{"id":260048,"date":"2022-01-02T09:09:45","date_gmt":"2022-01-02T15:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=260048"},"modified":"2021-12-30T21:31:55","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T03:31:55","slug":"abortion-survivor-speaks-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/abortion-survivor-speaks-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Abortion survivor speaks out: ‘The greatest gift I have received is life’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Linda Swayn grew up in the care of the Sisters of Compassion<\/a> in Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand, which was founded by Venerable Suzanne Aubert to help care for babies and children deemed unwanted. But Linda wasn’t just deemed “unwanted.” She survived an abortion attempt.<\/p>\n

“My mother had an unexpected pregnancy with a married man\u00a0who already had a daughter that was about four years old,” Swayn told<\/a> Fr. James Lyons, Chaplain of the Home of Compassion. “And it was a shock to her. She didn’t want her parents to know she was pregnant, so she got hold of a drug called methotrexate<\/a>, and methotrexate is a drug that’s used to be able to abort the fetus. However, I survived.”<\/p>\n

It was the 1960s. Though methotrexate, an anti-rheumatic drug, is today rarely used for abortions, the Mayo Clinic says it is typically used along with misoprostol when used as an abortifacient. It alone can cause the death of the preborn child, but it can also cause<\/a> neural tube defects, harming the development of the brain, spine, or spinal cord. The Mayo Clinic states<\/a>, “This type of medical abortion must be done within seven weeks of the first day of your last period, and it can take up to a month for methotrexate to complete the abortion. Methotrexate is given as a shot or vaginally and the misoprostol is later used at home.”<\/p>\n

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