Woman who survives abortion at 8 months finds birth mother

By Claudia Tanner - Posted at Daily Mail Online:

Woman who survived being aborted at EIGHT MONTHS after a nurse heard her cries from the medical trashcan spent 17 years tracing her birth mother and reveals how she learnt to forgive.

Melissa Ohden, 40, from Missouri, was born despite her mother’s 5-day saline infusion abortion in 1977 when she was eight months pregnant.

• Weighing 2Ib 14oz, she suffered jaundice, respiratory distress and seizures
• Her 17-year search for answers about her past turned her world upside down 
• She found out she owes her life to the 'angel' nurse who saw her wriggle
• But she would have been dead if another nurse - her grandmother - had had her way
• Melissa had a tearful reunion with her birth mother and has now written a book

‘It’s been a painful journey from shame and anger to forgiveness,’ she says.

‘I discovered that my birth mother, aged 19, had been forced into the abortion by her own mother, who was an educational nurse at the hospital,’ said the 40-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who has written a memoir about her life. 

‘She was heavily sedated and didn’t know that I had been born alive. It would be 30 odd years before she learned the truth. 

‘It’s been a long and painful journey from shame and anger to faith and forgiveness. But I refuse to be poisoned by bitterness – that’s no way to live.’

Read more here.