She wasn’t supposed to make it out of her mother’s womb alive.
In the late 1970s, almost four years after Roe v. Wade, Melissa Ohden was a 31-week fetus in her 19-year-old mother’s belly when she soaked in a toxic salt solution for several days as part of an attempted saline infusion abortion.
After she was expelled from her mom’s body, Ohden was thought to be dead and dumped out with the medical waste. She was later found crying and moving and eventually put up for adoption.
“There are babies like me who survived during Roe v. Wade, and there are babies who still survive abortions today,” Ohden, CEO of The Abortion Survivors Network, told The Post.
Today, anti-abortion activists such as Ohden are celebrating the two-year anniversary of Roe’s overturning by the US Supreme Court in June 2022.
But there are gnawing fears that the feat may be short-lived, given the upcoming presidential election — and the possibility of several potential upcoming nominations to the nation’s highest court.
“This could be the last Dobbs’ anniversary we celebrate if we don’t win this election. So there’s a lot at stake,” said Kelsey Pritchard, director of State Public Affairs at the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.
Republicans waver on abortion
Three years after Roe, the GOP enacted an anti-abortion stance in its platform, and Republicans and Democrats quickly began dividing into what they are today.
Still, for decades, railing against abortion was largely symbolic — there was little the GOP could do to ban the procedure because of Roe, which gave women a federal right to an abortion. Therefore, the party was somewhat shielded from the political ramifications.
But now those political perils are front and center in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed states to make the decision on a woman’s right to choose.
A plethora of polling has suggested that a majority of voters want the procedure kept mostly legal. And there have been a smattering of state ballot initiatives even in Republican states which seemingly corroborate that.
Some prominent Republicans have simply begun distancing themselves from the albatross issue.
“Their job is to get re-elected,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. “That’s politicians doing what politicians do.”
Other GOP candidates, such as Maryland Senate hopeful Larry Hogan and Nevada Senate aspirant Sam Brown, have downplayed the issue.
Meanwhile, perhaps most significantly, in April, former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump deemed abortion a state issue and eschewed any support for a federal ban.
As for Ohden, she said, “As someone who survived an abortion, I will tell you that this isn’t about an issue being a winning issue or not — this is a life issue.”
One prevailing theory among political analysts and strategists is that backlash from Dobbs sapped what was supposed to be a mighty red wave during the 2022 midterm elections.
“In 2022, we saw too many Republicans adopt the ostrich strategy, where they wouldn’t talk about abortion at all. And they ran from the issue, and they really let Democrats define them,” Pritchard said.
Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group LiveAction, said, “Retreating on abortion is not a winning approach.
“Being pro-life means advocating for the protection of every preborn child without compromise.”
GOP platform anxieties
There are now rumors that the party may try to soften its official position on abortion.
“I do have concerns about the GOP platform process,” Rose said.
But “it is imperative that we remain vigilant and proactive in ensuring our platform reflects our highest pro-life principles,” she said.
Pritchar stressed, “Our expectation is that the GOP platform will continue to unequivocally call for national protections for unborn children, rooted in the 14th Amendment.”
The Post reached out to the Republican National Committee for comment.
Abortions ticking up?
Many critics and supporters of Roe predicted that nixing the landmark 1973 ruling would dramatically slash the number of abortions performed in the US.
Two years out from the Dobbs, the opposite appears to have occurred at the national level. The pro-abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 1 million pregnancies were terminated in 2023 — a decade high.
This builds upon a small trend that began in 2019. Before that, the procedure had been on the decline since the 1990s.
“It is true that there has been a tragic increase in the total number of abortions on the national level, in large part due to the proliferation of the abortion pill,” Rose said. “These horrific numbers must embolden and activate us to end abortion nationwide and make the killing of innocent children unthinkable.”
Rose highlighted a study that concluded abortion restrictions have resulted in 32,000 more births during the first half of 2023. She also stressed that abortion has plummeted in states that have enacted restrictions.
Data on abortion is murky because of the lack of formal reporting systems in all 50 states. Some anti-abortion activists are torn about the extent to which they should even trust the Guttmacher Institute’s figures.
“My first reaction would be prove it. The abortion industry and Planned Parenthood is the entire reason we don’t have a national abortion reporting requirement,” Hawkins said. “So a lot of this is conjecture.”
