Melissa Ohden went through an abortion and lived to tell about it. That might not sound noteworthy in an era when more than 3,000 women a day have an abortion.
But Melissa was the baby, not the mother.
In 1977, at approximately seven months gestation, Melissa was the target of a saline infusion abortion. She wasn't supposed to survive. She did. Now a married mother with a master's degree in social work, she speaks about abortion from the child's perspective.
That perspective should have gotten much more media coverage recently as abortionist Kermit Gosnell went on trial for murder. For three decades, Gosnell conducted thousands of late-term abortions in squalid conditions at an address that should live in infamy: 3801 Lancaster Ave., Philadelphia, Pa.
Prosecutors and former clinic staff estimate that hundreds of these abortions — some of them performed beyond Pennsylvania's 24-week limit — did not achieve their desired end. They resulted instead in live births.
In the city that birthed a nation founded on the basic human right to life, Gosnell routinely denied life to these infants who survived botched abortions in his unsanitary clinic, prosecutors said.
He is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of at least four newborns. He and his employees used a gruesome technique to kill infants who survived late-term abortions, referring to it as a means to "ensure fetal demise," prosecutors said.
Gosnell's grisly practices expose the tenuous logic of "choice" pushed to its extreme.
