Many people have pleasant Christmas memories.
Jan Waters, who attends Faith Temple Church in Taylors, S.C., says, “One of my favorite memories about Christmas is when I was small I would sit by our fireplace. The fire warmed me to the bone. The heat coming from that fire is [like] the warmth I felt when Jesus came into my heart. My mom would peel me a navel orange, and I would sit by the fire and eat my orange. The orange was so juicy and sweet. I usually ate two of them. The smell of a fireplace was and still is so comforting to me. Now that I am on my own, I do not have the luxury of doing that any more. How times have changed.”
Christmastime may stir happy memories but can cause us to think of losses, too.
Brenda Locklear of Laurinburg, N.C., works in a carpet-dyeing plant. I recently asked Brenda, a Christian grandmother with Lumbee Indian ancestry, to tell me something about her childhood memories of Christmas.
“A shoebox,” she responded. Moisture filled her eyes, and she lifted a hand to wipe away a tear.
“A shoebox?” I asked, feeling nervous about possibly upsetting a longtime friend and coworker.
Brenda explained, “When we’d get our shoes to go to school each fall, Mama would say, ‘Keep your box.’”
Her late mother used those shoeboxes for her children’s Christmas gifts.
Brenda grew up in rural Hoke County, N.C. She had two older brothers and was born the third of six children (three boys, three girls). Her mother was unmarried.
“Did she wrap the boxes for you?” I asked.
“We couldn’t afford wrapping paper,” Brenda said. “In the box would be an apple, an orange, some nuts and candy – hard candy, Christmas candy, and there wouldn’t be much of that. That’s all she could afford.”
Brenda said she, being the oldest girl in her family, babysat younger siblings while her mother and brothers worked as sharecroppers, raising tobacco.
“I never knew my father – never knew what a father was,” Brenda said, noting that she and her baby brother share the same father. When she graduated from high school, a man she thought could be her father, told her he was.
She asked her mother if that man was telling the truth. Brenda recalls that her mother said, “Well, if he says it, you must be his.”
“She wouldn’t admit it,” Brenda said.
Brenda’s maternal grandmother, Nurseann Locklear, took her to church. (Nurseann’s husband died of a heart attack at age 29. She later became engaged to a soldier who died overseas before they could marry. Nurseann remained single until the end of her long life.)
“I always went to church,” Brenda says. “It was a little country church.”
She and her husband, Mike, accepted Christ early in their marriage, she says. They faithfully attend a Church of God of Prophecy and have two adult daughters, four grandsons and a granddaughter. I pray that Brenda enjoys a wonderful Christmas, this year, and that Christ continues healing hurts and disappointments she has experienced.
My early memories of Christmas include a drama presented at Gum Springs Pentecostal Holiness Church in Greenville County, S.C. I was old enough to read and was given a part in that “play” about a modern family at Christmastime. My 3-years-younger sister, Shirley, had a part, too. I recall the darkened church and the pulpit moved aside to make way for a couch. The troubled family featured in the play ended up having a Merry Christmas, with the Lord’s help.
In those days, Gum Springs Church usually gave a large grocery bag of fruit to each family attending the Sunday night service preceding Christmas. Nowadays, a bag of fruit might not mean much, but I recall one family who showed up at our church just to get a Christmas bag of fruit. (At least I, as a child, suspected that’s why that family came.) When fruit bags were presented at the end of the service, that family’s young mother left her two small children and her husband sitting on a pew near the back of the church. She walked forward and received a bag of fruit. I can still envision her thin face and long, wispy, straight brown hair. I never saw that family, again, but the presence of that mother and her family at that service caused me to think about people who lived outside our church. I wondered if they had the hope I had – a hope in Jesus Christ encouraged by folk in my church who took time to teach me about Christ, pray with me to receive Christ and patiently encourage me to participate in a Christmas play.
Father, please fill hearts with Christ’s love and healing during this Christmas season, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Abby Johnson, Prolife Advocate, Speaks in Southern Pines, N.C.
Abbey Johnson, an American prolife activist and author of “unPlanned,” spoke in the auditorium of Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines, N.C., on the evening of September 10, 2011.
She worked as a Planned Parenthood clinic director but resigned in October 2009, she says, after watching an abortion on ultrasound.
Johnson, 31, was raised in a “conservative, pro-life family” from Texas but began volunteering for Planned Parenthood after seeing its booth at a fair at her college. She said she hadn’t heard of the group before, didn’t know [at first] that they performed abortions. She stated that Planned Parenthood told her they wanted to reduce the number of abortions. Johnson volunteered in 2001and progressed to the position of community services director. She worked at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, for eight years, escorting women into the clinic from their cars and eventually working as director of that clinic.
