This abortion survivor’s story is a powerful lesson in forgiveness

Last updated on: February 10, 2017 at 9:00 am by Bristol Palin

This abortion survivor’s story is a powerful lesson in forgiveness 2017-02-10T09:00:30-05:00 Bristol Palin

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Sometimes tragedies have a way of teaching life’s hardest lessons and this is a story I needed to hear today.

Melissa Ohden’s story is rare. She’s a survivor of abortion and that makes her voice unique as a pro-life activist. Her birth mother agreed to a saline abortion which didn’t work. Luckily, a loving nurse was on duty that day and saved her life.

In her new book, You Carried Me, Ohden details her search for her biological mother and how she needed to do one more thing to finally start healing her deep scars: forgive her mom.

“Forgiveness is a huge part of my journey,” Ohden said in an interview with The Blaze. “Accepting that I am who I am and I don’t need to be ashamed of that truly set me free. And I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to — you try to run away from something difficult or painful, but you just can’t. And my faith is what saved me from that. God put me on this journey and I’m thankful.”

Her painful journey began a long time ago as a teenager living in her adopted home when her sister told her the unexpected:

“It was shocking. I was devastated. You know, at fourteen years old, to find out your life was supposed to end… I was angry and I was scared. I was ashamed and embarrassed for many years.”

Ohden says she turned to sex, alcohol, and bulimia — the “unholy trinity” — to cope and “get as far away from the truth as [she] could.”

But that left her feeling empty and she knew that the road to healing started at forgiving her birth mother for what she did. The Blaze reports:

After Ohden came to terms with her story, she began to search for her biological family. For years, the painful search yielded little fruit, as she did not have much information about her biological parents. Eventually, she was able to track them down, which lead to additional painful discoveries.

After making contact with a member of her birth mother’s family, Ohden found out that her biological parents had been separated by her maternal grandmother — who later coerced her daughter into an abortion. Ohden’s grandmother also hid her survival from her daughter after the procedure, and even tried to demand that hospital staff leave the infant to die. A nurse saved her life anyway.

The fact that a nurse ignored her grandmother’s wishes is proof enough, Ohden said, why infants deserve laws to protect them:

“There are children like me that survive abortions on a regular basis. I could have died in that hospital and nobody ever would have known what was done to me, or that nobody worked to save me. They need to be legally obligated to help.

“My life shouldn’t have been dependent on who was working that day, but really, it was.”

This is such a powerful story. See the book’s trailer by clicking CONTINUE below:

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