We're ready to get started here. I'm so excited to introduce, uh, Rachel MacNair, who will
be our facilitator for this panel. She works for Institute for — Integrated Soc — Integrated
Social Analysis, thank you. It's the research arm of the Consistent Life
Network. Yes. Um. My brain's not firing on all engines
this morning. All cylinders. That's how you can tell.
And then we have Annette Lancaster. Lancaster? Lancaster, with And Then There Were None ministries,
which is the ministry that Abby Johnson started for former abortion clinic workers, helping
them get out of the industry and into life-affirming work. And then we have Thad Crouch, he's with
Veterans for Peace, and he's also worked with the Consistent Life Network and a bunch of
other great organizations in Texas as well. Um, so, we have Annette from North Carolina,
Thad from Texas, and Rachel from...Kansas? City, Missouri.
Kansas City, Missouri, ah. The state line goes right through the city,
y'all. Anyway, please welcome them.
Okay, we're gonna have Annette go for ten — Annette goes for ten minutes and then
Thad goes for ten minutes, and I'm gonna sit over there and do like this when they've got
two minutes and like this when they've got one minute. And then, then we'll move to parallels
and contrasts between the two. (Make sure the green button's on. Oh, it needs
to be green? Oh, they need it to be green. Okay, this isn't turning off. There we go.)
Okay. Good afternoon. So, my name is Annette Lancaster,
I was formerly the health center manager of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. That is
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I actually got involved with Planned Parenthood — um,
I was sought out by a headhunter. I was working at a previous organization that was absorbed
by another, larger health system, and so I ended up looking for a job. I wanted to help
people, I wanted to stay in healthcare. My goal was really to help women. And, of course,
that is the undertone lie that Planned Parenthood sells to people. I interviewed for the Winston-Salem
office first, and then didn't get that position, and then they actually called me back and
asked me would I be interested in the Chapel Hill location? Which was actually a lot larger
than the Winston-Salem location. So of course I was really interested — here's this large
clinic that I can be the manager of, it's a stand-alone clinic, they help women, they
do all these different things for women, so I'm thinking, this is great. When I got into
working at the clinic, it didn't take very long for me to realize that it wasn't exactly
what everybody had told me that it was. It wasn't what they sold to me. I realized that
women were being lied to — we were told that we did the top number of mammograms and
breast exams, and the first thing that I noticed was we didn't even have a mammogram machine.
So, how were we doing all these breast exams, and you know, helping women with breast cancer
and all these things, when we didn't even have a breast exam machine? After a few weeks,
uh, of working there, I noticed that, myself personally, I started to have this moral decline.
My jokes started becoming very dark and morbid, um, I started drinking very heavily, drinking
to the point where it was becoming detrimental not only to my health, but to my family and
to my marriage. Jumping forward, I'm happy to say that, as of this August, I am completely
sober. Thank you. I used to use that term loosely, I would say, "Yeah, I'm sober," and
I'd have a glass here, and a glass there. But after having deep conversations with myself
I realized that I just needed to cut it out completely, so I did do that. But...it was
a really long and difficult journey for me. I remember several times that I would have
employees come to me, and they would be in tears, working in what we called the POC room,
which was Products of Conception. So, I had my 18-year-old niece working with me at the
time, this was her very first job, she wanted to get in healthcare — and of course, I'm
helping her, I'm trying to get her involved in healthcare, so I'm like, "I can get you
a job at Planned Parenthood; you can work with me," and it ended up being so horrific
for her, causing her to have nightmares. A lot of the things that she saw, and a lot
of the things that she did. I'm happy to say that I got her out of the industry, even though
I also helped her get into the industry. But I was able to help get her out, as well as
seven other people that worked in the industry, at that clinic, and get them involved with
And Then There Were None, with Abby Johnson. But there were a lot of things that I saw,
you guys, and a lot of things that I participated in that was just, just horrible. One of the
things — it wasn't just one situation that got me out of the clinic and out of the industry,
it was a culmination of a variety of things — but one of the things was when I assisted
in an ultrasound-guided abortion. I was not ultrasound trained, I had never done an ultrasound
before, I had never held — I had never even held a transvaginal ultrasound. But I was
doing — here I found myself, as the manager, supposedly hired to do administrative work,
and I'm holding an ultrasound for a Day Two procedure. I'm actually watching the baby,
inside of the mother's womb, run from all of these instruments that are being into the
mother, and then being pulled out, piece by piece. Because that's how an abortion is performed.
People say, "Oh, I'm pro-choice. I think it should be a woman's right." But until you
actually see the procedure done, I don't think people really grasp how an abortion procedure
is done. The baby is actually torn apart limb-by-limb. And after me seeing this, and holding the
ultrasound, and actually watching this, something inside of me just woke up. I thought, "What
in the world am I doing here? This is not really helping women."