She serves as the chief research strategist for Live Action, a pro-life organization known for conducting sting operations against Planned Parenthood clinics. She holds a B.S. in psychology from Texas A&M University and a M.A. in counseling from Sam Houston State University. She lives (in 2011) in Austin, Texas, with her husband and 4-year-old daughter.
On Sept. 10, 2011, Johnson, sponsored by the Life Care Pregnancy Center of Carthage, N.C., spoke to about 175 people gathered at Pinecrest High School.
Monsignor Jeffrey Ingram gave an invocation, praying, “Heavenly Father, you have given us your Son as the Truth. … Help us to have a great understanding and respect for human life … leave the culture of death behind and look to a culture of life, protecting those who cannot protect themselves.”
Suzanne Clendenin, executive director of the Life Care Pregnancy Center of Carthage, introduced Johnson to the audience.
Abby Johnson Tells of ‘Signs’
Johnson told the following two stories about people who received “signs” concerning abortion decisions.
She said that one girl was pregnant and wanted a sign from God as to whether or not to abort her baby. As the girl rode in the back seat of a friend’s car, she saw a pregnancy center billboard and typed the center’s number into her phone. She later called the center but received no return call.
The girl made an appointment for an abortion. As she was about to enter the abortion clinic, a young pro-life worker, stationed outside that clinic, called to the girl and asked what she could do to help.
The girl told her looking-for-a-sign story to the pro-life lady, letting her know she called a pregnancy center and received no return call.
“What if I’m your sign?” the prolife lady asked. “What is your name?”
The girl said, “My name is Elizabeth.”
“My name is Elizabeth,” the lady said.
“That was her sign,” Johnson said. “She now has a 6-month-old boy.
Johnson told another “sign” story.
A lady visiting an abortion clinic was sent to a nearby prolife pregnancy center to get a free ultrasound screening. Abortion clinics use ultrasound images to estimate how large a baby is before he is aborted.
The lady asked a prolife center attendant for the ultrasound screening but told the attendant she wanted no lectures about keeping her baby.
While performing the ultrasound, the pregnancy center attendant wondered what she could say to help the lady on the table change her mind about aborting her baby.
The attendant thought of these words and voiced them the lady: “Would you like to touch your baby’s hand?”
The woman on the table was startled but placed her hand on her stomach, as the technician directed her to do. Then, the lady on the table saw, on the ultrasound screen, her baby inside her body reach up and touch the top of her womb. Their hands were close.
“She now has a 2-year-old daughter,” Johnson said.
Getting Serious
“If the majority of Americans were really prolife, the abortion numbers wouldn’t be increasing each year. … One in three of those having abortions wouldn’t be ‘Christians,’” Johnson said. (She recommended Lifenews.com as a good source of prolife information.)
She said many ministers don’t take a stand from the pulpit against abortion. There are over 300,000 organized churches in the U.S., she noted.
“One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do is look my parents in the face and say, ‘I have killed two of your grandchildren,’” Johnson said. “I believe this is a spiritual battle, do you? I see so many groups fighting each other. … Let’s get together for these babies. Four thousand children, every day, are dying, because we’re not really ready to get serious.”
Worked for Planned Parenthood
Johnson worked eight years for Planned Parenthood.
“One of the jobs I used to do was in the POC (Products of Conception) lab,” Johnson said. “You’re not allowed to say ‘baby’ in an abortion lab. There’s a POC person in each lab. They take the tissue and dump it into a Pyrex-type holder and piece the baby back together. If you’re missing a part of the baby, it could cause infection in the mother.”
John said the POC job didn’t bother her and that she thought the process was interesting.
“I had to buy leather tennis shoes,” she said. “I got blood on my shoes and had to throw them into the washer each day. Abortion is graphic. It didn’t bother me. I looked at that [body parts] in a dish all the time. It didn’t bother me."
The abortion clinic Johnson worked for didn’t get all the baby-parts retrieved from the body of one woman, and that woman ended up in the hospital a week later.
“We had left a leg in her uterus,” Johnson said. “We didn’t want her to go to the media. We needed to make her a monetary offer, for she was mad, ready to go to the media.”
The abortion clinic came up with money and told Johnson to give the woman an agreed-upon check and get her to sign off.
“We gave her $897,” Johnson said, noting that the lady had paid $550 for her abortion. “We thought that was fair. That’s how we treated women. You see, guys, when I hear about how Planned Parenthood helps people, I shake my head. I lied to women every day and didn’t even know it. … I was good at it.”
