"RESPONSIBLE ADULTS" AND ABORTION
“RESPONSIBLE ADULTS” AND ABORTION Last Wednesday morning there appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times a paid advertisement from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The...
...But an ultrasound exam conducted at the center indicated that Herron’s baby was more than 23 weeks old, and a second exam placed the age at more than 24 weeks— potentially “viable” outside the womb, according to the best available science, and therefore protected from death by abortion under Arizona state law...
...This argument—Joyce Farley loses all rights to counsel her daughter, or even to know the girl’s whereabouts, the moment Crystal Lane begins travel toward an abortion clinic—is a familiar one...
...A nurse who was present there April 16 has since told the Arizona Republic that Dr...
...Kolbert minimized her client’s offense as akin to having helpfully “taken this girl to New York to buy a toothbrush or go to the mall...
...The bill will then be sent to the president...
...Biskind next dilated Herron’s cervix...
...This has always been the abortion movement’s basic party line...
...30 miles from home, bleeding and in severe pain from what would turn out to be botched surgery...
...In its New York Times advertorial, Planned Parenthood also complained that Congress is “trying to outlaw the safest and most common forms of abortion...
...In essence, the House sustained the unimpeachable judgment of more than 20 state legislatures that people like Rosa Marie Hartford are not “responsible adults...
...HerTHE CLAIM THAT PARTIAL-BIRTH REMAINS THE “SAFEST” SURGERY HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE PARTY LINE...
...Rosa Marie Hartford was sentenced to probation upon conviction of “interfering with the custody of a minor” during Crystal Lane’s trip to Binghamton...
...He is currently serving a 30-month prison term...
...Certain of our senators and representatives, for example, intend to “bar teens from turning to a responsible adult if they can’t talk to their parents about abortion...
...The Senate version of this “Child Custody Protection Act,” sponsored by Spencer Abraham and Jeff Sessions, was approved by the Judiciary Committee this past Thursday, and will likely win final passage at some point in the next few months...
...And precisely because partial-birth is hideous, as readers of this magazine are well aware, abortion advocates have never before been prepared to acknowledge that it is “common...
...But there is a fair chance the Senate will fail...
...At trial and on appeal (the charge is now being reprosecuted for technical reasons), Hartford was represented by abortion’s leading legal advocate, Kathryn Kolbert of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy...
...By this time, Joyce Farley, panicked by her daughter’s odd note and unexplained absence from Sullivan County High School, had already contacted the Pennsylvania state police...
...John Biskinds still run amok, beyond effective public sanction...
...The only “form” of abortion Congress has lately attempted to ban is the infamously hideous, late-term “partial- birth” procedure...
...Two hours later, Louann Herron was dead...
...Partial-birth, in other words, may live—that those like Louann Herron, and uncounted unborn children, might continue to die...
...Three weeks ago, on June 29, a 17-year-old girl entered Biskind’s office...
...She, too, like Louann Herron, was given a questionable ultrasound exam...
...Crystal was only 12, just out of seventh grade...
...Kathryn Kolbert used much the same argument as lead plaintiff ’s attorney in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey...
...In the summer of 1995, Hartford’s son, Michael Kilmer, had eyes for a local girl named Crystal Lane...
...Sometime soon, the Senate may make a similar attempt...
...and left the clinic at 2 o’clock...
...But Crystal saw neither school nor friends that day...
...Crystal’s mother, Joyce Farley, vehemently objected to his attentions—Kilmer was 18 at the time...
...So she was invited back to A-Z nine days later, by then about 26 weeks pregnant...
...One thing bears repeating, though...
...Instead, she was escorted by Rosa Marie Hartford to the Southern Tier Women’s Services clinic, 60 miles away in Binghamton, New York—where, unlike in Pennsylvania, no parent or judge need be notified in advance of an abortion performed on a minor child...
...Kolbert and Planned Parenthood were rebuffed again last Wednesday by the House of Representatives, which voted 276-150 to impose federal, Class One misdemeanor penalties on anyone who knowingly spirits a minor girl across state lines for the purpose of evading parental-notification and consent rules governing abortion...