And then after that procedure, I had the same patient come back to me and ask me, again
— they had before the procedure started, and they came back to ask me: "Do you think
God is gonna forgive me for what I just did?" You know, and...so then I'm torn, morally
and with corporate life. What do I say? Do I say what I feel? Do I say what I really
think, in my heart and in my mind? Or do I continue to tell them what I've been taught
by Planned Parenthood? Which is the blanket answer of, "Well, do you believe in a forgiving
God? Do you think that God is going to forgive you?"
And I found myself repeating what I had been taught by Planned Parenthood to say. It wasn't
until the last days that I was there that I began actually opening up and telling people
how I really felt. I had women come in who were being coerced.
They would come in being brought by parents, or grandparents, boyfriends, husbands, partners,
pimps, to have their abortion procedures done. And they really didn't want to do it.
But I was being told by my regional manager at that time, "Oh, they're ready. They signed
the paperwork, so they really wanna have — they want it. If they didn't want to have this
done, they wouldn't be here." But I found that, after a few months, my numbers
of abortion procedures were going down and down and down. Because as women came in, and
they would tell me their stories, and they would answer their questions, my response
would be, "I don't think you want to have this procedure done today. So let's reschedule
you, or let's just cancel your procedure altogether." Um, I ended up being reprimanded for that.
I was told that my abortion numbers were not as high as they were supposed to be. So then,
at a meeting one day, I just came out and asked: "Do we have an abortion quota?" Because
I felt like we were herding women in, like cattle. We were just bringing them in, like,
you know, what is it that you want from me? Do you want me to just go out on the streets
and advertise, "Please come in and abort your babies"? You know, I was starting to get frustrated
at one point. But I was told, "No, we don't have an abortion
quota. There's, there's no quota. You know, we make our money off of family planning."
So again, then my question was, "Why am I being reprimanded because my numbers are going
down?" It wasn't making sense to me. So after a few more weeks of my numbers continually
declining, I was brought into the office and I was told — so, let me back up a little
bit. My husband had been telling me for months: "You need to go ahead and quit. We'll be okay.
We'll be fine with just me working." And I was so hellbent on..."They're not gonna break
me. I can do this. You know, I can stay in this industry. I can do this. There's nothing
wrong with me. I'm not changing." But my husband was telling me, "I can see you changing. The
children can see you changing." We would tell such dark, morbid jokes — for
example, um, the freezer, where we kept the products of conception after a procedure...we
called it the Nursery. We had providers — er, abortionists — who
would talk down to the women who they were doing procedures on. They would talk about
them afterwards, talked about how their body parts were shaped, or how they were colored.
It was just, it was horrific. And I wasn't seeing how I was changing.
But after a while, I started noticing. You know, after almost every abortion day — we
did abortion procedures on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Sometimes we were there 10,
11, 12 hours, performing these procedures. But after every abortion day, we always met
up at a local restaurant or a bar. All of us. And we would jokingly say that we were
getting together for our "staff meeting." And I started to notice that I was using alcohol
as a crutch — all of us were using alcohol as a crutch — except for my 18-year-old
niece, who wasn't old enough to drink. So I started wondering to myself, you know, "How
is she getting through this?" And I realized, after a while, she was using ZzzQuil, and
NyQuil. That was what she would drink so that she could go to sleep at night and not have
these nightmares — or try to sleep through them.
So, I ended up writing a letter of resignation. And I kept it. I didn't put a date on it.
I wrote a really nice letter, saying, "Thank you for my time here at Planned Parenthood.
You know, you've taught me so much, blah, blah, blah." But I never turned it in — and
I actually had that letter with me for about two weeks. And I would keep it with me. But
my numbers were still declining, so I knew that something was eventually gonna come.
I was eventually called into the office, and I was told: "You just don't fit in here anymore.
You don't fit in here." And it was like a weight had been lifted off
of my shoulders. and I thought, "You are right. I don't fit in here, with this morbid humor."
And I had already gone to Human Resources, and I had talked about the sexually-charged
environment, about the vulgarities and the cursing, and just, different things that went
on. And I was told, "Well, this is just the culture here." Basically, I was being told,
get over it and get used to it. But when I was finally told, "You don't fit
in here anymore. Sign this paperwork saying that you're not gonna disclose any of our
patient information and leave." It was a weight lifted off my shoulders, and I slid over that
letter. When I was — because when I was called into that office by two HR administrators
with their folders, I already knew what was coming. So I had my folder with me, and I
was ready as well. So they slid me their paperwork, and I slid them mine.
But even after leaving there, there was just so much that I had to deal with. So much that
I had seen and participated in. And I had a card that had been given to me
previously — and I couldn't remember the name on the card, because I had actually washed
it — so let me tell you this quick story. The workers, sidewalk workers, would come,
they would pray, and they would talk to us, and of course, they would try to get us out
of the industry. I would always ignore them, I would call the police, I would have them
trespassed. I didn't want them on our property. So I would park across the street, in a bank
parking lot. One day, when I went out to my car to take a break, I noticed that my car
literally had been littered with these cards. There wasn't just one card on my windshield
— they were all around the front, down the sides, and around the back. And I thought,
"These people are relentless! They are crazy. Why won't they just leave me alone? They won't
go away." So I took them all off of my car, and I came
back into the building, and my manager, really in a hateful way, said, "You're gonna throw
those away, right?" And me, being the person that I am, I threw
them all away except for one. And I kept looking at it, day after day, and I would look at
it, and I would read it, and I would look it up and google the information, and then
I would close the page. And I would look it up at home, and then I would close the page.
