A YouTube video (see bottom of article) featuring a young woman who survived a saline abortion and was born alive has gone viral, and it warns about Barack Obama’s record of voting to allow similar abortion survivors to perish. On the video, produced by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, 35-year-old Melissa Ohden tells viewers that “many children — more than you might think — actually survive failed abortions and are born alive. I know, because I’m one of them. I was aborted and my body discarded like I didn’t exist.” Thankfully, Ohden continues, “a nurse heard me crying and cared enough to save my life.”
But other babies who survive the attempts to kill them have not been as fortunate, Ohden notes, and explains our current president’s complicity in this murder after the fact. “When he was in the Illinois State Senate,” Ohden recalls, “Barack Obama voted to deny basic constitutional protections for babies born alive from an abortion — not once, but four times.”
Continues Ohden, who is now a wife and mother: “I know that it’s by the grace of God that I’m alive today, if only to ask America this question: Is this the kind of leadership that will move us forward, that would discard the weakest among us? How will you answer?”
Ohden’s bio notes that while there were initial concerns about the impact the violence done on her might have on her future, after her birth — via the failed abortion — at seven months in 1977, “she has not only survived but thrived. With a Master’s Degree in Social Work, she has worked in the fields of substance abuse, mental health, domestic violence/sexual assault counseling, and child welfare.” Perhaps most touching, the bio notes, is the fact that “Melissa and her husband Ryan have a daughter, Olivia, whose birth at the same hospital where Melissa’s life was supposed to end has significantly shaped Melissa’s ministry.”
The Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List first aired the ad in Missouri and North Carolina during Obama’s speech at the Democratic Party convention, and since then nearly 265,000 people have logged on to YouTube to view the powerful video. “Voters now want to know if such extremism is commonplace in the executive branch,” said the group’s director, Marjorie Dannenfelser.
Charisma News Service noted that the ad “is the first in a series exposing Obama’s extreme abortion record. The SBA List is considering additional ads for release in North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Recently the SBA List wrapped up a five state ‘Women Speak Out: Abortion is Not Health Care’ bus tour, drawing attention to the president’s opposition to bans on sex-selection abortions and post-fetal pain late-term abortions — both of which are overwhelmingly supported by the majority of Americans.”
Dannenfelser said that the position on abortion embraced by Obama and the Democratic Party is so extreme that “voters should question the President’s honesty in committing to finding ‘common ground’ in the last general election.”
In an interview with LifeNews.com, Dannenfelser said that “opposing the sex selection and post-fetal pain abortion bans voted on in the House of Representatives are minority stances among women and all Americans. Voting four times against measures that would provide equal protection to children accidentally born alive after a failed abortion is a clear minority stance. Requiring Americans to pay for abortion through their taxes is a minority view as well. Where is that ground he is standing?”
Dannenfelser recalled that as a U.S. Senator “Vice President Joe Biden joined a 98-0 Senate roll call supporting federal legislation to grant equal legal protection to babies born alive during an abortion,.” By contrast, Obama “fought vigorously against several born-alive bills in the Illinois state Senate because he believed efforts to protect babies born alive during abortions were unconstitutional and would ‘burden’ a woman’s abortion decision.” Charisma News reported that even when “the Illinois bill was amended in 2003 to be an exact copy of the federal law that had passed Congress without dissent, Obama voted against it.”
Image at top: screen capture from YouTube video featuring Melissa Ohden
