The failed abortion survivor whose mum thought she was dead
BBC News 5 June 2018
Family First Comment: An abortion victim – who lived to tell her story…..
“When Melissa Ohden was 14 she learned a shocking secret – her mother had tried to abort her. She was saved by a nurse who heard her crying as she lay among medical waste at a US hospital. This is the story of her survival, and of the mother who thought she was dead.”
www.ChooseLife.nz
When Melissa Ohden was 14 she learned a shocking secret – her mother had tried to abort her. She was saved by a nurse who heard her crying as she lay among medical waste at a US hospital. This is the story of her survival, and of the mother who thought she was dead.
“I grew up knowing I’d been born prematurely, that I had been adopted,” Melissa Ohden, now 41, tells the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme.
“What I didn’t know was that there was this great secret behind all of this. That I should have been delivered dead, and instead I was born alive.”
In 1977, in a hospital in the US state of Iowa, Melissa’s 19-year-old mother had undergone an abortion using a toxic saline solution over five days.
Born at eight months and weighing less than three pounds (1.3kg), Melissa was placed among medical waste.
That was, until a nurse heard her weak cries and slight movements.
Melissa was rushed to an intensive care unit, where – against the odds – she survived.
Doctors thought she would be blind, and at one stage believed she had a fatal heart defect.
But she has gone on to live a perfectly healthy life, being brought up by an adoptive family.
“It is astonishing”, Melissa admits. “I pinch myself some days.”
READ MORE: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-44357373
