I was quite looking forward to reading this, despite - or perhaps because of! - the differences of opinion I have with the author. She's a pro-life Christian, and I am a pro-choice atheist. Well, so what - it's good to read things from other people's perspective. And despite this fundamental disagreement, a lot of this book was enjoyable to read. It's well-written, and I can admire the author for having the courage to follow her convictions (at considerable cost) when those convictions changed. Going from the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic, to a pro-life advocate, can not have been - and by this account was not - an easy transition. I can sympathise, too, with her disgust at the prospect of increasing clinic income by increasing abortion - although admittedly, if her country will insist upon treating healthcare as a business instead of a right, then such a thing is inevitable. So, I was expecting to give the book three stars, liking it even though I disagreed with many of Johnson's decisions.

But as I read on and on, there were a couple of things that bothered me... and bothered me increasingly. There's something of unacknowledged hypocrisy here. Johnson argues - and correctly so, I think - that language can be used to direct argument and manipulate people. Her frequent example, because this is something she comes back to more than once, is that Planned Parenthood's use of "foetus" rather than "baby" helps women carrying unwanted pregnancies to dissociate from the reality of their situation. And I can see her point... but as much as she hates this linguistic tactic when Planned Parenthood uses it, she does the same thing herself, and does it lots. Examples are the constant referencing of women who have had abortions as "victims," when many are frankly nothing but relieved and would certainly not described themselves as victimised. (I'm thinking of studies like Rocca et al., "Decision Rightness..." 2015, though admittedly that was after this book was published.) More disturbingly, this tendency appears yet again towards the end of the book when Johnson and the Coalition for Life are celebrating the closure of multiple "abortion centres," including the one she used to run.

But here's the thing, and this is what fundamentally bumped this down to two stars. The celebration was not of the closure of "abortion centres," hypocritically emotive and manipulative as those words may be. Johnson didn't direct an abortion centre. She directed a Planned Parenthood clinic. These are not the same thing, and Johnson spends much of the first half of the book explaining the non-abortion services those clinics provide: contraception, health checks, sex education... all these useful, necessary services go when the clinics go, and she completely ignore this. It's the ignoring that irritates me. This whole thing has been marketed as a journey, from pro-choice to pro-life, and journeys, at least in my mind, require some sort of progress. Johnson was able to sublimate her own doubts about abortion and work at Planned Parenthood for so many years because she was able to ignore what she felt were the realities of abortion in favour of the services she wanted to promote. Come the end of the book, that determined ignorance has flipped itself around but not moved an inch. She is able, completely and thoroughly, to ignore the very real consequences of taking away essential health services (smear checks, contraception, and the like) from numerous communities, in favour of an agenda she, again, wants to promote. It's like she's incapable of seeing in more than black and white. The black and white have changed positions, but apparently grey is still beyond her.