Because I thought, you know, Planned Parenthood's gonna find out that I'm trying to contact
this organization. Well, when I left that day, I went home. I
was distraught. I told my husband: "I don't know if I just quit or if I got fired, but
I know I don't work there anymore."
Thank you, Annette. You're welcome.
In one month and two days, it will be 21 years. We were surrounded by a brick wall, barbed
wire. And the military police are saying, "Get in
line." I was not staying in line, literally or metaphorically.
I had already crossed the line, and I wasn't going back.
I was arrested for the first time for crossing the property line, trespassing the U.S. Army's
Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the School of the Americas. It was November 16th of 1997
— nine years to the day, that an El Salvadoran death squad went into the residence of six
Catholic university professors and Jesuit priests and murdered them, and their housekeeper,
and their housekeeper's 16-year-old daughter. The authoritarian Salvadoran government didn't
like the thoughts of peace and justice that those Jesuits were teaching, so they not only
killed them, they symbolically put some of their brains next to their bodies.
I spent many times weeping and wailing, wondering if I had helped train any of the members of
that death squad. Because from 1987 to 1989, I was an infantry soldier assigned to Fort
Benning, and I did support work for the U.S. Army School of the Americas.
The military police kept screaming, "Get back in line!" Yet my friends from Pax Christi
and Veterans for Peace, and others from around the country, and I, we were 601 people strong,
and we were already way out of line with our government, which wanted to use our troops
to support a greedy, unjust violent foreign policy of death, domination, destruction,
and waste. It was a foreign policy that was dehumanizing.
Our civil disobedience was a decision to be obedient to our conscience. And I gotta tell
ya, back then and now, and uh — is the mike on?— in the face of feeling fear and stress
that I might be imprisoned for six to eighteen months, in the face of wondering how I might
pay my rent and my bills if I was in jail, stressing about how this arrest might possibly
keep me from getting a job I wanted, in the face of possibly being called a traitor by
some of my army buddies, and lifelong friends and family – then, and now, I stand for
being someone who follows my conscience. And I stand for being a voice for the voiceless
in a system that silences them. And in the face of strong feelings of betrayal, by the
government and the army, in the face of sometimes just feeling so angry, in the face of the
temptation to react with anger and resentment, in the face of the temptation to judge and
label and put in a box and dehumanize the government as greedy and lying, and to dehumanize
the members of that death squad...I stand for being someone who, in my mind and in my
heart, rehumanizes them. Because then, in 1989, and right now, and forever, they are
human beings. And I remember that I am a human being, and I remember that I, once like them,
was a soldier who would've obeyed almost any order to kill. I trusted my leaders, and like
them, I was psychologically resocialized and trained to bypass my conscience and kill on
command. And I remember the one who redeems me from that greater death.
In the face of those walls and that wire, and those military police telling us to get
back in line, we did not get back in line. We stood in a circle, and we playfully sang
and danced the hokey pokey. And it was, at that point in my life, the freest I had ever
felt. It wasn't always like that.
When I was young, I wanted my life to be about a purpose, not just making money. There's
nothing wrong with that. But I, I wanted to be an Army ranger, and jump out of airplanes
and helicopters, and kill people! For freedom, and democracy, and human rights. I saw way
too many Chuck Norris and Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. War looks so exciting
on TV. And I went to the recruiter station, and I said, "I wanna be an airborne ranger."
And they said, "Well, we don't have anymore ranger slots."
I said, "I wanna be in airborne infantry." They said, "We don't have any airborne infantry
slots. You could be an airborne paratrooper." I'm like, *scoffs*, I'm Chuck Norris, right?
"When are you gonna have those slots?" "Um, next quarter."
"I'll come back next quarter." They're like, "Hey, hold on. We've got an
unassigned infantry assignment at Fort Benning." I'm like, "Fort Benning?! That's where they
have the airborne school and the ranger school!" And he's like, "That's right. And every basic
training class, the rangers are gonna come by and ask the drill sergeants, 'Who's just
really kicking butt?' And, and they can recommend you to be an airborne ranger."
I'm like, "Awesome!" And I signed up. And they dropped that promise just like I
dropped part of this microphone right here. And recruiters lie. We can talk more about
that later. So I went to basic training at Fort Benning...two
minutes to go, wow. And um, okay, some of this I'll do in parallels.
But uh, you know there was a time that I was so proud to be a soldier, and the first time
that I — I was in a training unit, I wasn't in combat
unit, so most of my time was training our own soldiers — but I remember this time
where my drill sergeant said that I was gonna train folks at the School of the Americas.
