Melissa Ohden / Facebook
CV NEWS FEED // Multiple women who survived attempted abortions expressed outrage over Senate Democrats’ decision to block the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill aimed at safeguarding infants born alive after abortion attempts.
“The fact that Democrats continue to block this and vote against it, the message is heard loud and clear by people like me,” Melissa Ohden, founder of the Abortion Survivors Network, told Fox News. “We are not treated as human beings. We are simply treated as pawns in their game of political chess.”
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would mandate that health care providers administer the same level of care to infants born alive after an abortion as they would to any other child born at the same gestational age, CatholicVote reported. The surviving child also would have to be taken immediately to a hospital for care.
Senate Democrats blocked the initiative in a 52-47 vote, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) calling the bill “[as] pernicious as they come,” CatholicVote reported Jan. 22.
Ohden, a survivor of an attempted saline infusion abortion in 1977, is a longtime advocate for the born-alive bill, which has been introduced by Republicans and blocked by Democrats multiple times. The Abortion Survivors Network currently has more than 900 members, but Ohden suspects that the actual number of survivors is significantly greater.
The bill also contained provisions mandating healthcare workers to report any violations of the requirements, while ensuring a civil right of action for the mothers, shielding them from criminal prosecution.
“Under the ‘Born-Alive’ bill, doctors that perform these late-term abortions can’t get away with it anymore if the baby is born alive,” Priscilla Hurley, an abortion survivor who once worked in the abortion industry, told Fox News. “They have to provide care, and the people around them have to report it if they don’t. There’s that accountability factor that the abortion industry in general does not have. So it’s not surprising that those who are in bed with the abortion industry vote the way they do.”
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Schumer is facing particular criticism for dismissing concerns about abortion survivors not receiving life-saving treatment or being treated like other living individuals, calling those worries “sh– that ain’t true.”
“If only it wasn’t true that my birthmother’s forced saline abortion didn’t occur,” Ohden wrote on X via her organization’s account. “If only it wasn’t true that I was poisoned and scalded for 5 days before being delivered alive instead of dead. If only nurses who have left babies like me to die didn’t share their stories with me. If only women like Sycloria Williams didn’t have to live with knowing her baby who survived the abortion was placed breathing in a biohazard bag and thrown on the roof of the abortion clinic.”
In 2009, while at a Florida abortion clinic awaiting her abortion procedure, Williams unexpectedly gave birth to a live baby girl, Fox News reported. One of the clinic’s owners, who has no medical license, cut the infant’s umbilical cord, placed the baby in a plastic biohazard bag, and threw her out.
“If only policymakers and the media read the research like the one in ACOG that identified an 11.2% failure rate of second trimester abortions,” Ohden continued in the Abortion Survivors Network post. “If only you would stop attempting to silence and shame those of us whose very existence apparently threatens your narrative on abortion.”
Although Democrats contend that the matter pertains to women’s health care, Hurley argues that it is fundamentally a human rights issue.
“I just pray that their eyes would open to the truth,” Hurley told Fox News. “I don’t think they really take the time, honestly, to talk to people and listen to the facts because they just are protecting the doctors.”
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