“I’d known ever since I can remember that I was adopted, and was born about four months premature. I knew that I was very sick and tiny, and the doctors didn’t have a very good prognosis for my life. I didn’t have a lot of questions about that growing up, because I was in a great home. I was loved, and life was good.”
The speaker is an attractive young woman, with short brown hair and sparkling blue eyes, doing an interview on a television talk show. As she speaks, a series of photos of her as an infant, child and young adult are flashed across the screen. Looking at the smiling images displaying obvious robust health, it is hard to believe she began life as such a premature, high-risk infant. The photo montage ends with more recent wedding pictures to husband Ryan in 2005, and the birth of their first child, a daughter Olivia, in 2008.
She speaks of the joys of motherhood, after working for several years as a social worker with a masters degree in substance abuse, and assault and sexual abuse counseling. As I listen I think, “Here is an accomplished, young mother who undoubtedly brings great joy to her adoptive parents, who probably can’t imagine what their lives would have been like without her. Another heartwarming human interest story.”
As I start to change channels, her next words stop me cold, and rivet my attention. “I was 14 years old when my Mom decided to tell me the circumstances surrounding my birth. She said, ’There’s no easy way to tell you this.’ Then she just kind of blurted it out. She said, ‘Melissa, your mother had an abortion during her fifth month of pregnancy with you and you survived it.’”
She goes on to describe how her 19 year-old mother chose to have a saline abortion, subjecting Melissa to 5 days of toxic salt poisoning in the womb. Supposed to be dead at delivery, she was discarded as medical waste, but rescued by a nurse who heard her feeble grunts. She spent the next 2 months in a NICU, on IV feeding, not expected to survive. She was adopted by her parents, who made their choice in the face of medical warnings that Melissa would probably have multiple impairments and never be normal.
Despite the happiness she enjoyed with her adoptive parents, Melissa Ohden shares the deep pain this revelation brought. “My biggest question was, ‘Why? Why could you make that decision to end my life? Could I have been so unwanted and so unloved?” It took a decade of soul searching, but Melissa relates that she came to understand that her life, indeed everyone’s life, has tremendous significance that needs to be respected.
Consider for a moment, what if your mother had chosen to abort you? Your spouse, if you are married, would not know you and your children would never have been born. Your parents would never have watched either you or your children grow up. Your siblings and friends would never have had all those wonderful childhood adventures with you, and your work associates would never experience your contributions to the group effort. The ripple effects of a single human life go on and on, bridging generations.
Psalm 139, verses 13 and 16 tell us: “For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.” If God values the significance of our life so much, can we value our life or the life of anyone else, less?
Please come and join us this Sunday at 10:30 AM to continue this discussion. My sermon, “Creating a Culture of Life,” is Part 4 in our current series, “Reformer’s Pledge.”
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