act like good little broodmares as the Lovecraftian nightmare story these people dare to call God intended** (or so they think)? Well who’da thunk?!
* with tongue firmly in cheek; IME, the real man-haters are the straight girls…
** and seriously, Christians are the last people who should be pushing abstinence. If abstinence really were 100% effective, they wouldn’t have a religion! According to Matthew and Luke anyway =P
Pteryxx @ 41;
While you are certainly right that this functions as a means of poisoning the discourse, I think it is also used as a means of reinforcing the position of those already ‘on board’ with the anti-choice position – helping to quash any sneaking doubts and whipping up the base into a fervour against ‘baby-killers’, such that abortion is not merely seen as ‘problematic’ or even ‘immoral’, but is instead transmuted into such an unconscionable evil, such a vital front in the culture wars, that willful lying and misrepresentation, and even violence and cold-blooded murder, are not simply permissable but are a moral imperative to the true believers.
This is not just about chilling the discourse among those who might be prepared to talk, it is also about transforming those who are already beyond the point of being reachable by discourse into fanatics prepared to employ force. That is why the anecdotes are so lurid; they are calculated to provoke the rage of those who already believe abortion to be a great evil.
As raven said @ 34, the link between anti-choicers and out-and-out xian terrorism is not merely coincidental.
It reminds me of a famous story about the former USSR when Stalin was in power (I don’t know if it is actually true, but the attitude seems familiar).
So the story goes, it was widely believed that Stalin had secret police present at all his speaches, and after he finished speaking and the applause began, it tended to continue for an absurdly long period, because if you stopped clapping prematurely you were likely to be hauled off on suspicion of being an agent provocateur. Allegedly, the audience only stopped applauding when senior officals did so, thus signalling that it was safe to stop clapping.
I can imagine any number of fundies being quite happy with a similar set up where anyone who doesn’t repudiate the Devil/teh ghey/Darwin/femininism/Islam loud and long enough has their name noted down for later ‘correction’…
…
…You’re right, and I’m ashamed that I’m *still* so prone to presume good faith that I missed this.
…This might explain the current Republican party.
Hang on, isn’t this essentially a negative “tone” argument? Regardless of facts, failure to, I don’t know, repeat them loudly and luridly enough?
(I’m sorry, this is overlapping what I’m learning from the discussion of empathy versus compassion in the JohnTheOther thread…)
Oh, god, don’t tell me she’s THAT far go…
…oh. Different misogynist named Abby. Please continue.
Azuma Hazuki @ 43;
If I am to perish at the hands of androcidal commandos, then my last request is to choose the manner of my passing.
I throw myself on the mercy of the wise Femputer, and request death by snoo-snoo!
Hey, if you have to go out, you should at least go out your way…
So it’s not that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s just lying.
Am I wrong to think, the stuffed animal anecdote is wishful thing, of the clergy wanting to bugger children.
But the “moral” boundaries these people skirt to avoid telling the truth is no longer a surprise.
No wonder Bill Maher is anti vaccination….Unconsciously he has been inducted into the everyone lies camp….promoted and practiced by christians. In his case, he limits it to corporations perverting the medical profession. Which is largely truth, but not all true.
PS vaccinate your child….
PPS Lying for Jesus = emotional truth triumphs over scientific truth. Something we atheists need to address better.
Pteryxx @ 45;
Don’t worry, you can borrow some of my bitter cynicism – I have plenty and to spare, or so people keep telling me…
@ 46;
They certainly seem to be heading in that direction. You deserve extra intertoob points for comparing them to a Communist regime – you just know they will hate that.
Gregory, thanks… it’s not simple lack of cynicism with me, it’s a failure of theory of mind, but that’s the topic of the OTHER thread. It’s been several years and I’m still trying to grasp the heuristic “outrage makes neurotypicals believe things”.
Gregory Greenwood:
So… are you Zapp Brannigan or Fry? :p
More or less on-topic: both those Atheist Elephant takedowns PZ linked are really good, detailed, reference-filled dissections of Abby Johnson’s lies and biology fails. The second one even called her out directly on Twitter:
http://atheistelephant.com/2012/03/among-other-things-abby-johnson-didnt-pay-attention-in-biology-part-ii/
This needs amplified (and applauded!)
Also, the author’s defending against some Innocently-Ignorant commenters:
I thought the chimps got it from eating monkeys.
