Dr. Joseph Randall

Former Abortionist: Dr. Joseph Randall

Former Occupation: Abortionist Place: Atlanta, Georgia, USA

About   Dr. Joseph Randall works in Atlanta, Georgia. For ten years, he was in the abortion business. He operated from 1973 when abortion became legalised through the Supreme Court rulings, Roe v. Wade and Doe V. Bolton, until 1983 when he became a Christian and stopped doing abortions. But during that time he estimates that he was involved in 32,000 abortions. Thirty-two thousand human beings. Following is his testimony of his experience as an abortionist and as a Christian gentleman.

Testimony of Dr. Joseph Randall 

"I would like to tell you about my life - how it began, how I got into doing abortions, how I got out of doing them, and what I am doing now.

First of all, I was born. It doesn't sound like much, does it? No major feat, but actually it is! I guess you might call me a victorious foetus. When I was born I was not wanted. I was given up for adoption. You see, in a way I was victorious because abortions were not common then - they were illegal - and I was not aborted. Today, I would have, no doubt, been aborted, I am sure. My mother gave me up. I spent time in several foster homes until I was adopted at age six.

I was raised in a religious home. A very nice couple - my parents - adopted me, and they raised me up religiously. In fact, I was very proud of that. I became interested in medicine quite early in high school. I knew I was going to be a doctor and I worked my way through the academic ladders up through college, and so forth. I really took a great deal of pride in that, after all, there was a great deal of competition.

When I was a teenager, I used to talk to God. I would chatter informally back and forth. Especially if I had problems, sort of like crisis prayer. But that faded as I got more and more into my thing - medicine- and as I got into college. I guess you might say I put God on the shelf. He was just gathering dust on the shelf, He didn't have much meaning to me. I was never committed to Him at all.

Then I got into my medical training. As part of the medical training, we learned to do abortions. According to the chief of my department, it was a necessary procedure. This was in 1971. This was a few years before the law changed in the country, but it was legal in New York. After all, we needed to serve women. We needed to do it in a complete way. Our chief told us that if we didn't do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynaecology because we wouldn't be a complete physician. He was a very influential man.

When we started doing the abortions, we had panels that the women had to pass through before they had the abortion. They were made up of nurses, social workers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and the like, to carefully see if the women really were rather ill, medically or emotionally, before they had the abortion.

The abortions, when we started, were done by the D&C method - we did not use suction then. In a D&C you dilate and curette - you actually scrape the lining. This took 15 to 20 minutes sometimes. It was a bloody sort of thing. We didn't really like it, we felt uncomfortable about it, but we did it.

Things gradually changed - new technology came along; we developed the suction procedure, and things went much more quickly. In addition, it wasn't as bloody, so it was easier to take. We were able to do more abortions, and the panels went by the wayside. We were doing too many to have them go through this arduous, long process of evaluation. And then the severity of the reasons needed for abortion, both medically and emotionally, became less and less. It was a gradual desensitisation, so to speak.

The media was very active early on. It was probably one of the major influences on us. It told us that abortion was number one, legal; that it was to serve women; it was to give women a choice; give them freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they had been kind of pushed down prior to that. We believed the lie that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to the legalisation of abortion. It kind of made things feel a little bit better.

At this time of life, I got married and we moved from Albany to Atlanta with the Army - Uncle Sam got me. I spent two years there at Fort McPherson. During that time, we had one baby, and then another. We have two boys. I also began working in abortion clinics. That was the newest thing.

Something was happening to me at this time, emotionally. I could do several hours of abortion and feel nothing. Here I was a doctor, making a lot of money, but something was not there. I had a searching feeling from inside me. Something was missing.

I thought at first it might be love, so I took it to the extreme and had a relationship with a woman outside the marriage, and the marriage broke up. The sad part of course was that two little boys lost a father in the case. But, still I was determined. I felt that this time, I finally had it made. I was a bachelor doctor in Atlanta with everything before me. I got all the women I wanted and all the good times. It was life in the fast lane, so to speak. But I still had this gnawing emptiness inside.

