Miracle Survival and Reunion: Woman Finds Birth Mother 30 Years After Being Aborted and Left for Dead

"I will never forget meeting her and seeing her pain. Her pain haunted me for a very long time after that but now I also get to experience her joy." -Melissa Ohden

By Charlene Aaron, CBN News
Breaking Christian News

Melissa Ohden's life is the type of story from which movies are made. In 1977, her mother tried to abort her, but she survived to tell the world all about it.

"I don't believe God originally wrote abortion into my life, as God is the Creator of life, but when it was introduced by man, or in my case, a woman, He rewrote the story of my life around it, to create the story of a life that is more intricate, more redemptive, more grace-filled, than anything anyone else could have planned or written," Ohden writes on her website.

A video recently posted online details Ohden's miraculous testimony.

"I should have been delivered dead," she says in an interview with the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire. "Instead, I was actually born alive."

Ohden, now 41, went on to describe how she was saved by a nurse who heard her crying as she lay among medical waste at a hospital in Iowa.

"My 19-year-old birth mother, as a college student, had a saline infusion abortion," she says in the video."And that type of procedure was meant to poison me to death. Ultimately, a nurse rushed me off to the neonatal intensive care unit where medical care ultimately saved my life."

Ohden said she was 14 when her adoptive parents told her the shocking secret.

"My birth mother had spent over 30 years of her life believing I had died at the hospital that day. She was not told that I survived. It was kept a secret from her. I was placed for adoption without her ever knowing. She never knew if it was a little boy or a little girl she had delivered in that abortion."

Ohden chronicles her journey to find her biological parents in an intimate account titled, You Carried Me: A Daughter's Memoir. She says her birth mother told her she didn't want to have an abortion but that her grandmother, who worked at the hospital, forced her mom to terminate the pregnancy. She then instructed her colleagues to "leave the baby in the room to die" that day.

Years later, Ohden met her birth mother and the two both live in Kansas City and see each other often.

Ohden explains, "She had lived with such incredible regret and heartache. So we started to communicate through email about five years ago and shared information; built walls of trust and love with one another before we met face to face for the first time about two years ago now."

"I will never forget meeting her and seeing her pain. Her pain haunted me for a very long time after that but now I also get to experience her joy," Ohden said.

In 2012, Ohden founded The Abortion Survivors Network (ASN), which seeks to educate the public about failed abortions and survivors while providing emotional, mental and spiritual support for abortion survivors.

Website: Breaking Christian News

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