Johnson’s associated “Talk” page on wikipedia has some interesting information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abby_Johnson_%28activist%29
Johnson had two abortions herself. It is OK for her to do when she needed them, but not for other people.
It also mentions she is converting to Catholicism. The first line of the Talk page says: “Abby and her partner were still waiting for an annulment ruling on 4 August.”
Huh? She has two abortions, is married, has a child, and that marriage can be annulled, as if it didn’t happen?
Goddamn it! It’s not uncommon!
yep; that’s how conservative catholics get divorced without getting divorced. why they can do that i don’t know, but they can.
HAhahahaHAHAHAHAhahahaha
is that before or after they murder grandma with euthanasia?
HAHAHAhahahaHAHAHAH
she’s a female santorum, alright.
Mummy laid an egg (fun fact: Amazon.com does not even have a picture of the cover (!)) has some interestingly looking sex position (I think doing it on a bouncing ball could be a bit tricky).
My kids both love it and the younger one is two. Oh the horrors, they’ll grow up thinking that sex is fun!
And they don’t only know how babies come out of the womb, they also know how they get in there in the first place!
@raven:
The difference isn’t quite that great. Your reference quotes rate in the Netherlands as 5-7/1000/yr. The CDC estimate for the USA rate in 2005 for the US was ~15/1000/yr (for women between 15 and 44 years of age).
The rate in the Netherlands is a factor of two to three less than that in the US, so your point is still valid.
Dr. Audley Z. Darkheart, purveyor of candy and lies @ 53;
Fry, definitely Fry. It may be that I am already a buffoon, but I would far rather be a basically harmless, even quite-decent-some-of-the-time buffoon than a self-obsessed, narcissistic, toxically misogynist ersatz Kirk buffoon.
I ♥ Fry (almost as much as I ♥ Bender).
Not Kirk. Shatner. Zapp Brannigan is supposedly based on Kirk, but if William Shatner played himself instead of acting* as Kirk. (Hopefully that makes sense.)
*For certain values of acting, anyway.
The numbers I quoted USA versus Netherlands were for adolescents, teenagers.
There is room for improvement here. And all the Abby Johnson’s of the country do is try to stand in the way.
The teenage birth rate is important, being highly correlated and causal with life long poverty.
Raven:
I LOL’ed.
Gregory, #5 and Matt125, #6: You are not helping by positioning abortion as something “we should strive to get rid of,” no matter how much you favor keeping it legal. The more you wring your hands about how “terrible” abortion is, the more ground you cede to the forced birthers.
Abortion should be safe, legal, and readily available to any woman who wants one.
Jaybee, #56: But, you see, it’s OK, because she’s repented and dedicated herself to JEEEZZZUSSSSSSS. Fundies of all kinds love nothing so much as a “sinner redeemed.”
Dr. Audley Z. Darkheart, purveyor of candy and lies @ 63;
Fry is one of my favourite characters, but I must admit that I too love Bender just that little bit more.
It makes perfect sense. With every passing year Shatner seems to become ever more of a parody of himself, and the man’s ego is legendary.
“Damnit… Audley… he’s just… a man… not an… acting… machine!”
Now all we need is a scantily clad young woman with her skin unconvincingly dyed green, some Red Shirts to kill off (because you can’t have anything original series related without Red Shirts dying in droves), and for Kirk’s shirt to spontaneously tear for no reason, and we’ll be set…
Seriously, this is the last off topic post out of me!
Gregory Greenwood:
XD
Just to make things a little weirder, Incubus was on IFC the other day.
Esperanto!
@65 Erm, please can you tell me where I said anything contrary to that? I am definitely in support of them being legal and readily available. Maybe I do ‘wring my hands’ at the thought of some abortions but I accept they represent a tiny minority and are done for all the right reasons. My point was that the best way to reduce them is contraception and sex ed.
Matt125, you wrote:
You will never get rid of abortion, for multiple reasons listed previously in this thread. The goal should not be to get rid of it, or even to reduce it, because the latter is always hijacked by forced-birthers who want to reduce access to safe, legal abortion.
The goal should be to provide women with as many reproductive alternatives as possible and let the numbers fall where they will. The end.
@raven
Ah. The number you quoted in your first source was for the overall rate, so I got confused. Sorry about that.