What happened then was a Christian girl came into my life and influenced me. The reason she came into my life was because the only prerequisite I had for dating somebody was that they looked good. She happened to look good. So with that great motivation, the Lord twisted it around. She broke up with me, but in doing so, she gave me two Scriptures. Now that should have had absolutely no influence on me, but for some reason these Scriptures meant something to me. They were Jeremiah 15 and Psalm 139: 13-18. She knew I did abortions and felt terrible about them.

She was hoping to change my mind, and I kind of laughed. But when I read them I did not laugh. It was just as if there was a knife that went right through my middle. It made me realize that instead of serving women, I was killing babies.

What those Scriptures say, briefly, is that God knew us before we were conceived. He knew all the babies I killed before they were conceived. He had plans for their lives. They became human to me, they became babies. I didn't stop doing abortions, but I did feel very uncomfortable doing them.

At the same time, I started doing the D&E procedure. In this procedure the babies are bigger, they are fully formed, and you are tearing them apart from below. I was sent to Chicago to learn this procedure, because no one else knew how to do them safely. So I started doing them, and then I really started to feel uncomfortable.

I think the greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. The baby really came alive on TV and was moving. That picture of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than anything. We used the ultrasound to determine how far along a pregnancy was. The nurses had to help with this because we got paid more the further along a pregnancy was. We started to lose nurses and other staff. They couldn't take looking at it.

At this point I really began searching for the truth. I joined the Lion's Club, became Vice President of the Medical Society, I even searched for the truth in the occult. Just as I was about to try psychic surgery, God put an activist into my life. A Christian activist who worked for me part-time, but for God full-time. He put her right in my office. Her name was Becky. Becky was married and she became a friend of mine, partly because she took in foster children. She adopted a couple of them later on. I appreciated that because I was in foster homes before I was adopted. So I liked that, and God knew that.

Now the key about Becky was that she did not like abortions. She never judged me, though; she never put me down; she became my friend. She loved me. Despite the fact that every week, I would go down to the clinic and do my abortions in great numbers. But she stuck with it. She also took me to church, a large church that believes in spreading the truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everybody, every week. I became gradually convinced that what they said in church was truth. I wanted to become a Christian, but I knew I couldn't be a good Christian abortionist. It just didn't make sense. So now I was on the fence.

Now, what kept me on the fence for a year and a half was money. I had become trapped by the money. It wasn't that I wouldn't give up money for certain things, but not my whole life.

I was getting divorced. In my case, my wife got two-thirds of my income. Now half of my money was tied up in doing abortions, and the other half in a gynaecology practice. (I mention a gynaecology practice because I didn't do obstetrics. I couldn't deliver babies. I just didn't do that. I said I was giving up delivering babies because my abortions were my deliveries.)

Anyway, I assumed I would go immediately bankrupt. So I was going to wait until I finished paying off my wife, it would have taken about a year, before I quit doing abortions. But the voice said: Do it now. Trust me. So on October 23, 1983 (it was a Saturday), I went and did my last abortions on just a few patients. And that evening I said No to the money and Yes to God, and I called up Becky. She was so excited! The next day I went down to church and opened my mouth and confessed with my mouth that Jesus was Lord and went right up to the altar and cried there with the best of them at the altar.

Then, on the way out of church, I saw this blue brochure for a crisis pregnancy center. I just looked at it and kind of felt that this was what I should be involved with. So I picked it up and called the center and said I needed to speak to the head of it. 

I told them I was a doctor in Atlanta and had done many, many thousands of abortions, and that I came to Christ the day before and now wanted to do everything to save babies instead of taking their lives. Well, there was this silence on the phone. You could hear a pin drop, but what I did hear was his Adam's apple going up and down, He squeaked out: We've got to talk.

So we went down by a lovely river in Atlanta and we talked. He told me that people were going to need to hear this - and now I know exactly what he meant.