Exclusive: Dr. Haywood Robinson tells his story, from abortionist to pro-life champion

CV NEWS FEED // Dr. Haywood Robinson, M.D., shared the story of his unbelievable transformation from a young doctor swept up in the post-Roe proliferation of abortion to an integral force behind one of the world’s largest prayer movements to abolish it.

Robinson is the Director of Medical Affairs and Education at 40 Days for Life.

Along with his late wife Dr. Noreen Johnson – also an ex-abortionist who became a pro-life advocate – he wrote “The Scalpel and the Soul,” a book chronicling their journey.

Robinson spoke with CatholicVote at an event hosted by 40 Days for Life and Family for LIFE in Jacksonville, Florida, on Friday evening – following a speech in which he discussed his miraculous conversion from abortionist to champion of the pro-life movement.

A personal tragedy

In his speech, the doctor, now a Christian, said his “experience with abortions” began years before he started performing them.

He noted that in 1973, the same year of the Supreme Court’s now-overturned Roe v. Wade ruling, there was an “explosion of abortion facilities” in parts of the country.

Robinson said that in that very year, “I bullied my girlfriend into getting an abortion.”

“That baby would’ve been about 50 years old right now,” he said. “I probably would’ve had grandkids from that baby.”

Robinson recounted that when he returned to his community in Los Angeles for his residency training after medical school in the late 1970s, “I learned to do a procedure called the D&C, dilation and curettage.”

He explained this procedure is usually performed to treat women who suffered miscarriages but can be also used to abort a healthy pregnancy. The doctor added he was also explicitly trained to conduct abortions in the same hospital. 

At the time, “about six years after Roe v. Wade was passed,” performing abortions was considered “a very marketable skill” in parts of the medical community, he said. “There were abortion facilities all around Los Angeles – after hours, weekends – make good money.”

The deception behind abortion

Robinson said that although he was “not a believer” at the time, he still knew deep down there was something wrong about the abortions he was performing. 

“Scientifically you know life begins at conception,” he indicated. “But the enemy knows how to work within your mind and deceive you to make you think that what you’re doing, this evil thing you are doing is okay.”

The former abortionist pointed out that in some hospitals, abortions took place “no more than 50 yards” from the labor and delivery suite. “So, you’re killing babies in one part, and right on the same floor, you’re delivering babies.”

“I recognize, retrospectively, that it almost makes you godlike – the power to kill on one hand, and the power of life on the other,” he said. “That’s the reality of it. That’s the way the enemy wants you to think and gives you the false sense of godlike power.”

“God is always about addition and multiplication,” Robinson said during his speech. “Never about subtraction or division. The enemy is about divide and conquer.”

‘Pro-abortion in my mind’

The doctor said he eventually stopped performing abortions when he moved to Texas 1981, but he still continued to be “pro-abortion in my mind” until he became a Christian five years later. 

Between 1981 and his conversion in 1986, he said,

if a woman came into the office and asked for an abortion, I said, “No, we don’t do abortions,” but I’d give her a pamphlet. “Here’s where you can get an abortion.”

That’s just like doing it yourself, right? That’s accessory to the crime. I was still literally doing abortions in my mind and facilitating women getting them.

A ‘betrayal’

Robinson characterized abortion as a “betrayal” of a doctor’s Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.”

He told CatholicVote that after Roe v. Wade became law, “you would’ve thought that the overwhelming number of doctors who aren’t involved in abortion … far greater than 90%, would’ve stood up and said, ‘Time out.’”

“It wasn’t the case,” Robinson recounted. “We basically stood complacently by and allowed a small silent majority to come in and let this industry proliferate, using physicians’ greed … an industry of the shedding of innocent blood and selling baby parts.”

He compared the overwhelming majority of doctors at the time to the priest and the Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, who ignored and walked past a man who had been brutally attacked by robbers (Luke 10:31-32). 

“The priest and Levite walked by him. He needed help,” Robinson said. “These babies needed help from the doctors who were going to stand up for the principles of medicine that have stood for millennia.”

“It shows what happens when good men and women do nothing,” he added. “Evil prevails.”

