A Missouri woman is recounting her personal story of survival after being aborted at eight months gestation and discarded in a medical waste bin.
Melissa Ohden, 40, who discussed the tragic saga in her recently released book, “You Carried Me: A Daughter’s Memoir,” also spoke out an in-depth interview with The Daily Mail in which she dove deeper into how she overcame the odds..
“I discovered that my birth mother, aged 19, had been forced into the abortion by her own mother, who was an educational nurse at the hospital,” Ohden said. “She was heavily sedated and didn’t know that I had been born alive.”
It was more than three decades before her mother learned the truth: that her baby had, indeed, survived, and was later adopted by a loving family.
“It’s been a long and painful journey from shame and anger to faith and forgiveness,” she said. “But I refuse to be poisoned by bitterness – that’s no way to live.”
According to The Daily Mail, Ohden was born in 1977 and was discovered by a nurse crying and gasping for breath in a medical waste bin. In a horrific twist, one nurse reportedly told others to “leave the baby in the room to die.”
Luckily, at least one hero didn’t listen, as Ohden was rushed to the neonatal unit, where she was subsequently saved.
Three months later, she was adopted. And when she eventually came to learn that she was the survivor of a saline abortion, she went on a successful quest to find her mother — a journey that took years.
“When we finally met in May last year, I could see her in the distance getting nearer and part of me wanted to run away. It was scary,” she said. “Then we hugged and both cried. I said, ‘It’s been a long time.’ She told me, ‘I was robbed of you.’ Then it felt really natural.”
Read Ohden’s entire interview here.
This isn’t the first time Ohden has shared her story; she appeared in a pro-life ad for the Susan B. Anthony List back in 2012. The ad, which took aim at former president Barack Obama, held little back.
Here’s a portion of the transcript:
“I was aborted, and my body discarded…like I didn’t exist.
But a nurse heard me crying…and cared enough to save my life.
There’s something else you may not know…when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Barack Obama voted to deny basic constitutional protections for babies born alive from a failed abortion. Not once, but four times.
I know that it is by the grace of God I am alive today…if only to ask America this question: Is this the kind of leadership that will move us forward? Leadership that would discard the least and the weakest among us?”
Ohden also testified before Congress in 2015, sharing her personal experience surviving abortion.