Like many pro-life activists, Gianna Jessen is heartened that the recent sting videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting and selling aborted baby parts has energized the pro-life movement. But, she’s also angered by what she sees as widespread apathy.
“I’m thankful that there is an uprising over them, but I’m astonished that the entire nation isn’t in an uprising over them,” Jessen said. “Facebook should be blowing up about this and yet, we hear forever about Cecil the lion. And, I’m not in favor of killing lions or whatever. That’s not the point. It’s that we’ve got our priorities all wrong.”
For Jessen, abortion isn’t a just a political issue; it’s personal. Thirty-eight years ago, she spent 18 hours soaking in a saline solution in her mother’s womb. She should have died. But miraculously, she defied the odds and was born in an abortion clinic in Los Angeles County.
“I was born alive, instead of dead, at 6 o’clock in the morning and thank God!” she told me in a recent interview. “I mean, it was literally, ‘Thank God!’ because it was the perfect moment to be born because the abortionist was not at work yet. . . . Had he been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation or leaving me there to die.”
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Tomorrow, Jessen will tell her amazing story of survival to a House Judiciary Committee investigating the alleged illegal and barbaric practices of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. Also testifying will be Melissa Ohden, a woman who also miraculously survived a botched saline abortion in 1977. Ohden soaked in a chemical solution for five days before a doctor induced labor and Ohden was born and presumed dead. Fortunately, a nurse heard her muffled cry, saved her life, and Ohden was adopted into a loving family.
Both Ohden and Jessen are powerful, living testimonies of the awful realities of the abortion industry and the hypocrisy of the abortion rights movement. “If abortion is about women’s rights, then what were mine?” Jessen asked. “There was not a radical feminist standing up and yelling about how my rights were being violated that day; in fact, my life was being snuffed out in the name of women’s rights.”
They also highlight the continued, barbaric practice of late-term abortions.
Both Oden and Jessen’s mothers were more than seven months pregnant at the time of their botched abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, approximately 10,000 third-trimester abortions occur every year in the U.S.
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“Usually pro-choice people will say, ‘Oh my gosh! You know, late-term abortions, they never happen,’” Jessen said. “Yes, they do. The bigger the baby in the womb, the more money they ask for an abortion. And, now we know they sell the parts of the babies, as well.”
Americans now also have evidence that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of unborn babies survive abortion doctors’ attempts to kill them. In 2012, Ohden founded the Abortion Survivors Network and since then, she has been in contact with 160 abortion survivors. However, most babies who survive abortion do not live to tell their stories. According to Florida Rep. Cary Pigman, an emergency medicine physician and sponsor of the Florida “born-alive” bill, at least 1,270 babies before 2010 were reported to have survived an abortion and then died.
One of the Planned Parenthood videos released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) provided evidence of this horrific reality. The video included testimony from a technician, who not only witnessed a baby born alive, but also helped harvest the baby’s brain for sale. Jessen said watching these CMP videos has been excruciating. “Most of the time, I have to disconnect,” she explained. “I engage, but I have to disconnect from myself in order to do what I do. . . . But, if I was just constantly living in, ‘I am this aborted child,’ I could never do what I do because it would be too intense.”
The abortion procedure both Ohden and Jessen survived normally poisons the baby, who swallows the saline solution. It also burns the baby’s lungs and its skin so badly that the outer layer is usually completely stripped away. However, neither Jessen nor Ohden have any burns on their body.
When asked how this happened, Jessen replied, “Jesus. . . . It was just the hand of God. It was like being thrown into the fiery furnace, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, ‘and there was one like the Son of Man in the midst of the fire with them, and the fire did not harm them.
“But, I’ll tell ya,” Jessen said in a playful, yet defiant tone, “they got a little more than they bargained for. Not only did they not realize who they were trying to kill, they didn’t realize that in that time, the Lord would be instilling in me a fire that can never be vanquished. It’s eternal; it is relentless; it is of Him – a will that is of him.”
That will, and God’s sovereignty, enabled Jessen to live when every doctor and nurse expected her to die. Jessen, however, retains a permanent reminder of her mother’s abortion attempt: due to the trauma she endured, she has cerebral palsy, a movement disorder that impairs her ability to walk and move. Because of her condition, few thought Jessen would ever take a single step. She spent her first 17 months of her life in emergency foster care, where she reportedly was neglected and shut in a room for long periods of time. But then, a Christian woman named Penny took Jessen into her home. Penny refused to believe the negative prognoses, prayed regularly for Jessen, and diligently performed physical therapy on her three times a day. By age three-and-a-half, Jessen was walking with a walker and leg braces.
Today, Jessen enjoys a very full life. She speaks internationally and has testified before the Australian Parliament, the British House of Commons and the U.S. Congress. A movie based loosely on her life, “October Baby,” was produced in 2012, and actually included a song Jessen wrote and recorded called, “Oceans Floor.”
But, Jessen still struggles with her physical ailment. In the past several years, she’s developed a “horrible” condition where she can unexpectedly freeze in place. Despite this, Jessen calls cerebral palsy her “gift” and part of her “sermon on earth.”
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“So many people now are resistant to the name of Jesus,” Jessen explained. “But when you’re limping in front of them or falling in front of them, they will listen to what you have to say. And, that is an incredible honor. It is an honor to, to limp all the way through this life leaning on the strong arm of Jesus Christ.”
This is a perspective Jessen desperately hopes more Christians will embrace – to be willing to suffer the consequences for standing on their Christian convictions. Specifically, she’s hoping more Christians lose their apathy and instead become willing to sacrifice social status, comfort and convenience for the pro-life cause.
“I look at our nation and I think, if all the Christians would just stand, we would have a totally different nation,” she said. “What kind of Christian do you want to be? You can’t handle losing five friends? If your relationships are that shallow, this test might be great for you because the Lord might remove you from a bunch of shallow people, living a shallow life, (to) living in the grandeur of the impossible things of God.
“It is God’s desire to do the impossible in your life,” Jessen said. Given all she’s been through, she should know.
LifeNews Note: Julie Roys is the Host & Executive Producer of Moody Radio’s Up For Debate.
