Planned Parenthood made the announcement on Friday. But there is still much more for pro-lifers to do.
They say everything is big in Texas, so why would Planned Parenthood be excluded?
I never made it there, but for years I’ve been reading about and seeing photos outside — and occasional undercover video inside — of a Planned Parenthood megacenter in Houston. I still remember when it was architecturally gestating and being constructed. And now it is closing. Planned Parenthood announced Friday this and one other Houston center are closing.
Planned Parenthood says “nearly 200 Planned Parenthood health centers in 24 states across the country are at risk of closure.” Twenty clinics in seven states had already announced by the beginning of June. Since then California, Ohio, and Texas have been added to the list.
In celebrating the news, in an interview with Fox News, Shawn Carney, CEO of 40 Days for Life (which leads prayer campaigns outside abortion clinics), said:
“Now they are closing the largest abortion facility in the world,” Carney said. “Their flagship. They’re very proud of it in Houston, Texas. They’re finally closing it, and it’s unbelievable.”
Abby Johnson ran a Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, when the Houston center was being conceived. She remembers when the Texas PP chief financial officer handed her information about “the $18 million dollar capital campaign we had begun for our new facility in Houston.” She was expected to contribute, both as an employee and especially as a clinic director. “I wanted my bosses to recognize how much I was willing to give towards the cause,” Johnson remembers in an e-mail statement today, “so I made a donation large enough to have my name etched into a large bronze plaque that would hang on the front outside wall of the building.”
She quit before the building was finished. Johnson wound up very publicly becoming a convert to the pro-life cause – and even founding a ministry, And Then There Were None (their website is abortionworker.com), dedicated to helping staff at abortion clinics quit and find other work (and healing from knowledge of what they have been involved in).
Johnson doesn’t know if her name ever made it on a wall of the center – and if it did, if they ultimately removed it.
She continues:
My memories of that building are enough to fill many chapters of a book: the unveiling of the plans, the jokes told about the number of babies that would be aborted, the layouts, the type of new equipment we would need because now we would be killing viable babies, which floor my future office would be on, the enormity of the building. At completion, the building was 78,000 square feet. It has 7 stories. I’ve never been inside, but have prayed outside many times.
Yesterday afternoon, I found out that this enormous facility is closing down. The affiliate is still open, but will move to a different location.
My emotions aren’t what I thought they would be. Abortion is so different now. That facility hasn’t been committing abortions in several years. Abortion in Texas doesn’t happen in brick and mortar facilities anymore. It is all online. Yet, many, many lives were taken there…murdered there.
The closing of this facility is more symbolic than anything. Planned Parenthood is losing ground. This facility once stood proudly as the “largest abortion facility in the western hemisphere,” as my former boss would proclaim. Now it will just be, yet again, an empty building, riddled with memories of pain, regret, loss and tears.
That’s the thing. It is amazing that this Houston center is closing. It is a tremendous milestone that Planned Parenthood is shutting down facilities around the country. They are obviously having financial trouble, and Congress cutting funding doesn’t help. But abortion in America today is different than it was. They don’t need the buildings like they used to. Now you go to CVS, Walgreens, Duane Reade – your local drug store – for your abortion pills, increasingly prescribed via telehealth. Or, for later abortions, you go to a hospital. In New York City we don’t even have Catholic hospitals like we used to, to be a haven from the murder of unborn children — and to refuse abortions in the face of mandates.
The new reality presents challenges to pro-life activists and counselors who used to get trained by the likes of Sidewalk Advocates for Life to be present to women going into old-fashioned abortion clinics, offering them options that are not the death of their children. Church or nonprofit-funded vans often park nearby – outside if there is not local ordinance against it – with ultrasound machines ready for any woman who is willing to see what Planned Parenthood won’t show her.
So, yes, I am as grateful as anyone that we are seeing these closures – including at the Planned Parenthood I’ve spent the most time outside of in Manhattan. But the city is making sure abortions are accessible and our governor is delighted to defend doctors who send pills to women and girls in states like Texas, where the unborn (and their mothers) are not protected from abortion.
In the wake of Dobbs, some Republicans give you the impression the fight against abortion is over. Only if you never had your heart in the fight in the first place. The pro-life movement needs to be more creative – and loving – than ever, reaching the confused, the hurt, the used and abused . . . with real, practical hope and help for life.
And it’s not just a state-by-state thing. It’s the human rights issue of our time right here and now. That didn’t change with the end of Roe v. Wade. And it doesn’t end with the closing of even mega Planned Parenthoods.
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