Pro-life movement mourns the passing of abortionist-turned pro-life apostle

Pro-lifers around the world are mourning the death of abortionist-turned pro-life apostle Dr. Haywood Robinson.

Robinson had performed abortions for 14 years before experiencing a conversion and becoming a staunch advocate for the unborn.

He died July 25 at the age of 74.

Robinson had a “unique impact,” said Shawn Carney, president of 40 Days for Life. “He had the spiritual maturity and healing to effectively share the barbaric nature of abortion and the hell that he had come from.”

“It’s a very difficult thing to do,” Carney told Catholic World Report. “It’s hard to balance, and most can’t do it.”

“You knew he was solid in his faith; he had a great sense of humor,” Carney said. “But he was not going to shy away from the fact that abortion is murder, that he committed murder—in his words, that he was no different from a Nazi—and that this is the injustice of our time.”

Robinson was raised poor in Los Angeles and was the first member of his family to go to college. He received training in abortion procedures as part of his medical education at Martin Luther King/Charles R. Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. His future wife, Dr. Noreen Johnson, was also a resident at the hospital.

In the 2023 book The Scalpel and the Soul: Our Radical Transformation as Husband and Wife Abortion Doctors, Robinson recounted how the doctors in training were desensitized to the horror of abortion. The procedure, which was presented as another component of healthcare, was initially abhorrent but became less and less so with repeated exposure.

After a med school romance, Robinson and Johnson married. The couple moonlighted as abortionists to supplement their income as physicians. In The Scalpel and the Soul, Johnson described doing “40 abortions on a weekend at $50 each”—a lucrative practice in 1979.

Conversion

In 1986, after a Christian concert and a friend’s witness, the couple experienced a “huge conversion,” Carney said.

“They immediately threw themselves into the pro-life movement,” he said, sharing their testimony of doing abortions, defending the unborn, holding medicine accountable, and witnessing about their conversion and the mercy of God.

40 Days for Life began its work in College Station, Texas, where Robinson and Johnson had a joint private practice. Robinson was at the first vigil the fledgling organization held outside an abortion clinic in 2007.

Robinson “was very much involved” with 40 Days for Life as it spread across the United States and became an international movement, Carney said.

It now hosts prayer vigils outside abortion facilities in 71 countries, has seen the closure of 187 abortion facilities, and has saved more than 26,000 babies from abortion.

Initially on 40 Days’ board of directors, Robinson left the board so he could work full time for the organization when he retired from medicine, serving as its director of medical affairs and education.

A New Chapter

Johnson died in 2021. Robinson was “literally heartbroken,” Carney said, as he first experienced the heart problems that would eventually take his life.

But God had a new chapter in store for him. At a 40 Days for Life event, Robinson met Daphne Harris Nicely, a pro-life leader from Atlanta. Robinson and Nicely were married in 2023 and continued working in the pro-life movement, traveling and speaking about abortion.

“As hard as it was, obviously, losing Noreen, as far as his global impact and what he was doing, I don’t think he would have scripted it any different as far as the end of his life,” Carney said, adding that Robinson was “a very happy man.”

Daphne Robinson announced her husband’s death in a Facebook post on July 25, voicing her “profound heartache.”

“Protecting and advocating for the unborn and defending all vulnerable life created in the image of God was core to who my husband was,” she said.

She noted that in addition to serving with 40 Days for Life, Robinson was director of continuum of care for Journey of a Lifetime, which provides support for families with a life-limiting or adverse diagnosis during pregnancy.

“Jesus’ hands to rescue abortion workers”

Robinson was a familiar face at 40 Days for Life vigils. Leonore Schuetz, a 40 Days for Life leader in Thousand Oaks, California, calls him “an encourager.”

Robinson “had one of the most chilling, raw, honest conversion stories,” Schuetz said.

‘After I talked to him personally, or listened to his speeches, I was fired up and convicted that I’m truly called to this mission,” she said.

Robinson “wasn’t on a mission just to save babies,” Schuetz said. “He strived to be Jesus’ words, hands, and compassion to rescue abortion workers.”

At one 40 Days for Life vigil, Schuetz recalled, “a question was posed about pro-lifers being accused of only caring for babies being born and not following up.” Robinson encouraged his wife to answer: she spoke about her work providing perinatal and post-natal care for low-income moms in Georgia. The couple were working to expand that network of care at the time of Robinson’s death.

Abortion leaves deep scars, and Robinson was no exception. After his conversion, he turned for help to Dr. Philip Ney, a Canadian psychiatrist who had worked with other former abortionists. “He admitted he had to be broken down and reconstructed,” Schuetz said. “Yes, he’d been saved by the Lord, but he needed to face what he’d done to be fully human and healed.”

“He came to terms with the fact that he was really no different than the Nazis who turned the switches on for the gas chambers.”

Voicing a somber reality

That somber reality underlined everything Robinson said, Carney remembers, despite his ready sense of humor. “He loved life; he was very joyful, but in every conversation, there would be something that was substantive.

“He could do sports and weather, but it’s not going to end there … He had a very unique quality about him, and that is for sure going to be the vacuum that he leaves.”

Robinson often said things that were hard to hear. But he did so “in a way where everybody liked him afterwards,” Carney said, describing the reaction of prisoners at a maximum security prison in Texas where Robinson once spoke.

“Most of you are murderers,” Robinson told the prisoners. “But so am I. But the injustice is that I get to walk around because abortion is legal, and you’re incarcerated.” Afterward, many of the prisoners shared their own abortion stories and expressed their appreciation for his words.

In recent years, Robinson frequently took high schoolers on tours of the former Planned Parenthood facility that later became 40 Days for Life’s headquarters. Many of those high schoolers later shared that they went into the tour thinking abortion “sometimes was good,” but changed their minds after hearing Robinson’s words.

If Robinson could say one thing to young people today, he would say what he told those students: that “abortion is the greatest injustice of our time,” Carney said.

“And that whatever you can do to end the killing of pre-born children, you need to do.”