Many people within the pro-life movement are familiar with Abby Johnson, who left her job as a director at Planned Parenthood to fight for the lives of the unborn. Now, she is taking her story to movie theaters to share the truth about the abortion business.
On Tuesday, Johnson spoke with IJR about the making of the upcoming film, “Unplanned,” which will be coming to theaters in the spring of 2019.
“I wanted it to be a movie that really showed the humanity of the women who have abortions, women who work inside abortion clinics — showing that there is redemption available, that there’s hope after abortion, that forgiveness is for everyone,” Johnson said.
“Unplanned” is based on Johnson’s book of the same name, which details how she left the abortion industry and became pro-life. It is written and directed by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who co-wrote the 2014 film “God’s Not Dead.”
Johnson began to rethink her stance on abortion after she assisted with a 13-week, ultrasound-guided abortion at a Planned Parenthood that she managed.
“I was asked to come in and assist and I was shocked to see this 13-week-old fetus — it appeared to be struggling and moving away from the abortion instrumentation and I knew then that there was life in the womb, that there was humanity in the womb, that really there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between me and this 13-week-old fetus,” Johnson said. “We still both had that instinctual fight or flight response — if somebody was coming to harm me, I would fight back and that is what I had seen in the womb.”
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In her interview with IJR, Johnson elaborated on how deceived she felt by Planned Parenthood, and how “Unplanned” portrays this:
“I knew then that I had been lied to by Planned Parenthood and then I so eagerly bought their lie, I had been in turn lying to thousands of women who had come into my clinic. I knew that, that because of that, I was going to have to leave. So, in the movie, that scene is portrayed and it’s one of the first scenes in the film. Sort of the flow of the movie follows the flow of the book and so it is one of the first scenes and so people will actually see what I saw on that ultrasound image.”
After leaving Planned Parenthood, Johnson began to help other abortion workers leave their jobs. She now runs a non-profit organization called And Then There Were None, which provides support to abortion facility workers who quit their jobs.
When asked about the impact of this film, Johnson said:
“I think people feel like what we hear from a lot of the media and what we hear from different organizations, there’s always sort of a spin and I just get the sense that people are tired of it —that people just want to be able to speak plainly and that’s what they’re looking for in others. They just want the truth. And that’s why I think now is a good time for this movie to come out because it’s just my experience — it’s what I experienced inside of Planned Parenthood and it’s just truth. So, I think that people are ready for that. I think that’s what they want.”
