This week, the U.S. House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would require that infants who survive abortion be given appropriate medical care, rather than being left to die or actively killed by an abortionist. Pro-abortion legislators, however, quickly spoke out against it, and abortion survivor Melissa Ohden is firing back.
Only two Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and many who voted against it gave bizarre reasoning for doing so — claiming that giving the abortion survivors medical care would endanger their lives. “The problem with this bill is that it endangers some infants by stating that that infant must immediately be brought to the hospital,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said. “It directs and mandates certain medical care that may not be appropriate.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) added that the legislation “requires immediately taking a struggling baby to a hospital. That hospital could be hours away and could be detrimental to the life of that baby.” Others denounced the bill as “extremist,” “dangerous,” “unnecessary,” and “not based in science.”
Ohden, who survived a saline abortion in 1977, slammed their remarks, calling them “traumatizing.”
“It’s almost indescribable for me to say what that’s like to see the people who are in opposition of truly who I am and what I have suffered and the population I serve – what they’re still suffering today,” she said in an interview with Fox News. “I soaked in a toxic salt solution for five days being poisoned and scalded to what was intended to be my death. And on the fifth day of the abortion procedure, I was accidentally born alive.”
Despite frequent claims that abortion survivors are a myth, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that over 100 babies have survived abortions over 12 years — and those are just the ones that were reported to the CDC. Only about half of all states require abortion complications to be reported, and there are no federal requirements for abortion reporting at all. Yet instances of abortion survivors still surface.
Five children were reported to have survived abortion attempts in Minnesota in 2021, while eight children were reported to have survived abortion attempts in Florida in 2022. And according to the Abortion Survivors Network (ASN), which Ohden founded, an estimated two babies are born alive for every 1,000 abortions; what happens to these children is not known.
Ohden’s grandmother demanded that she be left to die, but a nurse refused, and saved her life. “For me, that’s what the Born-Alive vote is all about,” she said. “Ensuring that babies like me are provided medical care. No survivor’s life should ever be left in the hands of whoever happens to be working that day.”