...The girl was 23.6 weeks pregnant, the clinic’s records certify...
...Even when the abortion is intended, as in this instance, to destroy evidence of a rape...
...Then Rosa Marie Hartford escorted Crystal back to Pennsylvania, dropping her off at 5:30 P.M...
...Here, too, recent real-world experience is at war with pro-choice dogma...
...John Biskind instructed an assistant to fake a third ultrasound exam and produce results that suggested a less-than-24-week pregnancy...
...Biskind had perforated her uterus, producing a massive hemorrhage...
...Which brings us to a separate but related abortion issue...
...But when Biskind performed a partial-birth abortion on this patient June 30, he suddenly “discovered” that he was about to puncture the skull—and suction the brains—of a full-term, six-pound, two-ounce baby girl...
...Her pregnancy was entirely without medical complication...
...One Rosa Marie Hartford, of Shunk, Pennsylvania, directly inspired the legislation at issue...
...it last approved the partial-birth ban with just 64 votes, three short of the two-thirds majority required to enact a bill over the president’s objections...
...This was a peculiar protest...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Perhaps the federation’s advertising agency was unaware of this key political nuance...
...Biskind finished the procedure at 12:40 P.M...
...There is much to say about all this, and THE WEEKLY STANDARD has said a good bit of it before...
...Who, his aides say, will immediately veto it...
...She will be adopted by a Texas couple, the only known survivor of a partial-birth assault...
...At 6:30 A.M...
...She, too, like Louann Herron, sought a purely elective abortion to end an otherwise normal pregnancy...
...The federation wanted Times readers to understand the 105th Congress’s various legislative sins against “family planning...
...On April 7 of this year, Louann Herron visited the A-Z Women’s Center in Phoenix, Arizona, seeking an abortion...
...She had gone to school early, the note said, and would return late from an afternoon visit with friends...
...The reference here was to a bill sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and scheduled for final consideration in the House later the same day this ad was published...
...She was rebuffed by the justices, who upheld as valid any state law like Pennsylvania’s that requires guidance from a parent— or from a judge acting confidentially in a parent’s stead—before an underage girl may receive an abortion...
...That reason’s name is William Jefferson Clinton...
...At the Binghamton clinic, the rapist’s mother identified the girl as her stepdaughter, “Crystal Hartford...
...This is not a theoretical question...
...She presented and signed a false medical history, paid for the abortion, and bought Crystal lunch when the deed was done...
...This week, the House of Representatives will vote to override the president’s veto of a federal ban on this allegedly “safest and most common” of abortions...
...The federation also wanted to warn us all about a few such sins still forthcoming—bad votes in utero, as it were...
...There was clearly no mistake, however, in Planned Parenthood’s apparent insistence that partial- birth remains the “safest” surgery for women in certain rare medical emergencies...
...While she was unconscious, Kilmer had sex with her...
...So he delivered the infant alive, after inflicting a skull fracture and two deep facial lacerations...
...The following day, at noon, he subjected her to a partial-birth abortion...
...There is now one reason, above all others, why the United States maintains the Western world’s most extreme and destructive abortion regime—one reason why the Rosa Marie Hartfords and Dr...
...In any case, she contended, child-custody statutes are unenforceable whenever a teenage girl seeks to terminate a pregnancy, since a “young woman’s constitutional right to choose abortion outweighs any interest her parents have” in the decision...
...But the young man secretly pursued Farley’s daughter just the same...
...They will probably succeed...
...But she wept at the news and appealed the decision...
...And one day in July, he plied Crystal with alcohol, so much that she passed out cold...
...And it has always been a lie...
...Michael Kilmer eventually plea-bargained multiple charges of rape and corrupting a minor...
...she was undergoing a divorce and she simply did not want a child...
...It is worth considering, first, exactly whom, in context of this controversy, Planned Parenthood considers a “responsible adult...
...on August 31, 1995, a few weeks past her thirteenth birthday, Crystal Lane crept out of her house, leaving a note for her mother...
...AND IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A LIE . ron was initially informed that the clinic could not help her...
...We will return to that measure’s merits in a moment...
Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 44
