“If Google thinks being prolife is propaganda, someone make me a t-shirt because I ain’t ashamed,” tweeted Ashley Bratcher, the actress who played Abby Johnson — a former abortion clinic director — in the hit movie Unplanned. Bratcher was responding to Google choosing to call the film a work of “propaganda.”
Regardless of what Google and other pro-abortion critics have said about the movie, it has exceeded expectations at the box office — raking in millions of dollars in the face of a major media blackout effort — but most importantly, it has saved the lives of unborn babies.
Bratcher told Fox and Friends on Monday, “The response has been incredibly positive. I mean, through it all — this has been the most rewarding and fulfilling role I’ve ever had in my entire career. To be able to hear someone come up to you and say, ‘I was so affected by your work that I decided instead of having an abortion, that I’m now going to have my child’ — I don’t know how to really explain the way that feels to know that you could potentially just have saved a life.”
Bratcher added, “There are not a lot of actors who get to say that, and I am so honored to be able to have a part of this.”
Unplanned is a motion picture based on the book by Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood “employee of the year” who became a pro-life activist after seeing an ultrasound of a baby moving in a mother’s womb, trying to escape the abortionist’s suction equipment, before the baby is sucked out, leaving a blank space on the screen where the baby had been moments before.
There are other powerful scenes in the movie, as well, such as the one depicting a teen-age girl who almost died from an abortion and the clinic refused to call an ambulance, and the scene where Johnson’s own RU-486 induced abortion is depicted by Bratcher, complete with copious amounts of bleeding.
Many women who seek and receive abortions are woefully ignorant of what is actually involved in an abortion, but anyone who sees this movie will now know. The scene in which Johnson, played by Bratcher, sees the ultrasound in which the unborn child is sucked to death from a mother’s womb, demonstrates powerfully why many women who see an ultrasound of their own baby in the womb opt not to go through with the abortion.
It also explains why the pro-abortionists fight ultrasound laws.
Bratcher told Fox and Friends that she has been inundated with support from women sharing their own personal stories. “It’s literally incredible that people are being affected this much — this is why we did this movie,” Bratcher said. “And not only that, but being able to share my story with you guys — it’s not only the movie, but being able to share my heart and the fact that I care so much and that, we really do want to help women that we’re here to walk alongside of them.”
Helping women who are struggling with whether to abort their own child has been a cardinal point of the pro-life movement since its inception. While the unborn child is the primary victim of the abortionist, millions of women suffer tremendous guilt after undergoing the grisly procedure, and are clearly a second victim.
When I ran for state representative several years ago, I knocked on the door of a woman who asked me my position on abortion. I told her that I was pro-life, and her response was, “Well, I had an abortion when I was 17 years old.” I then expected to be verbally assaulted, but instead she told me that she had nightmares for 10 years after having had the abortion. Even after she became a Christian, she said, she continued to feel guilt at having had an abortion, until one day she felt God had forgiven her.
Such stories are no doubt part of the reason that Unplanned has been so successful, despite the efforts of the media and tech giants Twitter and Google to thwart its effectiveness. Samantha Bee, a liberal comedian, called it “anti-choice propaganda.” This seems to be the pro-abortion talking point, as Google refused to take any advertising for the film and classified it as “propaganda.” It told the writers of the movie, Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, that the movie was being denied because it took the pro-life side of the abortion issue. Konzelman and Solomon predicted that Netflix and Amazon Prime will refuse to have anything to do with the movie, as well.
Twitter suspended the movie’s account, erasing 50,000 followers shortly after the film debuted. A spokesman for Twitter claimed it was a mistake.
Even before the film hit the big screens, efforts to diminish its impact included its being assigned an “R” rating.
Despite all of this, the movie has remained in the Top Five at the box office, and is both making money and saving the lives of unborn children.