Selling Abortions
Planned Parenthood honored Abby Johnson as a regional affiliate employee of the year in 2008.
“I could sell about anybody on abortion,” Johnson said. “We gave them promise of a better career. … [Telling them that] to kill their child was a smart parenting decision. … Planned Parenthood knew the lies we were telling were very important. Planned Parenthood gave us this list – all of us who counseled women to have abortions. We had a sheet: ‘Answers to Tough Questions.’”
Johnson said question number one on that sheet was “Will my baby feel this?”
The scripted answer was “No, the fetus has no sensory development until 28 weeks.”
“They wouldn’t believe their baby was going to be in pain and [they then would] have an abortion,” Johnson said, adding that another question on the clinic prompt sheet was “Will God ever forgive me?”
Johnson said, “We asked back, ‘Do you believe God is a forgiving God? Don’t you think he knows you’re in a tough position, right now, and you’re doing what’s best for your family?’”
“We liked our jobs, our paychecks,” Johnson said. “It’s great, until one day you figure out that you’ve been lied to and you’ve been lying to other people. And that’s what happened to me.”
The Turning Point
Johnson said a doctor who was new to her clinic wanted her to help him with an ultrasound-guided abortion, which is a very unusual procedure at an abortion clinic. The Houston, Texas, clinic where Johnson worked was performing 75 abortions a day and open for business six days per week, she said. She was “called in” to help the new doctor perform the ultrasound-guided abortion.
“My job was to hold the ultrasound probe during the abortion,” she said, noting that she had been promised she would, in time, become the COO [“chief operating officer,” in charge of daily business] of the clinic. “I thought it would be good to learn a new technique [ultrasound-guided abortion].”
She said there was no medical reason for the ultrasound, but an abortion clinic can use an ultrasound image to measure the baby and know how much to charge for that abortion. (She inferred that charges for each abortion seemed to be based on the size of each aborted baby.)
Johnson saw the baby on the video screen, during the ultrasound-guided procedure.
“I’m looking at this screen and kind of have an anxious feeling in my stomach,” she said. “The fetus was 13 weeks along and wouldn’t feel anything, I thought.”
The doctor placed a suction tube into the patient’s uterus.
“I saw this 13-week-old fetus recoil and try to move away from the instrument,” Johnson said. “I saw this child try to flee. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t stop looking. This can’t be really happening, I thought. Arms and legs were flailing about. I can’t tell you for sure that the baby felt pain, but if someone walked into this room with a gun … we’d be screaming, running like wild bandits … and that’s exactly what I saw on that ultrasound screen. That baby was frantic.”
Johnson said she recalled the attending doctor saying, “Beam me up, Scotty,” as he turned on the suction.
“The worst part was standing there and witnessing this tiny defenseless child struggling and fighting for his life,” she said. “I watched a child die right before my face. The biggest tragedy is it’s happening 4,000 times a day.
“If we saw a 2-year-old stomped by her dad, what would we do? Would we show preference for a 2-year-old over 4,000 unborn everyday? Would we say to a 2-year-old, ‘You deserve better,” and to the 4, 000, ‘Not so much’?”
Johnson said the prolife effort is not just a movement.
“This is ‘the’ movement, the cause. … Everything else is secondary to the right to live,” she said. “Thirty-three percent of our population is not here because of abortion. There’s no gray, when it comes to the murder of children – none. Somebody’s waiting for you to get involved. We have to be doing this because this is the right thing to do. I do 10 to 15 events like this every month.”
Funds for Abortions
Johnson said some charities, such as the following, give money to Planned Parenthood: the March of Dimes Foundation, American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, Relay for Life and the Girl Scout Cookie program.
“The money you give to this organization [Life Care Pregnancy Center] – not a penny of it is going to kill babies. … I want to give to safe organizations, not those that deceive people. Don’t give to organizations that give to other organizations that kill babies.”
She said the U.S. government gave 366 million dollars of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood “this year.”
Johnson referred to this quote from the Henry Hyde (1924-2007), a former U.S. House of Representatives statesman from the sixth district of Illinois:
“When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God – and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world – and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him, because he loved us!’”
“You can be the ‘sign’ for these children,” Johnson said. “They are waiting to be spared of death.”
Life Care Pregnancy Center of Carthage, N.C., “a Christ-centered ministry that promotes the sanctity of human life,” may be reached at 910-947-6199 or by e-mail at lcpc01@embarqmail.com.
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