I had never heard of it. I was like, "What's that?" They said, "That's the school where our
military trains these officers from Latin America to protect freedom and democracy and
fight communists." And I
was like, "Cool!" And after the first day I did it, and I did it several days, I called
my mom, and I was like, "Guess what! Instead of training our soldiers who might maybe one
day fight the Soviet Union, today I'm training these guys that are actually fighting communists
to protect democracy in South America!" And my mother said, "I'm so proud of you, son."
I was proud of myself, too. And uh, years later, after some prayer, and
finding a Pax Christi group in New Orleans, and after switching from a criminal justice
major — 'cause I didn't get to kill anyone in the Army, so I thought I'd be a cop. 'Cause
gunfights look cool, and you know cops, they always do the morally upright thing, right?
Yeah. Anyway, um, but I had this change in heart,
after prayer, and I wanted to do something else, but I went to Jesuit University in New
Orleans, there was a Pax Christi group, and they had a speaker there from Haiti asking
us to get President Clinton to put President Aristide back in Haiti, it
was 1994, and we said, "Is there anything else?" And he said, "Yes. You can close the
U.S. Army School of the Americas." And I was like, "What is this guy talking
about? He wishes more of his soldiers went to the School of the Americas so they would
learn civilian rule of law over the military, and learn about democracy, and human rights."
And then he told me the truth. That the school was training death squads, all over the Caribbean
and Central America, that were murdering, torturing, raping, disappearing their own
citizens, who were fighting against brutal governments to have the same rights and freedoms
that we have. Some of them were fighting, and some of them were just organizing, nonviolently
— and my heart...wanted to vomit. And after a long period of time, it wasn't
just a change of opinion, it was...it was this painful change of identity. I identified
myself as a soldier, and as a veteran, as someone that does good, because the U.S. foreign
policy's always good, our orders are always good...and I couldn't stand in that identity
anymore and feel good about myself. And there's a lot of veterans who — unlike
me, because I never saw combat — who saw combat, and who did some things they might
not have even had time to think about doing, but maybe they wouldn't have done if they
had. And they are...they're hurting. (Oh, [the mike] it's gonna be needed with
the parallels) Okay. We have, uh...seven minutes devoted
to the schedule for you all to discuss the parallels that you've noticed between each
other. Yeah, thank you. So, one of the parallels
that we've already heard really is, you know, some of the lies in recruiting. Them telling
me that every infantry basic training class they're gonna offer ranger school. There,
there are a lot of — when you sign a military contract to enlist, the military doesn't have
to keep a single thing in that contract. It shouldn't even legally be a contract. And
when they recruit, they have, with the Leave No Child Behind Act, the military recruiters
have access to student records and student information. And they spend hundreds — they
get access to schoolchildren, and the United States didn't sign the Universal, the UN's
Declaration on Rights of the Child, because the U.S. would be in violation of it for military
recruiting of persons under the age of 18. Um, another one of the parallels, like Thad
was saying, not only the lies, but the leaving you behind after you leave, when you leave
the organization. When I left Planned Parenthood, it wasn't like leaving any other job. Um,
it...the way that I can best describe it is trying to leave a gang. Or trying to leave
the mafia. It's like blood in, blood out. And that's how I felt when I left Planned
Parenthood. I was scared to call And Then There Were None because I didn't know what
was going to come afterwards. And I found out, um, not even a week or so — I think
it was maybe a week or two after I'd left Planned Parenthood — I got an email saying,
"If you don't bring back the week's worth of deposits that you took when you left, we're
gonna file and press criminal charges." And I thought, "What week's worth of, of deposits
could I have possibly taken?" When I left that day, I turned over my keys to everyone,
you know the HR people, and they literally walked me to my vehicle. So then I start getting
scared, and I told my husband, you know, this is thousands upon thousands of dollars that
they're talking about that's missing. And they're blaming me for it. As the health center
manager, I'm the only one who had keys to everything, as well as to the safe, so I had
to think quickly. And I said, "Well, all the cameras that you had there in the building?
I suggest that you go back and review those cameras, and review the tapes, and see who
took the money — because I don't have it." And after that — well, it wasn't after
that, it was after I mentioned Abby Johnson's name as well — then they backed off and
left me alone. But it's that parallel as well, you know,
they...it's, "Not only did you leave, but we're gonna make you fearful that you left."
