Born Alive Abortion Survivors: Parsing Fact from Fiction

March 11, 2019
by Libby Anne

Last week, a friend sent me an article bearing the headline They Are Real: Meet Born-Alive Abortion Survivors. Could I maybe blog about it, she asked? This article led me down to a rabbit hole with numbers that kept getting bigger. When I reached an article that argued that there are 44,000 abortion survivors living in the U.S. today, I knew we had a definitional problem. What is really going on here?

The article my friend sent me profiled five individuals it labeled “abortion survivors.” These individuals are real people. The first one profiled Gianna Jesson, whose mother had a saline abortion at 30 weeks in 1977, and Gianna survived. When she was born alive, she was provided with care and given up for adoption. Melissa Ohden’s biological mother had a saline abortion at 31 weeks in 1977; she, too, survived and was provided care.

Continued: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2019/03/born-alive-abortion-survivors-parsing-fact-from-fiction.html