Earlier this week, abortion survivor Melissa Ohden pleaded senators to pass a bill that would protect babies who live through failed abortions as well as stop brutal abortion methods. Her message was directed particularly towards the Democrats who stood unanimously opposed.
“I know of 281 others just like me,” said Ohden. Though the actual number is “much higher.”
Advocating for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, Ohden told her own story to exemplify the need for such measures to be taken.
Her mother, an unwed college student, was almost [eight] months pregnant when she went into the hospital to terminate her pregnancy. Medical staff administered a saline solution for an abortion that’s designed to fill the amniotic sack and scald the child to death from the outside in.
Ohden explained that she soaked in the toxic salt solution for five days. While doctors assumed her mother would deliver a stillborn baby, the procedure did not go as planned.
Believing that the abortion had worked, the medical professionals discarded the baby’s body. But ever so quietly, the infant began to whimper just enough for a nurse on staff to retrieve her from the trash and save her life.
“I should have been just another statistic, but by the grace of God I am more than a statistic,” Ohden said in an earlier speech before Congress. “I come here to you today as a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a master’s level prepared social worker. And, yes, as an abortion survivor from a botched abortion.”
As the founder of the Abortion Survivors Network, the pro-life advocate has now made it her life’s mission to give a voice to the unborn and other survivors.
In her testimony on Tuesday, Ohden slammed pro-choice advocates who say they are all for “women’s rights.”
“We hear all this talk about women’s rights, but I beg the question, where were my rights in the womb?” Ohden questioned. “Where are the rights of the little girls who are going to lose their lives to abortion every single day? Where are my rights now as a woman who survived an abortion? Where are the rights of my daughters who never would have lived if that abortion would have succeeded in ending my life?”
“I do believe if I would have been born accidentally at Planned Parenthood or another abortion clinic, they would not have done what they needed to do to get to a place where medical care would be provided,” she continued. “I am blessed indeed to have been born in a hospital.”
“As the toxic salt solution of the saline infusion abortion was injected into the amniotic fluid surrounding me in the womb, attempting to scald and poison me to death, I wonder how long it took for the pain to set in,” she said. “If you read about it online or in medical journals, you will find children like me called the ‘red skinned,’ or ‘candy-apple babies,’ because that toxic solution would turn the skin bright red, as it peeled it away and moved internally into the organs.
In talking to other moms who underwent the same procedure, she found they actually could feel their babies “thrashing about in their womb” after the solution was injected.
Expounding upon Ohden’s claims about the violence of abortion, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Donna Harrison, testified to the following:
“There are small human beings in the womb who are being pulled apart in pieces or having their skin burned off or partially delivered through their mother’s vagina and having their brains pierced and sucked out through a suction catheter. The pain-capable unborn child protection act will protect unborn children in the United States from being killed in these brutal ways.”
“Children just like me are being subjected to similarly horrific, painful abortion procedures that lead to their death,” said Ohden. “Abortion doesn’t spare a child from suffering, it causes suffering… There should be no question that every child should be spared from the excruciating pain of an abortion procedure like I was subjected to.”
