Mommy, Don’t Kill Me
Melissa Ohden is in certain ways unremarkable. She has a husband. She has two children. She goes to church. She has what appears to be a typical middle-American family life. What is remarkable is that she wasn’t supposed to have life at all. Ohden is one of many survivors of “botched” abortions — often euphemistically labeled “reproductive choice.” Welcome to the story of a grown-up “unviable tissue mass.”
Botched abortions are relatively common. Their existence is largely why Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted in 2013 of murder and manslaughter and now will spend the rest of his life in prison. Yet his occupying a new caged home is the result of technicalities: the location and age of his victims. Had he confined his dark surgical endeavors to cases of younger babies, inside the womb and not out of it, he wouldn’t today be labeled a serial killer. He’d be called a medical provider.
Ohden can be thankful she never crossed the path of Gosnell, a man who’d sever babies’ spines with scissors when they were born alive during “botched” abortions. It’s nonetheless a miracle that she survived what she did. The National Catholic Register related her story last year:
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