Chemical abortions
In sharp contrast with the pre-Roe era, the abortion landscape is now dominated by the prevalence of chemical abortions.
“Abortion has been driven from [many] states. The larger problem we have is the illegal trafficking of chemical abortion pills,” Hawkins said.
Some 63% of abortions in the US during 2023 were triggered by chemical means, according to the Guttmacher Institute. This is distinct from more notorious abortion procedures such as dilation and evacuation, in which the fetus is ultimately cut up and removed from the womb in pieces.
Pills such as mifepristone, which is commonly used as part of a two-drug regimen to trigger abortions, can now be mailed to households and snuck into states with strict anti-abortion laws on the books.
Anti-abortion activists were dealt a setback earlier this month over a legal effort before the Supreme Court to curtail the availability of mifepristone. The court rejected the challenge based on standing rather than merit.
Battle of the states
Since Roe fell to the wayside, states have begun crafting their own policies on abortion.
At the moment, 21 states have enacted significant restrictions on abortion, ranging from near-total bans with a few carveouts such as for the life of the mother, to bans after about 15 to 18 weeks of gestation, according to a tracker from the New York Times.
Three more states are facing roadblocks in the courtroom to enact their suite of abortion restrictions. The rest have abortion largely legal.
“That protects an estimated 200,902 unborn children annually through those pro-life laws. And we celebrate that number is even higher than it was one year ago,” Pritchard said.
For context, the number of births in the US was just over 3.6 million for 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortions clocked in just over 1 million in 2023, said the Guttmacher Institute.
This election cycle, there are a bevy of abortion-related initiatives including in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota.
“There is practically unlimited spending now allowed in these ballot referendums,” Hawkins said. “So we are very concerned about being outspent as we were in all these other states [and] about the confusion of the ballot referendums.”
Anti-abortion activists are trying to be optimistic about their chances of success after past drubbings in places such as Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas on ballot measures.
“It’s very important that GOP leaders step up on this and that they do so early so that the people are aware of what they’re actually voting on,” Pritchard said.
It’s not just restrictions in states that anti-abortion advocates are seeking, they also want federal intervention as well — something that has splintered top Republicans.
“Every lawmaker who understands what abortion is should absolutely pursue national restrictions on abortion. Protecting life is a moral imperative that transcends political strategy,” Rose argued.
Beyond abortion restrictions, activists are seeking to build up a “pro-life safety net,” according to Pritchard.
“We also celebrate all the ways that the states have moved forward on building a pro-life safety net — whether that’s funding pregnancy centers or allocating money for child-care assistance or extending Medicaid for postpartum moms,” she said.
Aborted fetuses that survived
Ohden formed the Abortion Survivors Network to help connect individuals such as herself. She estimates her network has brought together almost 800 people so far.
“I found out my story when I was 14, and it was utterly devastating,” she said. “We have no idea how often this is happening.”
Because of the lack of data in the US, it remains unclear how frequent survival is, but her organization has noted there was a roughly 0.21% survival rate in Canada over a seven-year stretch based on its assessment. If that translated into the US, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2,000 babies annually.
For Ohden, surviving an abortion procedure has given her a unique perspective on the thorny political issue. Much of the debate centers around the experience and rights of women, but she has the rare view of someone who was nearly aborted and survived.
“I never would have had the ability to execute any right if I hadn’t first been born,” she reflected.
Underpinning part of the debate is a question about whether the fetus is really human. Ohden took note of how questions of the unborn child’s humanity aren’t often asked when the fetus is wanted.
“The reality of the humanity of every pre-born child … isn’t based on how someone feels about them,” she said.
Pro-abortion-rights activists mobilize
On the other side of the pitched abortion battle, pro-abortion rights activists are marking the Dobbs anniversary with a deep remorse and a renewed desire to reclaim what the landmark Supreme Court decision took from them.
“Make no mistake: if Republicans win majorities in Congress and Donald Trump, God forbid, locks in the presidency, a national abortion ban is next,” warned Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, during a press call Friday.
Vice President Kamala Harris and first lady Jill Biden scheduled campaign events in battleground states to mark the Dobbs anniversary in a bid to gin up support for restoring the nationwide right to abortion access that had once been enshrined in Roe.
Democrats in Congress have sought to restore protections set by Roe through legislation, but they lack control over both chambers. Moreover, the Senate requires a 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster.
