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Truth
is powerful and inbodies those who seek it with an open mind. |
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EX-ABORTIONIST
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Joseph
Randall works in Atlanta, Georgia. For ten years,
he was in the abortion business. He operated from
1973 when abortion became legalized through the abominable
Supreme Court rulings, Roe v. Wade and Doe V. Bolton,
until 1983 when he
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a Christian and stopped doing abortions. But during
that time he estimates that he was involved in 32,000
abortions.
Thirty-two thousand human beings.
I would like to tell you about my life – how it
began, how I got into doing abortions, how I got out
of doing them, and what I am doing now. First of all,
I was born. It doesn’t sound like much, does it?
No major feat, but actually it is! I guess you might
call me a victorious fetus. When I was born I was not
wanted. I was given up for adoption. You see, in a way
I was victorious because abortions were not common then--
they were illegal—and I was not aborted. Today,
I would have, no doubt, been aborted, I am sure. My
mother gave me up. I spent time in several foster homes
until I was adopted at age six. I was raised in a religious
home. A very nice couple - my parents - adopted me,
and they raised me up religiously. In fact, I was very
proud of that. I became interested in medicine quite
early in high school. I knew I was going to be a doctor
and I worked my way through the academic ladders up
through college, and so forth. I really took a great
deal of pride in that, after all, there was a great
deal of competition. When I was a teenager, I used to
talk to God. I would chatter informally back and forth.
Especially if I had problems, sort of like crisis prayer.
But that faded as I got more and more into my thing
- medicine- and as I got into college. I guess you might
say I put God on the shelf. He was just gathering dust
on the shelf, He didn’t have much meaning to me.
I was never committed to Him at all. Then I got into
my medical training. As part of the medical training,
we learned to do abortions. According to the chief of
my department, it was a necessary procedure. This was
in 1971. This was a few years before the law change
in the country, but it was legal in New York. After
all, we needed to serve women. We needed to do it in
a complete way. Our chief told us that if we didn’t
do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics
and gynecology because we wouldn’t be a complete
physician. He was a very influential man. When we started
doing the abortions, we had panels that the women had
to pass through before they had the abortion. They were
made up of nurses, social workers, doctors, psychologists,
psychiatrists and the like, to carefully see if the
women really were rather ill, medically or emotionally,
before they had the abortion. The abortions, when we
started were done by the D&C method - we did not
use suction then. In a D&C you dilate and curette
- you actually scrape the lining. This took 15 to 20
minutes sometimes. It was a bloody sort of thing. We
didn’t really like it, we felt uncomfortable about
it, but we did it. Things gradually changed - new technology
came along; we developed the suction procedure, and
thing went much more quickly. In addition, it wasn’t
as bloody, so it was easier to take. We were able to
do more abortions, and the panels went by the wayside.
We were doing too many to have them go through this
arduous, long process of evaluation. And then the severity
of the reasons needed for abortion, both medically and
emotionally, became less and less. It was a gradual
desensitization, so to speak. The media was very active
early on. It was probably one of the major influenced
on us. It told us that abortion was number one, legal,
that it was to serve women, it was to give women a choice,
more or less give them a freedom to grow and to take
their rightful place in society where they had been
kind of pushed down prior to that. We believed the lie
that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed
and killed from illegal abortions prior to the legalization
of abortion. It kind of made things feel a little bit
better. At this time of life, I got married and we moved
from Albany to Atlanta with the Army – Uncle Sam
got me. I spent two years there at Fort McPherson. During
that time, we had one baby, and then another. We have
two boys. I also began working in abortion clinics.
That was the newest thing. Something was happening to
me at this time, emotionally. I could do several hours
of abortion and feel nothing. Here I was a doctor, making
a lot of money, but something was not there. I had a
searching feeling from inside me. Something was missing.
I thought at first it might be love, so I took it to
the extreme and had a relationship with a woman outside
the marriage, and the marriage broke up. The sad part
of course was that two little boys lost a father in
the case. But, still I was determined. I felt that this
time, I finally had it made. I was a bachelor doctor
in Atlanta with everything before me. I got all the
women I wanted and all the good times. It was life in
the fast lane, so to speak. But I still had this gnawing
emptiness inside. What happened then was a Christian
girl came into my life and influenced me. The reason
she came into my life was because the only prerequisite
I had for dating somebody was that they looked good.
