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Melissa Ohden's remarkable story takes the reader on a roller coaster ride from heartbreak to joy, from incalculable pain and grief to peace and forgiveness. Although as a young child she knew she was adopted, she only learned at the age of fourteen that she was the survivor of a botched abortion. This knowledge sent Ohden into a tailspin of despair and confusion, and launched a two-decade struggle to decipher the enormity of what had happened to her. Despite the love and support of her adoptive family, Haunted by notions of the parents she had not known and whose motives she could not fathom, Ohden searched for information about her birth parents and the circumstances surrounding her miraculous survival. Her straightforward writing style is both engaging and absorbing; her journey an amazing testimony to God's will in unveiling the lie of women's so-called "freedom to choose." While feminist lore has always claimed that abortion "empowers" women and frees them from the "burden" of child rearing, Ohden's birth mother faced a very different situation in October of 1977. After years of detective work to uncover the events surrounding the abortion attempt, Ohden discovered that her mother was not given a "choice" by the more powerful and controlling people in her life. A nurse and professor, Ohden's grandmother insisted her daughter have an abortion, and even left her own granddaughter to die following the botched procedure. Unbeknownst to Ohden's mother, another nurse rushed her tiny baby to the NICU, where she experienced complications that were eventually overcome, aided by the medical advances of the day and the care of the loving couple who adopted her. When she entered college, Ohden began to share her unbearable secret by writing and speaking about being an abortion survivor. But her story was generally received with resentment and even hostility given that, as Ohden describes, "[A]bortion on demand was the holy grail of the feminist ideology my classmates adhered to; anything that challenged its essential rightness must be suppressed." A self-described "ardent supporter of women's rights," Ohden nonetheless learned that "there was no place in the feminist fold for women who object to the procedure that had nearly ended my life before it began." Ohden's long quest for her identity resulted in a deepening of her Christian faith, a happy marriage that produced two daughters, and her eventual discovery of her birth parents. Although her father passed away before she could meet him, she was able to establish a relationship with her paternal grandfather, and came to know and embrace her half-sisters, a cousin, and other family members. At long last, she was united with her biological mother, who had believed her first baby perished in the abortion attempt until Ohden's initial outreach to both her birth parents. During the long, arduous process of discovery and by the grace of God, Ohden was able to forgive those who contributed to her abortion, including even her maternal grandmother, which she admits was the most difficult step of all. Now a successful speaker and pro-life champion, Melissa Ohden is finally at peace. One of a small but elite group of people, she perhaps understands better than any of us the remarkable, God-given gift that is life. Plough Publishing House, 2017 |
Ohden was devastated by the belief that she had been unwanted by her biological parents. Her sense of self-worth plummeted, and she began making poor choices that lasted throughout her teenage years; among them bulimia, experimentation with alcohol, and sexual activity.
