Editor’s note: This piece contains a graphic description of abortion.
This is the first piece in a two-part series about abortion survivors.
It’s no secret that the pro-abortion lobby ignores, silences, and degrades the voices of anyone who disagrees with their movement. This includes silencing the voices of those who were born as a result of a failed abortion.
Melissa Ohden was born alive after a failed saline infusion abortion in 1977. This method of abortion, which is a days-long process, is rarely used nowadays. This abortion procedure involved injecting a toxic salt solution into the amniotic fluid meant to protect Ohden in order to poison her to death.
Ohden’s mother, a nineteen-year-old college student, was forced into undergoing an abortion by her mother, who was a nurse in their community and colleagues with the abortionist.
Obviously, the abortion did not go as planned. According to Ohden, her medical records state the following: “A saline infusion for an abortion was done, but was unsuccessful.”
Ohden was miraculously born alive, unbeknownst to her mother.
“I know now that my birth mother did not know for over 30 years that I had survived,” Ohden told Townhall in a telephone interview. “It was kept a secret from her.”
As an infant, Ohden was adopted by a loving family. And, over the years, Ohden has pieced together her story regarding the circumstances surrounding her birth.
“When I was delivered alive on the fifth day of the abortion, I weighed a little less than three pounds…a neonatologist remarked that I looked like I was probably 31 weeks gestation,” she added.
The attempted abortion was carried out at St. Luke’s Hospital in Sioux City, Iowa, Ohden told Townhall. One nurse who was working in the neonatal intensive care unit that day remembered Ohden being born because a nurse rushed Ohden into the NICU. This nurse recalled that Ohden’s grandmother told nurses to leave her to die. Then, Ohden's grandmother ordered the nurses to keep Ohden’s live birth a secret.
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“In meeting this nurse, I now know that when I was rushed to the NICU, my grandmother followed her in and told the nurses to never tell my birth mother that I had survived,” Ohden said.
Ohden was later moved to the University of Iowa Hospital at 21 days. There, she was adopted. Ohden began to learn about her birth story when she was 14.
“It was utterly shocking at the age of 14 to find out that I had survived an abortion…I honestly feel like the abortion industry and their lobby very deliberately silence and marginalize any of us whose experiences are inconvenient to the cultural narrative on abortion,” she explained.
Ohden began looking through her medical records and for her birth parents when she was 19. She later got involved in the pro-life movement.
“This should not be a partisan issue…They [pro-abortion Democrats] reduce us to being these Republican-made machines to attack women’s reproductive rights,” she said.
Ohden located her birth mother in 2007. She had some correspondence with her family, but they asserted that no messages from Ohden would be passed along. In 2013, another member of Ohden’s mother’s family reached out to her and told her how her grandmother was behind the abortion.
“That’s when the big secret came out that she [the birth mother] had not known that I had survived,” Ohden said. They spent a few years corresponding over email and eventually met face-to-face.
“I have nothing but incredible respect for Ruth,” Ohden said, referring to her birth mother. “She knows how much I love her and that she is forgiven.”
“Essentially, she was robbed of me twice…she was robbed by being forced to have an abortion and then she was robbed of making any decision about whether she would choose to parent me,” Ohden said.
Now, Ohden is involved in the Abortion Survivors Network, which helps individuals who survived failed abortions, as well as mothers who underwent abortion pill reversal (APR). ASN also has resources for family members whose lives have been impacted by abortion, such as adoptive parents, etc.
The ASN’s latest initiative is called “My Body My Voice,” for people in these situations to share their stories.
“We know, post-Dobbs, how successful the abortion industry and their lobby has been with fear-based messaging…Everybody can share that story of somebody who has supposedly been hurt by an abortion ‘ban,’ but what happens if we open the narrative to include voices like mine, who can say, ‘Let me tell you a story about abortion that you don’t often hear.’”
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