Mark your calendar for June 3.The 20th annual Ball for Life
will honor Peggy Noonan and Ambassador Faith Whittlesey at the
New York Athletic Club,180 Central Park South. I will once again
be on the host committee, and I expect that by next week my
mailbox will teem with missives from the most venomous of
pro-choice scribes angered by this column. I hope the critical
letters to the editor of The New York Sun will be much more
discreet.
Someone asked me recently what I thought about the recent Florida
ruling allowing an abortion for a 13-year-old girl. He wondered
if I could research any offspring of children that young. I
didn't have to look very far, because an in-law of mine had her
firstborn at 13 and three more before she was 20.
I did a Google search for the youngest mother and discovered that
a Peruvian girl gave birth at 5. That may be a statistic for the
Guinness Book of World Records, but all I could think of was, who
impregnated that poor child? For that matter, who impregnated
that 13-year-old Floridian?
For the past 32 years, abortion rights have been incontrovertibly
linked with women's issues, and yet concern for the female child
does not fit into that sphere. How else to explain why statutory
rape is covered up, under the guise of protecting the minor's
privacy?
In Kansas and Indiana, authorities are investigating allegations
of statutory rape. Planned Parenthood and other abortion
providers, which claim that releasing medical records would
violate the privacy of the girls, are blocking the investigators'
efforts. Even though state officials would redact the records to
protect the victims' privacy, the abortion providers are refusing
to cooperate. Clearly, the violation of the girls' bodies is not
their greatest priority.
The House of Representatives, by a lopsided bipartisan vote,
recently approved legislation making it a crime to take a
teenager across state lines to obtain an abortion.
Abortion-rights advocates, chief among them New York's own
Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of Manhattan, offered an amendment to
the bill that would have exempted grandparents or other adult
relatives.
According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, 46% of
children who are raped are raped by family members. That
amendment would have exempted possible sexual predators.
Fortunately, the amendment failed, but clearly the mindset of
these pro-choice legislators seems to be more about protecting
abortion than protecting children.
When I dared suggest in a previous column that women who have
abortions suffer extreme emotional trauma, we received a letter
from a reader asserting that "uncountable" women who
have abortions go on to have successful, happy lives, and that
just because some women regret their decision does not mean the
right to an abortion must be taken away from all women. The
reader suggested instead that women should be helped to
understand their options and be strong enough to make their
decision.
Ay, there's the rub! Many of the women who have suffered most
from aborting their babies were not given that assistance.
Although I'm not one of the greatest fans of trial lawyers, one
has to wonder why a hotshot tort attorney hasn't filed a
class-action suit against Planned Parenthood and other abortion
clinics named by these women in their testimonies.
Why is it that an obstetrician will refer to a patient's
"fetus" until he finds out it's wanted - then it
becomes her baby? Why is the right to an abortion more important
than women's health? Why is scientific research linking abortion
to breast cancer, sterility, or future birth defects cavalierly
dismissed?
If any medical procedure were proven to have the same deleterious
side effects that abortion has, it would have been banned. At the
very least, a warning to the patient would be have been made
mandatory. Planned Parenthood has strange priorities, yet it gets
government funds.
The campaign manager for International Planned Parenthood
Federation, Eve Fox, issued a memo this month urging Catholic
pro-choicers: "Please write a letter to the editor
encouraging Pope Benedict XVI to reconsider his dangerously
outdated stances on birth control, abortion and sexuality in
order to help move the Catholic Church into the 21st
century."
Sorry, Ms. Fox, but a trillion letters to the editor will not
change the pope's mind. Pro-choice Catholics are free to leave
the church at any time. Buh-bye.
Pro-lifers from all religions are free to join me on June 3 for
the Ball for Life (www.ballforlife.org). The event will benefit
Good Counsel Homes, which serves women and their children in
crisis pregnancies. This great organization has its priorities
straight: It benefits women.