Pro-Choice Kidnappers

  Rosa Marie Hartford had to act fast. Her 18-year-old son, Michael, had gotten a 13-year-old girl pregnant. If the girl's parents found out, he faced charges of statutory rape and corruption of a minor. To conceal her son's crimes, Hartford asked a male friend to secretly drive the girl from Pennsylvania to New York for an abortion. Unfortunately, the abortionist botched the procedure, leading to serious medical complications. The secret came out, but, incredibly, abortion advocates are defending Hartford. The case has raised a debate about pro-choice advocates exploiting a loophole in parental consent laws. Pennsylvania, you see, has a parental consent law—and that's where the 13-year-old girl lives. That's why Hartford sent her to New York, which has no such law. When the truth came out, Hartford was charged with interfering with the custody of a minor, and her son pled guilty to statutory rape. As outrageous as Hartford’s actions were, they're not unusual. The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP) says that every year thousands of girls are taken across state lines by nonrelated adults to evade parental consent laws. To abortion supporters, people like Hartford are modern-day Harriet Tubmans, operating underground railroads to the nation's abortion mills. As the CRLP put it, Hartford was simply "assist[ing] a woman to exercise her constitutional rights." Wait a minute. Who stood by this so-called "woman" when she suffered physical complications from the abortion? Who paid the doctor bills, and who's going to help her deal with the emotional aftereffects the abortion will surely cause her? Will Mrs. Hartford do all this? Of course not. The girl's own mother will. And that's why her mother should be the one helping the girl decide if an abortion is in her best interests. As the girl’s mother told a Senate hearing: "My daughter, who had just turned 13, underwent a dangerous medical procedure without anyone present who knew her past medical history." In their zeal to protect the abortion license, prochoicers disregard the reason we pass parental involvement laws in the first place: to protect children and to preserve family integrity. Consider: We don’t allow kids to buy property, enter into contracts, marry, or even attend certain movies without their parents’ approval. Why? Because we recognize that underage children need their parents' guidance. But when it comes to abortion, the law tosses aside this vital consideration, stripping the child of her parents' protection. Family integrity is destroyed when outsiders help girls lie to their parents about their secret abortions. The fact that pro-abortion elites can justify outrages like these is proof that when we refuse to honor God’s law, we are led into "depraved ways of thinking," as Paul puts it in Romans. The good news is that a bill pending in Congress would make it a federal crime to take someone else's child across state lines for a secret abortion. We need to remind our senators and representatives that 80 percent of Americans support parental consent laws. Let's urge them to pass the Child Custody Protection Act by a veto-proof majority. We must not allow abortion advocates to risk the lives of other people's children to promote their own depraved agendas.

06/10/98