Thank you. One of the big differences, maybe the biggest,
in leaving the military before your contract is up and, and leaving an abortion clinic
is that, as difficult as it is for you, and I've heard Abby's story, to leave, when you're
in the military, it's against the law to quit. You, you — and the consequences are, you
know, prison, and a dishonorable discharge, and not being able to get a job you might
want because of a dishonorable discharge. I don't have a whole lot of time to talk about
conscientious objection, but I used to help conscientious objectors, if someone wants
to talk later, but conscientious objection — most soldiers don't even think it's — many
soldiers don't even know they can apply for it. They think it was from when you were drafted,
and they don't even know they have the right to do it. The chaplains themselves, that interview
people for conscientious objection, are often asking them all kinds of questions like, "What
are you? You're a Southern Baptist? What are you? You're a Catholic?" They're asking them
questions like about Baptist and Catholic theology and social teaching...that is not
criteria for being con — your own personal belief, is it sincerely and deeply held, and
are you opposed to all war? You couldn't participate in any war? So, I wanna say here today, we're
in this Catholic university: it's against the law to fully practice your Catholicism
in the military because if you wanna say, "Hey, I'm willing to fight and kill to defend
my country in a just war, but I'm not gonna take part in an unjust war" — if you don't
know what those are, come talk to me afterwards — that's against the law. If you become
a military pacifist, no war? Legal. The Supreme Court heard a case about this
in 1971. The vote was eight to one — didn't matter how many thousands of years there's
been church teaching on Just War. No. Incidentally, seven of those nine justices
also voted on Roe, also reinstated the death penalty. Just saying.
Um. Let's see. Oh, another thing is, is some of the language that's really dehumanizing.
You heard "POC," you know there's so much stuff in the military, you know. It's an enemy,
then it's not an enemy, it's a target, then it's not a target, it's "tango" because that's
the phonetic alphabet for T, and you kill someone, and it's "tango down." You fire a
missile, and it's "package is delivered." Um, and then — I'm really sorry, Aimee,
I'm gonna say the "C" word — "collateral damage" are innocent people that, you know,
when you look at modern warfare — depending on who you're reading it could be as high
as 90% or maybe as low as 40% of the people killed by militaries are not our enemies,
they're innocent civilians. They're women and children. And we justify that by calling
it "collateral damage." And many of us in this country will think
about that and what terrorists do and think that's okay, and I ask this question: What
action do you think our nation or our country could do, or has done, that you think would
justify some other country bombing your neighborhood, burning down your house, killing your children,
and calling them collateral damage?
It was the same way at Planned Parenthood. A lot of the verbiage and a lot of the terms
that we used were very dehumanizing. Like, I said, we called the POC freezer "the Nursery."
Not only that, a lot of the providers, as they were working with women, they would make
just rude and crude remarks, like I said, about their vaginas. About the shape, or the
smell, or, just rude and crude things. I remember I had a provider one time tell a woman, you
know, she said she couldn't take the procedure, "Well, obviously something was stuck in there
before — so you can take this." You know, just, and you would think to yourself that
it would be shocking to hear, but after you hear that so many times, and after you hear
providers say this to women, you start dehumanizing the women, and you start thinking the same
thing for the next client, and the next patient that comes through. "Well, why are you crying?
Why are you acting like this is painful? You had something in there before." And we would
actually laugh at these jokes and at these crude and rude things that the doctors would
say, and we would mimic it. We would repeat it. And we would say it to other people.
Okay. We are on time this, so, do you have something more pressing to say?
No. Um, real quickly, can I — you know, in the
military, mimicking and repeating is mandatory. There's marching cadences. There's songs about
killing. Drill sergeants saying, "What is the spear of a bayonet?" and you're saying,
"To kill! Kill! Kill!" We're marching, singing songs — this is in the 1980s — we're still
singing songs, racist songs, about Vietnam, about killing "gooks," we're using the word
"gooks" for Asian people. We're singing songs dehumanizing women. Um, the Army, after WWII,
realized enough people weren't firing at the enemy, so they employed social psychologists
to, to resocialize people to kill. We went from bullseyes to pop-up targets that pop
down real quick, so you only have a second to shoot.
They brought in, during my training, a supposed Russian officer, they made up some story about
why he got to address us, and he was insulting us, and saying, "If your capitalist system is so good,
why did you even enlist in the Army? It's because your mothers and sisters don't make
enough money on the street." And I was taking notes, that Russians were a-holes and I could
not wait to go to war and kill these a-holes. This is using psychology intentionally to
dehumanize people.
Thank you.
(Okay, I'm supposed to get this thing to go green. It's on, it's on, it's on, it's on?
It is on. There we go. It's green.)
Alright. Um, I was sitting, contemplating back in the 1980s about this whole debate,
over whether abortion constitutes killing or not, and I thought, well — you know,
let's go a little deeper than just, the philosophical premises and all this, let's see if people
who are doing abortions react to them the same way people react to killing people.