That is most certainly true, regardless of which rate we’re considering.
Abby Johnson claims: “due to a personnel shortage she was called in to assist”
I call BS on that claim, because having an untrained person “assisting” would be worse than going short-handed.
@69 Ms. Daisy
Fair enough, I did say that. It was silly.
I work on API drugs, and having an untrained person involved with processing the batch could cause it to be tossed out, never approved. Which is why I can’t do anything in production other than “checked by” these days. Real medicine should be even stricter. It has been noted that her story doesn’t always add up.
Hello all! Tim here, co-author of the posts PZ so kindly posted here. I just wanted to let you know, if you’re interested, that you can tell Abby Johnson directly what you think. If you go to http://www.abbyjohnson.org/contact/, you can submit mail which she reads and responds to personally. Just a thought…
Enjoy, and thank you all for the support!
#64 raven says:
Try “caused by absence of decent sex education courses in schools.”
I was just reading the Wikipedia article on the children’s book “Everybody Poops”, and it inspires me to wonder why no one has written a book for kids, “Everybody Has Genitals and Everybody Uses Them”.
Asexuals exist.
Now we can move on
out of curiosity; was that meant to contradict something n raven’s post?
Do asexuals who don’t urinate exist?
I think I’ve found a straightforward misogyny test.
Just ask someone, “Do you think pregnancy is a suitable punishment for a woman having casual sex?”
(The correct answer is “What sort of goddamn question is that, you asshole?”)
If these people are so adamantly opposed to abortion, why are they always so adamantly opposed to contraception? It seems to me that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to work towards making sure that every pregnancy a wanted pregnancy.
You assume sanity, and you assume that there can be no witting or unwitting dysgenicists out there. Well, it is not so. You will discover on further investigation that ‘pro-life’ is in good part people who want their own kinds of deranged people conceived and born. It’s no coincidence that they obsessively hate eugenics and Margaret Sanger.
Matt125
I think you mean the right thing. It is, both from an economical and medical perspective much better to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to abort them, and the best tools we have there are good sex education and readily avaiable contraception.
I don’t think that anybody here disagrees with that.
But we should very carefull about the wording here.
The forced birthers side tries to frame the issue as if we conceded that an abortion as such is something terrible and evil and only marginally less evil than forcing a woman to give birth against her will.
Don’t let them take you in, don’t give them that angle.
Even with good sex ed and contraception, shit still happens. Women will still get pregnant from consensual enthusiastic sex, and they will still seek abortions for no other reason than not wanting children.
And there’s nothing wrong with this.
We need to take the whole contraception and abortion discussion back. Although rape and medical issues are angles from which we can tackle the utter misogyny of the forced birthers, we mustn’t lose the priciple of women’s human rights and bodily autonomy out of sight.
Abortion: legal, safe, and non of your damn business.
The argument that childbirth is supposed to be painful by God’s will was made when anaesthetics were invented, and IIRC one doctor was murdered. I do know that one midwife was executed for using herbal concoctions to ease the pain of childbirth. Back to the 16th century, lads!
That is, BTW, also the angle of the “Natural Childbirth Community”:
Pain is god, pain is necessary, if you get an epidural or , oh beware a C-section, you’re cheating and harming your baby.
They’re not murdering doctors, only babies via incompetence.
AFAIK, they do have to produce an excuse like “the marriage was never consummated”. And/or you have to be considered important. A candidate for president of Austria had her marriage annulled, but IIRC she never had children.
Yep. I once found a bit of soundtrack of that one. Shatner’s pronunciation is surprisingly good.
Tpyos is god.
…somehow, because the preternatural is contractually obliged to damage someone’s health.
Naturalistic fallacy.
“What kind of person are you, to say a beautiful little baby is a punishment? So you were punishing your mom by existing in her womb before you were born?”
(Believe me, the years I spent on talk.abortion, I ran across ALL the pro-illegal-abortionist arguments and claims, up to and including “So this woman got a pelvic examination when she was eight months pregnant, and somehow the doctor got a bubble of air into her womb*. For the rest of her pregnancy the woman had to sleep sitting up, because every time she laid down the bubble got over the baby’s face and its crying kept her awake!”)
Gregory Greenwood:
-Then I choose to go out immediately post orgy (with Jason Statham, Ricky Martin, Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg, Chris Evans and David Boreanaz