On very rare occasions viable
babies are rescued and taken to neonatal units, like the now-grown prolife
activist Melissa Ohden. She was adopted. When she grew up and began to tell her
story, she found herself silenced. She wrote an essay about it in college, only
to have the professor accuse her adoptive parents of telling her lies. This
highly-educated man could not believe that ‘Choice’, firmly enshrined in his
heart as a woman’s right, had anything bad about it. Actually, after Melissa
met her mother, she discovered that her grandmother, a Professor of Nursing,
had bullied and threatened her mother into abortion because she didn’t like Melissa’s
mother’s fiancé. Melissa wrote a memoir ‘You
Carried Me’ as a tribute to her birth mother, who had never been told that
her baby lived. It’s available from the UK here.[i] Melissa,
discouraged at the negativity surrounding her prolife work, was about to give
it all up, but her birth mother urged her to continue. ‘You’re the only person who has ever stood up for me,’ she told
her. Melissa runs Abortion Survivors Network http://theabortionsurvivors.com/ where she has collected testimonies from men
and women who survived abortion attempts in all three trimesters. In the 1st
trimester and 2nd trimester, the survivor may have been a twin, and
the mother didn’t go for a 2nd abortion usually because it was too
late. In the third, after viability, the baby was lucky not to have been set
aside to die of neglect. Usually, a nurse took pity and risking her job, took
the little one to the Neo Unit or called an ambulance.
www.clinicquotes.com The author of this website Sarah Terzo has collected
hundreds of testimonies and quotes from women, doctors and the few abortion
survivors. I have referred her collection to many other women, but it’s scorned
by prochoice women, who don’t believe them, and call them ‘prolife lies’. Feminist
Nell McCafferty said recently that in 1983, she was certain that prolifers were
telling lies about foetal development. In the Irish Times April 21st
last, she said that she googled a scan and found for herself that what we’d
said was true – head, trunk, arms, legs, fingers and toes…and moving about…
I have an account on Twitter.
I began it to educate people about preborn life. I can’t tell you how many
people have called me ‘a liar’ for stating facts about midwifery, obstetric
care, fetology, etc! When I refute, I’m generally blocked. Repeal_Sheild have
blocked over 8,000 accounts as I write, because they don’t want to discuss or
debate. They argue that it’s because we have been ‘abusive’. I have kept all of
my tweets – and I have not been abusive. They, on the other hand, have sent me
satanic, anti-woman and anti-child verses that sent chills to my bone. I
screenshotted them and I still have them. (I think I know where abortion comes
from).
Why are women silencing other women? If we are
expected to believe testimonies from the prochoice side, and there are many difficult
stories – why are tragic stories about abortion dismissed as lies?
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