Well, I mean, we knew about combat veterans, they had battle fatigue, well the current
fancy name for that was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And uh, this is a diagnosis where
you have a really bureaucratic set of stuff in the American Psychiatric Association manual,
and a much looser definition in the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health
Organization, but basically, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has become a very well-developed
concept coming out of the American war in Vietnam. I mean, it had been developed, but
it then became much more clearly defined. I discovered that, uh, people were not thinking
in terms of getting PTSD from killing, even for combat veterans. You know, you, you get
shot at, you're traumatized. Your buddy dies, you're traumatized. But the idea that you
get traumatized from shooting somebody, at that point, wasn't in the literature. I searched
high and low, and I found a couple spots where they talked about committing atrocities, but
not just your normal killing that is expected. So I said, well, before I even look at abortion,
I'm gonna have to look at it: is killing traumatizing across combat veterans, executions, uh, criminal
homicides, and police who shoot in the line of duty? Police who shoot in the line of duty
is the exception that proved the rule — there was a huge amount of literature saying, yes,
they were traumatized by doing the shooting, but that was because it was the criminal's
fault, not theirs. So, all the more that they were virtuous people that they felt bad about
it. But the soldiers never got to feel bad about it. That was not supposed to happen.
So I worked through, and if you want to get webpages' worth of more information, you can
go to rachelmacnair.com/PITS, that's P as in Perpetration, I as in Induced, T as in
Traumatic, and S as in Stress. So, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, which is that form of PTSD
which is caused by acts of, actually causing the, the, usually killing, but torture will
do it as well. Ah, if you really want to get into it, I have a book called Perpetration-Induced
Traumatic Stress, and that's, you know, different chapters on different people. But then the
answer, when we went back to, when I went back to looking at abortion staff, the answer
was...yeah. Now, there was — there was a study that showed that, the, the government
had pulled together all these stats of like 1,638 combat veterans, and I was able to take
that, that information because it was publicly available, and there was one question: "Did
you kill or think that you killed anyone in Vietnam, yes or no?" Which is a ridiculously
poor way of asking the question, but that's all I had. So I divided people into two, and
sure enough, the PTSD was higher in the folks that had killed, and then when I took intensity
of combat into account, it wasn't just that the people who'd killed had heavier combat —
once I pulled that out, there was still trauma from killing. And, as I said, you can go to
the sources if you want more of the study than that, but that's what we have to study.
The American database is it, uh, the Israelis have done some, but mainly, there's very little
information on soldiers as a whole. However, in the next edition of the diagnostic manual
of the American Psychiatry Association — I was at that time dealing with version number
four — in version number five, they explicitly said, in the explanations that went with the
diagnosis, that you could get it from, from killing people. So that progress was made.
However, it was entirely, you know, if you're in the military. No idea of executions, certainly
no idea of abortion. Um, a word about moral injury: basically what
happened is that the Veterans' Administration and psychiatrists started up this idea of moral
injury and it took the place of Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, and it has a lot of advantages
over it, in terms of that they pay attention to whether you're drinking or not — I mean,
why drinking wouldn't be a possible symptom of PTSD is just purely a historical thing,
since, you don't have to have all of the symptoms, and obviously goes with being traumatized,
and with moral injury, and spiritual problems go with moral injury and feeling guilty goes
with moral injury. The problem with moral injury is that, by definition, you have to
have felt bad about what you did. So, you shoot an enemy soldier who's getting ready
to shoot you, if you hadn't done that, you'd be dead now, you feel fine about that, but
the three-year-old child who got caught in the crossfire — moral injury for the three-year-old
child, but not for the enemy soldier. But with Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress,
it includes the enemy soldier, and this is crucial because most violence is done by people
who believe it to be justified at the time of their doing it. And, I mean, you can get
to a point where, where what you're doing is suffering the trauma and finally it becomes a moral injury.
And then you get out of there. But, the fact is that there's traumatization, you're being
traumatized all along, because the human mind is not suited for killing people. That's what
I have to say. Um, resources.
Can I say a little bit about that? Oh, let me grab this. So, uh, just an obvious, glaring
example of what could be moral injury or, or PITS, is when you have drone operators
here in the United States flying — so they are no way in danger — and they, you know,
they're killing people, and they have trauma. And something else that we've noticed in the
veteran community — sometimes you can have someone with really bad PTSD, and they have
panic attacks, and their.....and when they, at some point, calm down or are less stressed
and not having panic attacks, they can start putting memories together, so, and then they'll
have, sometimes have moral injury, where they're feeling very guilty, and ashamed, and you
have someone that you're really concerned about suicide, maybe from PTSD, and then they
were fine, and then they were counseling other people for PTSD, and then they started evaluating
what they had done, and commit suicide for moral injury. And, so there's some resources
for that. Ah, one is, um, The Soul Repair Project, which you can look for online, the
Soul Repair Project will have resources for veterans with, with moral injury around the
country that you can find. Another resource for moral injury is uh, the Catholic Peace
Fellowship, in South Bend near Notre Dame University, they have a ministry called David's
Heart, and it's after, in the Bible, there's David's heart, remember he was grieving after
war, uh, and Saint Augustine talked about, uh, a deep-felt, a deep-felt, heartfelt grief,
which we think is similar to moral injury. Um, Shawn Storer, who runs that, has told
me stories of Vietnam veterans, thirty years after the war, who are Catholics, who would
not go to Communion because they thought that there was no way God could ever forgive them
for what they did. So that's a resource, those are resources for veterans, for moral injury,
and for PTSD, there's all kinds of things, of course there's the Veterans' Administration.
