The
Independent article linked to in the OP is no longer freely available, but you can get the gist, pretty much verbatim, from "testimony" given by this woman to the House Judiciary Committee
in 1996 and
again in 2000. Apparently, she's been regaling folks with this tale from the age of 14, i.e. half her life.
I don't buy her story. Not for a second. The various versions of her story are riddled with claims so unlikely I'd want to see truckload of documentary evidence before I even started to give credence to them. From the 2000 version:
A saline abortion is a solution of salt saline that is injected into the mothers womb. The baby then gulps the solution, it burns the baby inside and out and then the mother is to deliver a dead baby within 24 hours.
This happened to me! I remained in the solution for approximately 18 hours and was delivered ALIVE on April 6, 1977 at 6:00 am in a California abortion clinic. There were young women in the room who had already been given their injections and were waiting to deliver dead babies.
I'm supposed to believe that there is/was a clinic in California which not only conducted elective third-trimester abortions (unlikely to begin with), but performed several at a time, kept the patients in the clinic overnight and kept them all in one room? While they were all expected to expel a dead foetus at any time?
From the 1996 version:
I have met other survivors of abortion. They are all thankful for life. Only a few months ago I met another saline abortion survivor. Her name is Sarah. She is two years old. Sarah also has cerebral palsy, but her diagnosis is not good. She is blind and has severe seizures.
This "Sarah" is two years old, blind, suffering from cerebral palsy and seizures, yet Ms Jessen is capable of ascertaining that Sarah is "thankful for life." How? By telepathy?
And Ms Jessen supposedly suffers from cerebral palsy, but fortunately, as of 2000, she is left "only with a slight limp" and "no longer [has] need of a walker or leg braces." In
this article in the
Torygraph, she claims that:
"Two years ago, my upper-leg muscles had atrophied, so I had to build them up. I could only lift 30lb of weight. Now I can press over 200lb. It can be exhausting, but at least if you run, you get there faster."
Two years ago... so, late November or early December of 2003. Yet she finished last year's Music City Marathon (in Nashville TN), which was held on April 24th. From atrophied muscles to running a 7½ hour marathon in a mere five months!
And then there's this passage (also in the
Telegraph):
When she was 16, a stranger came up to her and told her that children with disabilities were a burden on society. "I just looked at her, smiled and knew she was wrong," Miss Jessen says.
Straight out of the Jack Chick correspondence course in script-writing.
I think the essentials of her story are entirely untrue. Maybe it has some basis in fact; maybe she was born prematurely and given up for adoption by a mother who couldn't keep her; maybe she has cerebral palsy, but not anywhere near as severely as she makes out (conveniently, the four operations she supposedly underwent all occurred before the age of ten; note also that she credits Jesus with her recovery, not the surgeons). But I think her two cardinal claims--that she survived a third-trimester abortion and largely overcame cerebral palsy--are fabrications.
Here's a theory: her foster mother is a Jesus freak and indoctrinated her well. When the problem of theodicy reared its head (namely, if god loves me, why do I have cerebral palsy?), her foster mother cooked up the abortion story to explain it away; that way, it wasn't God's fault, but that of her biological mother and, of course, first and foremost, "the abortionist." And Gianna not only bought it, but took it on the road, to the delight of anti-abortionists and positive-thinking disabled people all over the English-speaking world.
