In an exclusive interview with Live Action president and founder Lila Rose, former abortionist Dr. Beverly McMillan spoke about her conversion from being pro-abortion to being pro-life — and recalling the moment she realized she could never commit an abortion again.
The desire to help women
Raised Catholic, McMillan grew up wanting to be a doctor. After beginning college, she realized most of her professors and fellow students didn’t believe in God. She felt she needed to make decisions about her own life and she decided she wasn’t going to live by the Ten Commandments anymore. She recalled going to Mass one last time to say goodbye to God. It would be 14 years before she went to church again.
It was during her residency in obstetrics and gynecology in 1969 that McMillan was first exposed to abortion when she spent six weeks in the “infected OB ward.” There, between 5 pm and midnight each evening, patients were brought in from the emergency room. Each of them was bleeding and had an enlarged uterus. None of them would talk.
“That first night, I was on call. I was sitting at the nurses’ station writing out orders and such and I happen to overhear the nurses talking and it suddenly hit me what was going on. Ahh! These women were coming from the back alley abortion mills of Chicago,” she said. “They weren’t talking because the abortionists falsely told them that if admitted to having an induced abortion they were going to get into legal trouble. Not true. The abortionists would and of course, they were protecting themselves. And it all kind of, ‘Oh this is what’s going on.'”
Botched abortion still today is often not acknowledged as an abortion when women arrive in the hospital. Abortionists still advise women to lie about an abortion whether it is legal or illegal, chemical or surgical. In either case, women won’t be prosecuted and the abortionists are actually protecting their own interests.
McMillan frequently carried out D&C procedures on the women who were brought in, in order to remove any infected tissue from the abortion. She said most abortionists back then didn’t even attempt to do a complete abortion but would break a woman’s water and tell her that when she is cramping and bleeding to go to the hospital and claim to be having a miscarriage. She said the women were treated “like trash.”
Her heart was with wanting to help women and she began to think that in order for women to not be treated so poorly, abortion should be legal.
Becoming an abortionist and its effects on her
By 1973, McMillan was married and living in Kentucky with three children. Abortion was legalized a year later, and she began offering first-trimester abortions to her patients. In 1974, she and her family moved to Jackson, Mississippi where there were no abortion businesses. Then, an abortion organization called Family Health Services asked McMillan to be its doctor. She agreed and the clinic opened in 1975, committing first-trimester D&C abortions. In all, she estimates she carried out about 500 abortions. She lived a comfortable life, but she was miserable.
Watch Dr. McMillan as she describes the D&C suction aspiration abortion in the video below:
It was during this time that McMillan purchased the book “The Power of Positive Thinking,” which helped lead her back to God. The first chapter of the book tells readers to repeat 10 times daily, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” McMillan chose not to do that — at first.
“At that point I was desperate,” she told Rose. “It was January/February of ’76. Miserable weather. Sun hadn’t been out in a month. It was raining and cold. And I was at the point of having suicidal thoughts so I finally just gave up and said, ‘Okay I’ll say that darn thing.’ I was in my car in the doctors’ parking lot at Baptist Hospital when I finally gave up and just said, ‘Okay I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ At that point, I had a remarkable experience. The presence of Jesus Christ in the back seat of the car behind my right shoulder like the hound of Heaven jumping out of the underbrush.”
After that, she began becoming more and more uncomfortable committing abortions and she began going to church. She continued to run the abortion business, counting body parts as she suctioned apart the babies. One of the last abortions she did was a 12-week D&C — and afterward, she showed a curious staff member how she would account for all body parts.
“It was a little boy, you could easily tell that,” she said. “Off by itself was this little arm with this perfectly formed bicep muscle. And I had this cha-ching moment. My youngest son was, I guess, about three years old at the time and he was trying so hard to keep up with his big brothers. And he would go around saying, ‘Look at my muscle! Look at my muscle! I’m strong enough!’ And something connected and just this wave of sadness came over me and I just thought, you know, ‘What am I doing? Five minutes ago this little boy was all together in one piece and now here he is.’ And I just couldn’t do abortions after that.”
She remained at the abortion business, making the schedule but not committing abortions. Several months later she realized she needed to join the church and began taking her sons. At that point, she knew she had a decision to make. She knew she couldn’t walk into the church while being a part of the abortion business. So she resigned.
Becoming pro-life
In 1980, McMillan was invited to a meeting of Christian physicians to help the newly formed pro-life group for the state. It was there that her medical training was “refiltered back through the scriptures.” She still believed abortion was okay for rape, the mother’s health, and prenatal diagnosis.
“I had to rethink a lot of things,” she said. “And ya know, medical problems in the mother. I had never encountered at that point, nor have I since, a woman that needed to have an abortion for her health and life.”
She added, “It’s like a graph. If you have health on the up and down axis and time horizontal, you have mother’s health going down, down, down over nine months. You have a baby’s chances of survival going up over nine months. What I learned to pray for was ‘Lord, let me recognize when those lines cross.’ That’s the time — not for an abortion — for a planned early delivery.”
McMillan became fully pro-life and began to share her experience and knowledge. She had divorced in 1979 and later married Roy, a pro-life man who ran was arrested as many as 20 times for his efforts to save babies from abortion.
She urges women who are considering abortion to visit a pro-life pregnancy center. She said raising a child won’t be without pain, but neither will an abortion. She warns that abortion comes with an increased risk of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide. “That means that something has happened that violated something very tender, very real in you,” she explained. However, there is healing and forgiveness.
“Abortion is not the unforgiveable sin and I know that. I regret what I did but I’m at peace with God’s forgiveness and he’s given me the grace to forgive myself,” she said. “I would just say, ‘Believe that.’ Jesus said himself, he didn’t come for the righteous. He came for us.”
