In the past weeks, several US states signed anti-abortion laws. For example, Alabama passed a law that would not permit abortion even in case of rape or incest, while the law in Georgia prohibits abortions even as early as six weeks (with many women not yet knowing they are pregnant at this stage). The (overwhelmingly male) legislators treating The Handmaid’s Tale as an instruction manual is a terrifying phenomenon and many prominent people (including gymnasts) voiced their objections to these laws. However, one has decided it’s exactly the right time to gather some funds for an anti-abortion organization.

Sarah Finnegan, a 2012 Olympic alternate who competed for LSU for the past four years, has announced on Twitter that she is selling her Olympic and National team leotards to raise funds for a non-profit organization ABBA Helps to fight human trafficking.

🚨 ATTENTION 🚨



To all gym-fanatics,



I am selling my old National Team and Olympic leotards!!!



The profits are going to #SweepOffTrafficking through ABBA Helps ministries, a nonprofit organization.



Please retweet and stay tuned 🙂 — Sarah Finnegan (@sfinnegan37) May 18, 2019

It didn’t take long for the gymternet sleuths to discover that said organization’s main goal is fighting abortion and ABBA stands for “Aborted Babies Born Alive”. The organization is a registered non-profit and is run by Finnegan’s parents. One of the claims of the organization is that the fetal organs are harvested by Planned Parenthood for future sale.

The myth of Planned Parenthood harvesting and reselling organs of aborted fetuses for profit was started by several anti-abortion activists. Multiple state and federal investigations into those allegations proved that there was no black market for baby parts. Some of the fetal tissue is indeed given to research institutions and is extremely useful in research on a variety of illnesses but none of it is being sold and clinics receive no profits from this exchange.

ABBA Helps also runs camps for women after abortion “designed to bring healing and ABBA wholeness”, while Linnabelle Finnegan, Sarah’s mother, is a “holistic healer” with several degrees in Natural Medicine from a non-accredited for-profit university. She claims that belief is capable of changing the expression of your genes and curing cancer and she is working on a PhD dissertation on that very topic (seemingly, at the same non-accredited university).

When people on Twitter responded to Finnegan, pointing out the anti-abortion stance of ABBA Helps and her failure to disclose it when asking for donations, she went on a blocking spree and then also elaborated her plan for prevention of human trafficking. Apparently, it’s to make brooms that will say “Sweep off Trafficking” and have the National Human Trafficking Hotline number on it which will lead to traffickers not having “a place to hide when they see the broom displayed wherever they go”. If you didn’t quite understand from my explanation how exactly these brooms (that will likely be bought by similarly-minded Christians from the Bible Belt) will fight human trafficking (by hitting the traffickers with the broom?), this is because I don’t understand it either.

UPD: The website ABBA’s Ranch that had all the anti-abortion propaganda and claimed that ABBA Helps is rescuing aborted children has now been deactivated. All the information about abortions was scrubbed from the main website ABBA Helps. Finnegan opened a new website specifically for the campaign. The website still does not have any specific information on how the organization plans to fight off trafficking besides scaring traffickers off with the brooms but is already accepting donations and selling the leotards.