She happened to look good. So with that great motivation,
the Lord twisted it around. She broke up with me, but
in doing so, she gave me two Scriptures. Now that should
have had absolutely no influence on me, but for some
reason these Scriptures meant something to me. They
were Jeremiah 15 and Psalm 139: 13-18. She knew I did
abortions and felt terrible about them. She was hoping
to change my mind, and I kind of laughed. But when I
read them I did not laugh. It was just as if there was
a knife that went right through my middle. It made me
realize that instead of serving women, I was killing
babies. What those Scriptures say, briefly, is that
God knew us before we were conceived. He knew all the
babies I killed before they were conceived. He had plans
for their lives. They became human to me, they became
babies. I didn’t stop doing abortions, but I did
feel very uncomfortable doing them. At the same time,
I started doing the D&E procedure. In this procedure
the babies are bigger, they are fully formed, and you
are tearing them apart from below. I was sent to Chicago
to learn this procedure, because no one else knew how
to do them safely. So I started doing them, and then
I really started to feel uncomfortable. I think the
greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. The
baby really came alive on TV and was moving. That picture
of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than
anything. We used the ultrasound to determine how far
along a pregnancy was. The nurses had to help with this
because we got paid more the further along a pregnancy
was. We started to lose nurses and other staff. They
couldn’t take looking at it. At this point I really
began searching for the truth. I joined the Lion’s
Club, became Vice President of the Medical Society,
I even searched for the truth in the occult. Just as
I was about to try psychic surgery, God put an activist
into my life. A Christian activist who worked for me
part-time, but for God full-time. He put her right in
my office. Her name was Becky. Becky was married and
she became a friend of mine, partly because she took
in foster children. She adopted a couple of them later
on. I appreciated that because I was in foster homes
before I was adopted. So I liked that, and God knew
that. Now the key about Becky was that she did not like
abortions. She never judged me, though; she never put
me down; she became my friend. She loved me. Despite
the fact that every week, I would go down to the clinic
and do my abortions in great numbers. But she stuck
with it. She also took me to church, a large church
that believes in spreading the truth about the Gospel
of Jesus Christ to everybody, every week. I became gradually
convinced that what they said in church was truth. I
wanted to become a Christian, but I knew I couldn’t
be a good Christian abortionist. It just didn’t
make sense. So now I was on the fence. Now, what kept
me on the fence for a year and a half was money. I had
become trapped by the money. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t
give up money for certain things, but not my whole life.
I was getting divorced. In my case, my wife got two-thirds
of my income. Now half of my money was tied up in doing
abortions, and the other half in a gynecology practice.
(I mention a gynecology practice because I didn’t
do obstetrics. I couldn’t deliver babies. I just
didn’t do that. I said I was giving up delivering
babies because my abortions were my deliveries.) Anyway,
I assumed I would go immediately bankrupt. So I was
going to wait until I finished paying off my wife, it
would have taken about a year, before I quit doing abortions.
But the voice said: Do it now. Trust me. So on October
23, 1983 (it was a Saturday), I went and did my last
abortions on just a few patients. And that evening I
said No to the money and Yes to God, and I called up
Becky. She was so excited! The next day I went down
to church and opened my mouth and confessed with my
mouth that Jesus was Lord an went right up to the altar
and cried there with the best of them at the altar.
Then, on the way out of church, I saw this blue brochure
for a crisis pregnancy center. I just looked at it and
kind of felt that this was what I should be involved
with. So I picked it up and called the center and said
I needed to speak to the head of it. I told them I was
a doctor in Atlanta and had done many, many thousands
of abortions, and that I came to Christ the day before
and now wanted to do everything to save babies instead
of taking their lives. Well, there was this silence
on the phone. You could hear a pin drop, but what I
did hear was his Adam’s apple going up and down,
He squeaked out: We’ve got to talk. So we went
down by a lovely river in Atlanta and we talked. He
told me that people were going to need to hear this
– and now I know exactly what he meant. |
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