Uh, again, the great resource that I have for abortion workers is Abby Johnson's organization
And Then There Were None. I definitely suffered moral injury working in the abortion clinic,
um, when I first went my first retreat and actually calculated the number of abortion
procedures that I had participated in and seen, it was almost like I could relate to,
relate it to, the Holocaust. And I was so down on myself, um, but just that resource,
of having And Then There Were None, and the resource of having the retreats, the spiritual
healing, it was, it was wonderful, and I'm glad that that resource is there for ex-abortion
workers.
And the Catholic Peace Fellowship actually has retreats for veterans, and also for their
family members and current military. There's several more resources that I can name, I
wanna say, if you only remember one resource, to help both veterans and people in the military,
I would say it is the G.I. Rights Hotline. There are people who answer those calls almost
24/7, they're well trained. If they can't directly help you, they will find a resource
for you — and some of those I'm gonna give you, obviously, there's the Veteran Suicide
Hotline, um, you know, and being with other people, other veterans of the military who
have had similar experiences, you get this a lot, where people, combat vets, they'll
say, "Well, people, they just don't understand me. They don't get it." So there's Veterans
for Peace, there's Iraq Veterans Against War, there's all kinds of groups like that. If
you — there's again, the Veterans' Administration — if you know someone that's in the military,
ah, and wants to know their rights, G.I. Rights Hotline — if they're wanting to get out,
they can call the Center on Conscience and War. They've been around for 75 years, helping
people apply for conscientious objection, they figure out other ways to get out. There's
also — the Catholic Peace Fellowship also helps with that, not only with Catholic and
Christian troops. This is really interesting because it's another, it's a big difference
between the abortion industry and the military. The military's recruiting program is massive,
um, so there's actually all kinds of counter-recruiters and counter-recruiting information, and what
we have that I don't think we necessarily have with the abortion industry is the opportunity
to talk to children that are of recruiting age, and teens and young adults of recruiting
age, because more than likely, a military recruiter's gonna call them. They spent $600
million on their annual recruiting budget, and they didn't make their numbers. [Wooh!]
Yes! Thank you. There's a national network opposing the militarization
of youth, and they're a great group, there's plenty of local groups around.
Um, Planned Parenthood does the same thing; Planned Parenthood has billboards up, um,
they actually go into, starting as early as elementary schools, they have anti-bullying,
um what do you call it, campaigns, and that is their way of getting into the schools to
talk to children. They supposedly also do sex education campaigns, but that's their
way of getting in and starting as early as elementary school.
[It's grooming.]
Yeah. It's grooming. That's basically what they're doing. They're grooming. So when children,
as early as elementary school, they see Planned Parenthood come in for the anti-bullying campaigns,
then they see Planned Parenthood because of the sex education, then when they become sexually
active, and they need to go to a clinic, for — even if it's just family planning, if
they want birth control — the first thing they're gonna think of is, instead of their
regular local OBGYN or regular clinic, they're gonna think Planned Parenthood, because they've
been groomed from such an early age to come, and Planned Parenthood is your "friend."
And another thing that Planned Parenthood does is, they try to separate the child from
the parent; and so, their thing is, "Planned Parenthood: we're your friend. You know, your
parents are not gonna understand, so you need — you can come to us, you can talk to us
about anything." And one of the things that was shocking to me, when I started working
at Planned Parenthood, was — there was something called a judicial bypass. So, you know, even
if your child comes in as early as twelve years old, and they're pregnant, if they say,
"I have a fear that I'm gonna be beaten or I'm gonna be put out of my home if I tell
my parents that I'm pregnant," they can go to, they can get a judicial bypass, they can
go to the courts, there's a certain judge that will sign this judicial bypass, and they
can have someone who's of the age eighteen or older, just anyone, bring them into the
clinic, and they can have this abortion procedure without parental consent.
Okay, the next thing on the agenda was "How to be effective: what to say and not to say
to troops, veterans, and abortion clinic workers."
Super quick — Aimee gave me permission to jump in. We have so many clients from all
walks of the industry, and so I wanted to add to what Annette was sharing based on some
testimonies from some of our other clients who worked as community advocates. They actually
— Planned Parenthood has a program where community advocates — this is somebody who
doesn't even actually work at the abortion clinic, they work for Planned Parenthood,
they're doing community service projects, like gardening for little old ladies, and
things like that — and what they're doing is, they are training students to be the sex
educators in their schools as peer educators, and these teens are being groomed to be future
abortion workers. That is their goal, is that they can train up these students to then start
interning and working with Planned Parenthood, so that is an actual recruiting program that
they do have.
[It's the same sort of psychological manipulation that Thad was talking about, in military recruiting
and training.]
Right, and it's very —
So do you want to address what to say and not to say to abortion workers?
