Healing, serving, thriving: Melissa Ohden on the Abortion Survivors Network

Excerpted from a post at Braided Trails.

By the time Melissa Ohden wrote her book You Carried Me, she had already spent several years sharing her story publicly. That didn’t come easily to her – “I’m most comfortable behind the scenes, to be perfectly honest” – but she knew that speaking out was the only way to come to terms with being an abortion survivor.

Along the way, she found that her experience wasn’t unique. She connected with other people who were born alive after attempts were made to abort them. She later founded the Abortion Survivors Network, where she now serves as CEO. By 2022, nearly 600 people had reached out to ASN. Four years later, that number has doubled.

The network includes not only abortion survivors, but their family members as well, including mothers who gave birth after abortion attempts failed. “We offer healing support,” she says. “We are the only organization that has an online community not just for survivors, but for women whose abortions didn’t go the way they planned. We have a community for adoptive families as well.”

For more information about the Abortion Survivors Network and the resources cited in this interview, go to abortionsurvivors.org, and look for ASN’s posts on social media. 

Melissa joined me on a video call recently to talk about ASN’s mission, the people it serves, and the publication of its newest resources.

Head to Braided Trails on Substack to read the complete interview.

A Pilgrimage of Discovery: Finding Flannery

Finding Flannery: A Travel Memoir Exploring the Mystique of Flannery O’Connor and the Legacy She Has Left Us All (En Route Books and Media LLC, 2025) by Christina Brajkovich, Karen Anne Mahoney, and Roxane B. Salonen

A book with three authors can be disjointed, but Finding Flannery flows smoothly from one chapter to the next. Within each chapter are sections with three first-person narratives, and I can’t help but salute the editor who wove voices together so deftly. Each writer – Christina Brajkovich, Karen Anne Mahoney, and Roxane B. Salonen – adds a different dimension to what is more than a travel memoir.

One needn’t be a fan of the often-difficult fiction of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) to appreciate this book. If anything, as the authors go to Georgia to discover O’Connor’s milieu, they illuminate her gifts and Catholic faith in a way to inspire discovery, or re-discovery, of her work.

While the three women may have begun their journey intending to explore what they call the O’Connor “mystique,” their account of traveling to Georgia is rich in itself. The American South was unfamiliar territory for three Catholic writers coming from the north. They eased into it as they drove, enjoying hospitality from a fellow writer before making brief pilgrimages to the renowned Abbey of Gethsemane (where Thomas Merton found his spiritual home as Fr. Louis) and the motherhouse of the Sisters of Loretto, both in Kentucky. 

Their ultimate destination was Andalusia, the farm where O’Connor lived in Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor wrote piercing fiction (“…the oddities of our world with a heavy side of grace”) and perceptive essays while maintaining a lively flow of letters with many correspondents. Eventually, she developed lupus, a disease which gradually limited her mobility and strength. Her disciplined habits, which included daily Mass, sustained her as she kept writing to the end of her life.

Finding Flannery is filled with curiosity and humble openness to the unfamiliar, with observations and reflections about O’Connor’s work and legacy conveyed with clarity and appreciation. The three authors don’t shy away from problematic aspects of O’Connor’s life and work. They  recognize Andalusia’s flawed human being, a woman who shared their faith in God despite differences in time, place, and experience.  

The book would have been incomplete without the travelers’ accounts of their own lives and faith journeys, offering insight into what drew them to Andalusia in the first place.

Every page of Finding Flannery is informed by humble faith, gratitude for good fellowship, and deep respect for the craft of writing. Authors Brajkovich, Mahoney, and Salonen have left me open to approaching O’Connor’s fiction once again, this time with a better understanding of the woman who wrote it and the place from which it came. 

This post is shared to the Open Book blog linkup, found monthly at Carolyn Astfalk’s My Scribbler’s Heart and at catholicmom.com.

A summer shower

I last visited the Concord-Lake Sunapee Rail Trail in Concord, New Hampshire a few years ago, on a cool autumn day. I decided to return there the other day to see how it looks in summer.

I found a different kind of beauty near the trailhead, with summer wildflowers rather than fall foliage catching my eye. A beautiful start! The trail passed open space for a few hundred yards before entering deep shade under mature trees. I walked for about a mile and a half, enjoying the shade on a muggy day, before deciding to turn around.

Uh-oh…the forecast had been for scattered afternoon pop-up showers, and one of them popped up as soon as I turned around. I wasn’t carrying rain gear on the 80-degree day, and I had a half-hour walk between me and my car. I shrugged and took the consequences as a hard rain began to fall. It was over in 15 minutes, which was long enough to leave me drenched. It was a reminder that even for short walks, carrying an inexpensive poncho is a good idea.

A poncho wouldn’t have helped my shoes, of course. They should dry out within a few days. That’s a modest price to pay for some summer shade and beauty.

Read more about my walks throughout New Hampshire at Granite State Walker, where an earlier version of this post appeared.