The last thing they want to deal with is having to talk to a “piece of tissue” that isn’t human anyways.
Abortion survivor tells college students her story, even as some tell her to shut up – The College Fix
Melissa Ohden is not your typical pro-life activist. For one thing, she should be dead. The former Feminists for Life college outreach speaker survived an abortion attempt when she was born. Earlier this year she published a memoir, You Carried Me , about her upbringing in an adoptive family and learning she miraculously survived an abortion forced on her biological mother.
More:
As an abortion survivor and founder of the Abortion Survivors Network, Ohden says she has met many fellow survivors who are afraid to publicly identify as such, even at the highest levels of government.
You might think that pro-choice activists would engage with Ohden more respectfully when she speaks on campus, given that they support a practice that nearly scalded her to death in the womb. But that’s not always the case.
When she spoke at Eureka College recently, opposing students had already torn down the flyers promoting her talk. This is a common occurrence, Ohden told The College Fix: “Most things happen to the students in the pro-life groups prior to me arriving.”
Even more frequently, opposing students will try to get the student group sponsoring her shut down, as happened when she visited a Canadian college, said Ohden, who graduated from Buena Vista University and got a graduate degree at the University of Iowa.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Ohden’s phone conversation with The Fix about her current work and college experience.
Read the phonecon here.