Posted on 01/28/2003 4:59:07 PM PST by Coleus
Jack Kenny: Abortion survivor tells story of struggles,triumph and faith By JACK KENNY
SOME KIDS don’t know when to quit. Gianna Jessen never learned how.
By her own account she came into this world under extraordinary circumstances, having already suffered brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy by doctors who would later be amazed that she could sit up, much less walk. At 25, she walks with a pronounced limp and admits to frequent and unexpected falls. She doesn’t mind telling audiences she has gotten rather good at it over the years.
“After 25 years of falling, you learn how to fall,” she said at St. Joseph Cathedral in Manchester, where she was anything but a “flop.” The talented singer and songwriter from Nashville, Tenn. sang some devotional songs, then told her story as the keynote speaker during a pro-life rally that was part of a weekend- long “Triduum for Life” sponsored by the Respect Life Office of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester.
“This will not be a sad story, this will be a story of triumph and victory,” she said early on in her narrative. She has been on the speaking circuit since her early teens, telling her story with, literally, a missionary zeal. But for the grace of God, she might be counted in the world only as a number, one of the 40 million or so infants who have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was handed down 30 years ago today. Jessen was, indeed, aborted. But stubborn and determined soul that she is, she lived anyway. A quarter of a century later, she is still going strong.
“And still talking about it,” she said, suggesting a possible title for a sequel to the biography that was published several years ago: “Gianna: Aborted and lived to tell about it.”
Her mother was 17 years old and 7½ months pregnant when she had a saline abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Los Angeles. In the saline method, a highly concentrated salt solution is injected throughout the abdominal wall into the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby. The solution poisons the infant, causing convulsion and, in about an hour’s time, death. In most cases, the woman goes into labor 24 hours later and delivers the dead baby. The solution usually burns the skin off the infant, resulting in the delivery of the “candy-apple baby” often seen in pro-life literature.
That photograph is accompanied by a remarkable understatement on a page published by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Concerning the level of pain likely suffered by the saline-aborted fetus, the society suggests the following: “The contortion on the face of this baby, after the burning of the skin by the salt solution, may be an indication of what the infant has endured.”
Somehow Jessen was spared that fate. Her mother went into labor well ahead of the expected delivery time, though long after her baby was supposed to be dead. Gianna was born alive, weighing slightly more than two pounds. The abortionist had gone home for the night and the nurse on duty took the newborn to a hospital where she was placed in an incubator.
“If the abortionist had been there, he would have ended my life, either though strangulation, or he would have left me there to die,” said Jessen, who counts it a miracle that she survived the saline treatment. “I should be completely burned, I should be blind, I should be dead.”
She spent her infancy with a foster mother named Penny, a rather remarkable woman in her own right. “Over the course of her life she’s cared for 56 children considered unadoptable. Eventually, Penny’s daughter, Diane, adopted Gianna. It was Diane who found the child’s natural mother and learned the details of Gianna’s birth.
Jessen was present when President Bush signed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act into law in Pittsburgh last summer. So was Jill Stanek, the nurse who was fired from Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill. after testifying before Congress about an aborted infant left to die in the hospital’s laundry room. Jessen has also told her story at congressional hearings, before church groups, youth outreach programs and on college campuses. She has even begun to get speaking engagements in public schools, where she seems likely to create some controversy, and even legal battles over church-state separation, by her vocal witness to the “loving power of Jesus Christ.”
She is, however, familiar with struggles, in her own life and those she has read about in the Bible. Like Jacob, the patriarch of Israel, she recalls a time in her own life of a spiritual wrestling with God and of saying, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
Jacob, too, walked with a limp.
Manchester resident Jack Kenny is a freelance writer.
You're not impressed with Kate Michelman's calling her a sideshow freak?
You act surprised at Kate's callous indifference to women....
Actually, that's surprise that ANYONE would say that. I don't have a freakin' idea who Kate Michelman is.
This makes me even more "anti-choice."
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