Actress Busy Phillips dodged questions regarding a late-term abortion survivor’s right to life Wednesday at a congressional committee hearing.
Both Phillips and late-term abortion survivor Melissa Ohden testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee regarding abortion legislation, according to LifeSite News.
Phillips said that she obtained an abortion in Arizona at the age of 15 in 1994. The actress protested that if a 15-year-old girl needed an abortion in 2019, Arizona would require her to obtain parental consent, have a “medically unnecessary ultrasound,” go to a counseling session and wait 24 hours to mull over her decision.
“My body belongs to me, not the state,” Phillips told the committee. “Women and their doctors are in the best position to make informed decisions about what is best for them. No one else.” (RELATED: Actress Says She Received ‘Absolution’ From The Pope After Aborting Her Baby)
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Republican Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert asked Phillips whether “somebody who has survived an abortion like Melissa Ohden has a right when she’s born to life, to control her body when someone else doesn’t take her life.”
Phillips thanked Ohden for sharing her story but dodged responding directly. “Although I played a doctor on television, sir, I am actually not a physician,” she said.
“I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman and, you know, it’s a choice between a woman and her doctor,” Phillips said, adding that she couldn’t speak to Ohden’s “experience” because she was not present.
“Well I just wondered how far your feeling about that went,” Gohmert asked the actress, ” because once she’s born, would you agree that she is a person in being?”
“Yeah, see, I’m not speaking about birth, sir, I’m speaking about abortion,” Phillips responded.
Ohden survived her mother’s abortion at 31 weeks. Doctors misleadingly told her mother that Ohden was only 18-20 weeks along before the abortion, Ohden told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Ohden said that her mother’s parents orchestrated a forced saline infusion abortion with the help of her grandmother’s colleague, the local abortionist. The late-term abortion survivor explained that the saline infusion abortion is intended to poison and scald the child to death over 72 hours as the baby soaks in the fluid injected into the womb. Doctors would then induce premature labor.
Ohden soaked in the saline solution for not three but five days when doctors could not successfully induce her birthmother’s labor.
“They did finally succeed that fifth day, and I was delivered at St. Luke’s Hospital in Sioux City, Iowa, in the final step of the abortion procedure, expected to be a successful abortion—a deceased child, but when I was expelled from the womb, I was accidentally born alive,” Ohden told TheDCNF.
“I now know from admissions of my biological family that my grandmother was there when I was delivered alive and demanded to the nurses that they leave me to die,” Ohden said.
“We may never know how long I was ‘laid aside,’ in the words of a nurse who has communicated with me about her experience that day, but we know that ultimately, a ‘tall, blond nurse,’ rushed me to the NICU shouting out, ‘she just kept gasping for breath and I couldn’t just leave her there to die.'”
Ohden said that her life was saved that day because someone was willing to do the right thing.
“I’m alive today not because a law protected me, but because someone was willing to do the right thing. To me, my family, and all other survivors, yes, we’re worth the time and effort to establish this legislation.”
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