Abby Johnson speaks to about 650 guests at Pro-Life Wisconsin’s annual Love for Life Gala in Brookfield on Oct. 10. (Photo courtesy of Pro-Life Wisconsin)

Abby Johnson describes how, as a Texas A&M student, Planned Parenthood recruited her at a job fair with the promise of helping women in need.

Johnson took the job even though something didn’t sit right.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong because I didn’t tell my parents I worked at Planned Parenthood for a year and a half,” Johnson told about 650 people attending the sold-out Pro-Life Wisconsin Gala in Brookfield earlier this month.

Employed there for six years, everything changed the day she was asked to help with an ultrasound-guided abortion. Watching a 13-week-old baby’s heartbeat on the screen, Johnson, who had had two abortions, was overcome by the indisputable reality of life.

The image reminded her of the ultrasound she had seen of her own daughter: How could this not also be a baby?

Johnson recalled those events and discussed her life since then as the keynote speaker Oct. 10 for the annual Love for Life event at the Brookfield Conference Center.

Johnson, a prominent pro-life advocate in the 16 years since, also founded And Then There Were None, a ministry that helps abortion clinic workers leave the industry. Her memoir, “Unplanned,” which chronicles her dramatic shift from pro-choice to pro-life activism, was adapted into a 2019 movie of the same name.

She also spoke about her husband, Doug, and their eight children, and how the work of organizations like Pro-Life Wisconsin had been instrumental in their lives.

Johnson and her husband became Catholic a couple years after she left Planned Parenthood, when their oldest and then-only was four. In addition to her other work, she is a certified Natural Family Planning instructor, but jokes that she has no clients.

“I hear it works, but no one trusts me,” the mother of eight laughed.

Johnson shared stories about their growing family.

“Our oldest, Grace, is 18, and we have four boys in a row; they are now 13, 12, 11 and 10. Then we said to the Lord, we will have one more, and went to Rome to Mother Teresa’s canonization, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fine if we came back with a baby?’” she said. “We were so sure that we knocked it out of the park that we bought a baptismal gown from Assisi while we were there. Well, we came back with twins, and we were like, ‘Who gets the Assisi gown and who gets the Amazon one?’”

The twins are now eight and the couple also has a six-year-old.

But 10 years ago, before the trip to Rome, she was speaking at a pro-life event, and after a call from a friend, she began adoption proceedings for a baby, without her husband’s knowledge.

“Now whenever I come home from an event, he is a little nervous that I am coming back with another baby,” she said.

Johnson and Doug’s fourth child was just 6 months old when she received the call from a friend about Jude’s need for a home. Two adoptions had fallen through for him; one because the birth mother was deaf and the couple didn’t want a deaf child, and the other because the boy was biracial.

“When asked to adopt this baby, I said, ‘Sure, we haven’t slept in years, so throw another in,’ so I said ‘yes,’” she explained. “I told my husband later, and he was kind of mad at first and didn’t talk to me for a few days, which was fine, as I was on the road,” said Johnson. “Eventually, he did call me and said that he had been thinking and praying about it and said we should move forward and look to the future. I told him that I was glad to hear him say that because the lady who was going to do the home study would be there the next day.”

Adopting Jude reinforced for Johnson how vital organizations like Pro-Life Wisconsin are to moms with unexpected pregnancies.

“Life is so important — from the moment of conception — and all life matters; there is no exception,” she said. “Planned Parenthood will tell you that abortion is healthcare. You cannot call something healthcare that leads to the deliberate, intentional killing of a human being.”

Johnson added that when she left the abortion industry, they called her a hero. She disagreed.

“I am not a hero. I stopped killing babies and stopped committing a grave, unjustifiable evil,” she said. “But I have changed from a culture of death to a culture of life. I try to bring Jesus Christ to people, follow the Gospel, and I have changed the trajectory of my life. That is what we are all to be about.”