Oh. So, um, one thing to say — well, I wanted to address also, um, one of the slogans that
And Then There Were None has is "Nobody grows up wanting to be an abortion worker," and
so Planned Parenthood is working on trying to change that, by grooming the children,
and having them want to grow up to be abortion workers.
But things to say and not to say to abortion workers. So, I always tell people, when you're
a sidewalk advocate or you're outside, the best thing you can do is just be human. Rehumanize.
Be human, and talk to the abortion workers like they're normal people. You know, "How's
your day going?" You know, "Your outfit looks nice," or, you know, just be a normal human
being. When you're out there with a bullhorn, and you're screaming scriptures, and you're
calling them murderers, and you're being just completely negative, you're not gonna grasp
their — well, you're gonna grasp their attention, but you're gonna grasp it in a negative way.
They're gonna, you know, they're gonna have a manager, who was like I was, who's gonna
call the police, and have you trespassed from the property. Um, one thing I remember is
there was a sidewalk advocate when I was working at Planned Parenthood, she would never scream
out scriptures, she would never hardly even say anything but "good morning" or "good afternoon."
She was always there, she would come, she would kneel, she would be on the sidewalk,
and she would pray. She was the one who caught my attention, moreso than any of the other
people that were out there screaming, you know, their explicits with their bullhorns.
So, the thing, if you don't take away anything else, but just remember this, is to just be
human when you're talking to the abortion workers. We have, um, another, a client who
went through a very traumatic experience, and actually lost a family member, and she
had sidewalk workers who were yelling at her, you know, "This is why you lost that family
member, because you're working here." That's not — that's not the way to go about it.
You know, the best way would've been, you know, "I'm sorry that you lost your loved
one." You know, "What can we do for you? Can we pray for you?" or "I am praying for you."
But to be negative, and to — we had people who would come and bring miniature-sized baby
coffins to the clinic and just have them all over the sidewalks, and you know, giant crosses
and crucifixes. That grasps attention, but that grasps the wrong type of attention. You're
not looking for negative attention, you're trying to do relationship-building with the
abortion workers, so you want to be able to have a conversation with them, and the only
way somebody's gonna want to have a conversation with them is if you're loving and if you're
genuine with them. So that's the one takeaway that I would have.
Thank you, Annette. I, I think one of the things we're gonna find here talking is that,
whether you're pro-life and talking to an abortion clinic worker or a peace activist
talking to a soldier — which, I don't find that super difficult, I find it more difficult
to be a peace activist talking to a politician, but — um, but anyhow, or you want to abolish
the death penalty and you're talking to, you know, someone who's wanting to execute people,
that it's really about being human, isn't it? Isn't it? And so, before I talk about
what to say or not say, I really want to talk about how to be.
Like, don't be triggered and angry and resentful and presumptuous in these conversations. You
know, you're not — there's a way to talk to someone where you can almost predict they're
gonna get defensive and judgmental and feel attacked and attack you back, and communication's
not gonna happen there, right? So, look at yourself — do some meditation, do some therapy,
some contemplative prayer, some reevaluation counseling, just some catharsis for whatever
you're upset about. Um, ah, you can get training in these types of things with reevaluation
counseling, Landmark Forum, they have communication courses, authentic relating games — a friend
of mine has a thing called Vision Force where there's an honor window where you can look
at how you're judging people and switch that to, "What is it they're standing for?"
So, talking — one of the things that I found effective, and I learned from Vision Force
is, if there's someone that — I had one time a conversation with the former commandant
of the School of the Americas, and if you didn't catch it I don't like the School of
the Americas. There was a protest of the School of the Americas and lobbying in D.C., and
there were like, I don't know, 400 people there to close the School of the Americas.
Colonel Trumble felt so strongly about standing up for the school that he showed up on his
own, facing 400 people. And I saw him on a park bench, eating, and I walked up to him,
and, and this is what I said. I said, "Hey, Colonel Trumble," I said, "Listen. I used
to be with the 29th infantry regiment at Fort Benning and did support work for the school,"
so I got related, right? Get related to people. And I said, "Listen, I'm here for this
protest — I know we disagree on the School of the Americas, but I have to tell you. There's
400 people opposing what you're up to, and you came here on your own, and even though
we disagree, I just, I just wanna give you props, I want to respect you for that."
Um, and when you do something like that, people can drop their wall, and they don't feel judged,
and they're not guarded, and you can — you're more likely to have a conversation. If you
can — even if you disagree with someone, if you can get what they're standing for,
you know, like someone who might be really pro-war, they're standing for safety and security,
you know. And what their emotion is, and have them really feel like they were "gotten,"
you know? Like, you feel them. And then, you can — oh, wrap it up? Alright. So, ah —
I think, actually, that's a beautiful ending right there. Okay. It's a very beautiful ending
point. We are over time, so the, the Q&A will have to be, like, over lunch — these folks
will be here. So if you have a burning question, go straight to them and ask them.
So let's go to lunch!
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