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Katherine Ragsdale, president and CEO of the National Abortion FederationYouTube screenshot

November 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — The National Abortion Federation (NAF) has announced that its new president and CEO is Katherine Ragsdale, a lesbian Episcopal “priest” and longtime abortion activist.

“Abortion providers are some of my personal heroes and modern-day saints,” Ragsdale said when the news was announced. She had been NAF’s interim president and CEO since September 2018.

In 2011, she “married” another female Episcopal “priest,” Mally Lloyd. It is unclear if they are still together; Ragsdale’s bio on NAF’s website makes no mention of Lloyd.

“For decades, Katherine Ragsdale, a false prophet, has been trying to put religious vestments on child-killing,” Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life and president of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, told LifeSiteNews. “She led the ‘Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights’ (now the ‘Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice’), which actually provides rites of blessing for parents about to kill their children, and for the facilities in which the blood is shed.” 

That group also provides “Scripture studies that attempt to say exactly the opposite of what Scripture says about what God thinks of the shedding of innocent blood,” explained Pavone.

Fr. Pavone said it’s not surprising that NAF chose Ragsdale to lead it. 

“It actually reveals one of the greatest weaknesses of the abortion industry: science is not on their side, logic is not on their side, and history is not on their side,” he explained. “They ran out of arguments a long time ago to try to justify abortion. So now, all they have left is to disguise it in ‘spirituality.’”

“They try in vain to take the stigma out of abortion — but that effort continues, and that is what this new development represents,” he said.

In an April 2019 speech at a Kentucky Reproductive Freedom Fund fundraiser, Ragsdale claimed that the Bible says nothing about abortion and that it’s dishonest and manipulative to call the human in the womb a “baby.” 

“‘One inch from life,’ they say while showing a picture of a Gerber baby,” Ragsdale said of pro-life advocates who oppose partial-birth abortion. The audience laughed. 

“Apart from ‘one inch from life’ being a lie, the Gerber baby image is a lie,” she continued. “And actually, using the word ‘baby’ is a manipulative lie.” 

However, comments made by abortionists affiliated with NAF paint a different picture. Undercover video from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) taken at a NAF conference shows abortionists saying the work they do is “killing,” complaining about how “difficult” it is to tear apart a fetus, and lamenting that they’re not given a place to discuss the “heads that get stuck that we can’t get out.”

Late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, meanwhile, told a BBC reporter this year, “I think that it is a baby, and I use [the word] with patients.” 

“And you don’t have a problem…with…killing a baby?” the reporter hesitantly asked.

“I have no problem if it’s in the mother’s uterus,” Carhart responded without flinching.

Planned Parenthood is suing CMP over the videos showing its participation in the trafficking of baby body parts. The state of California is also prosecuting the pro-life journalists of CMP while those they exposed walk free. NAF has also brought a lawsuit against CMP; it is suspended pending the outcome of other litigation.

Fr. Pavone has for decades helped former abortionists and their staff “deal with the wounds abortion inflicts on them.”  

“A big part of their healing is to dig themselves out of the many layers of lies that they told themselves to justify the killing they carried out,” he said. “Those lies take many forms: rationalization; intellectualization; and here, in the example of False Prophet Ragsdale’s leadership, ‘spiritualization.’ And the lies by which spiritual and biblical language attempt to justify murder are among the most damaging to those who fall captive to them.”

NAF’s previous CEO and president, Vicki Saporta, brought in a salary of $392,018 in 2017, according to the organization’s publicly available tax records.