By Melissa Ohden
“[We’re] literally making stuff up. …A child doesn’t come out partway alive and doctors kill it. It’s not a thing. It’s not a thing today, it’s not a thing tomorrow, it’s not a thing ten years ago,” Minnesota State Sen. Alice Mann (D) stated in a recent hearing called “Establishing Fundamental Right to Reproductive Health.”
While Twitter retweets and replies to Sen. Mann’s blistering response to her colleague Sen. Bill Lieske’s (R) introduction of an amendment to stop abortions of “a child in part born alive” are a viral thread of punches from one side of the political aisle to the other, exchanging blows over what each side calls partisan propaganda, what’s missing from the 280-character dogfight is the irrefutable fact that babies can and do survive abortion throughout pregnancy. We know this from the medical and adoption records of abortion survivors; survivors’ and families’ stories; medical research; and doctors’, nurses’ and even abortionists’ statements.
Babies who survive abortions aren’t typically partially delivered and killed. More typical is that they survive chemical abortions in the first trimester. They survive surgical abortions in the second trimester that may leave them with significant wounds found upon delivery, as was the case for survivor Hope Hoffman. They survive induction of labor in the third trimester with the intent that they won’t survive the preterm induction, or with the plan to leave the child to die if they do survive the delivery, as was the case with Sarah Zagorski and, sadly, as happened in the practice of the imprisoned Dr. Kermit Gosnell, where some babies were brutally killed by having their spinal cord “snipped.”
The lives of abortion survivors are not political fodder. They shouldn’t be reduced to a partisan issue. But this is what the Democratic Party, the abortion industry and their lobbyists are doing to us.
Yes — us.
Forty-five years ago, in 1977, my birthmother, a 19-year-old college student, was forced to abort me at the urging of her mother, a nurse. After soaking in the toxic salt solution of the saline abortion for five days, her labor was finally successfully induced on that fifth day. Instead of expelling my dead body from her womb, as was intended and expected, I was accidentally born alive.
You have a birthday. I have a day that I now celebrate as my birthday. That is, when I can bring myself to push through the pain and grief that day brings me every year. The simple joy of a birthday – from simple acknowledgment to extravagant celebration – is not universal. That an estimated tens of thousands of people like me have very different experiences is never lost on me.
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