Unplanned?

Robinson said that in the mid-2000s, he joined the then-newly formed 40 Days for Life in praying for 40 days and nights outside the Bryan-College Station Planned Parenthood facility in Texas – the same facility that was featured in the 2019 film “Unplanned.”

“What we noticed early on,” he said, was “that when we were out there praying,” the Planned Parenthood’s “business dropped as much as 50% to 75%, simply by us being out there praying, holding signs.”

“Also having sidewalk counselors to give information to women that would direct them to pregnancy resource centers, so they could give them life-affirming care,” he added.

This all made for an “easy-to-replicate model,” Robinson said. “You can do that in any city. You get a group of people, you get a campaign leader, get together.”

The doctor noted that the Bryan-College Station Planned Parenthood was the ninth “abortion facility to close due to 40 Days for Life prayer campaigns.” He said that a total of over 200 facilities have closed since 2007.

The racist roots of the pro-abortion movement 

“Abortion affects black women greater than their white counterparts by approximately 50%,” said Robinson, who is black. “One out of three black babies is aborted.”

He pointed out that Planned Parenthood foundress Margaret Sanger – widely seen as one of the key figures in advancing the modern American pro-abortion movement – “was a eugenicist that believed that certain races should not proliferate.”

Sanger believed that “black folks were kind of like human weeds,” Robinson said, and according to her “they had to have their population controlled.”

“The devil is an equal opportunity destroyer. He’ll take white or black,” the doctor stressed, while noting that “the eugenics movement forms a key cornerstone” of the abortion industry. 

Robinson pointed to L.E.A.R.N. (Life Education And Resource Network), of which he was one of the founding board members, “a small organization that has been around for a number of decades that does have a focus on black pro-life issues and black family issues.”

On its website, L.E.A.R.N. describes itself as “the largest, African-American, evangelical pro-life ministry in the United States.”

A global tragedy 

Robinson also said that abortion is “not just a United States thing.”

“The United States only accounts for 2% of the global abortions,” he indicated, adding that an estimated 63 million abortions are occurring every year across the world.

“The taking of innocent life is at an unbelievable intensity,” the doctor stated. “That’s why 40 Days for Life is global.”

“When you’re out there praying,” he said, “you’re actually holding hands with somebody in Poland, or London. We’re in this fight fighting a formidable enemy.”

Later in his remarks, Robinson highlighted that “it’s not really the number” of unborn children who are aborted – as one child aborted in the womb is one too many.

“God is a God of the one,” he stressed. “He saves us one at a time, he conceives us one at a time, and we’re all uniquely special.”

‘Our Posterity’

The doctor also implied how abortion is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. He pointed out that the framers of the document included in its preamble the phrase “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

The framers “understood that the same law that we had … your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is something that is God-given,” he noted. “The government didn’t grant it.”

Robinson added that this simple fact sets the United States apart from other Western nations, where rights are expressly granted by the government: “No, ours is different.”

“The purpose of our Constitution was to protect us from a government that would take our God-given rights away,” he said. “But people don’t think like that anymore.”

Rights “have to be handed down to the next generation so that we have the same thing replicated,” Robinson stated. “It’s not just about us, it’s about continuing this.”

‘Just say no’

Robinson told his audience to “just say no” to Amendment 4, the proposed pro-abortion amendment on Florida’s November 5 ballot. Early voting is currently open in the state.

“This is going to be like grass,” he warned. “You mow the grass, a week from now, you’re going to need to mow it again.”

“If it passes, how does it change what we have to do?” Robinson asked, stressing that there will still be abortions, regardless of their legality.

“Let’s deal with the reality that abortion was around prior to Roe v. Wade. It was around 2,400 years ago when Hippocrates wrote the oath,” he said. “Abortion is going to be around. Murder is going to be around. Harming children is going to be around.”

“The question is,” the doctor concluded, “will we officially as a country, return the rights of every human being to everyone from conception to natural death?”

Readers can find “The Scalpel and the Soul” by Dr. Noreen Johnson and Dr. Haywood Robinson here.

Readers can find more about L.E.A.R.N. here.