FIC Blog

I’ve noted before the case of the 15 year-old West Hartford runaway who appears to have been the victim of a statutory rape that went unreported by Planned Parenthood (where she went for her abortion). The incident is a sad reminder that Connecticut is one of only six states that has yet to pass a parental notification law. Pray Connecticut’s Nick Uva yesterday also posed some pertinent questions:

That sad saga continues, complete with the revelation, gruesome to me, that abortion centers apparently keep remains long enough to allow DNA testing, but another large question is whether statutory rape statutes are being taken seriously enough by officials and electorates. Does the value they assign on easy abortion on purely ideological grounds outweigh the State’s interest in protecting teen (and pre-teen) girls from predation?

Will anyone draw the proper conclusions from the circumstances of the Gault case?

The “gruesome revelation” that abortion clinics “keep remains” is more gruesome than Nick knows. The LifeNews story he links to is based on an Aug. 2nd AP article. The Courant story appearing the same day (not available online) revealed more: “Bloomfield police located the aborted fetus at a medical-testing laboratory in Massachusetts.” That single sentence is all we get on the topic–a topic worth an entire investigative series of its own. Is it common practice for abortion clinics to sell the corpses of aborted children to medical testing laboratories? How much money do they get for the aborted children? What sort of tests are performed on them? When a woman gets an abortion is she told that the body of her dead child may be sold for medical examination? Does she have the right to decline to allow her dead child to be used that way? (After all, pro-abortionists sometimes describe the unborn child as merely a part of the woman’s body–but if we have the right to tell the DMV we don’t want to be an organ donor doesn’t a woman have the right to tell the abortion clinic she doesn’t want to be an aborted fetus donor?) Is this legal or is there a black market for the body parts of aborted children? This a grave matter (no pun intended) of public interest, but the likelihood of its being investigated by the mainstream media is probably zero.

Yet the other question raised by Nick, whether statutory rape statutes are being taken seriously by authorities when it comes to abortion clinics, is at least getting some attention:

When abortion clinics and other care providers are approached by girls, including those pregnant or otherwise seeking treatment, they face a difficult balancing test.

On the one hand, those providers face a mandate under state law to notify authorities of any evidence of child sexual abuse.

On the other hand, the “providers” at issue are providing abortions. More:

The state’s abuse disclosure rules fell under a spotlight in early June when a 15-year-old Bloomfield girl, Danielle Cramer, who had been missing for a year was found locked in a small storage room in a West Hartford man’s home.

According to the arrest warrant involving Adam Gault, 41, who faces kidnapping charges, the girl had an abortion on May 1 at Planned Parenthood in West Hartford – but wouldn’t identify the father.

“This case certainly has riveted public attention on the issue,” said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, whose office began a review of Connecticut’s disclosure rules this past spring, a process he said he hopes to conclude this fall. “It raises many of the same questions that professionals have to deal with day in and day out.”

And here’s some news. As the JI oh-so-delicately puts it, what DCF requires mandated reporters to report about statutory rape, ahem, “differs” from the law:

A Department of Children and Families policy requires that “mandated reporters,” who include health-care professionals, social workers, and others, report some statutory rapes but not all of them.

The policy requires reporting to DCF of any evidence that a child under age 13 has had sexual relations and any evidence of sex between a child under age 16 and an adult over age 21. The policy also allows reporting whenever the mandated reporter has “reasonable cause to suspect that child abuse or neglect has occurred.”

The DCF policy differs from the state’s criminal laws against statutory rape, which forbid any sexual intercourse between a child under age 16 and a person more than two years older. Starting Oct. 1, a new law will raise the age gap to three years when the child is 13, 14, or 15 years old…

Abortion clinics can avoid making reports to DCF if patients don’t give them relevant information, such as their age or the age of the sexual partner. An undercover investigation released in 2002 by a Texas-based anti-abortion group called Life Dynamics Inc. found evidence that some employees of abortion clinics, including some in Connecticut, discouraged potential patients from giving information that would trigger mandatory reporting.

That last sentence is the crux of the matter. But–like the aborted fetus located at a medical testing facility–a sentence is all it will get when the topic deserves an entire investigative series of its own. Life Dynamics has compiled more information on teen abortions in Connecticut here.  

Finally, there are a few other recent Connecticut abortion clinic items reported by LifeNews earlier this week that have received scant attention from our local media:

Bridgeport, CT (LifeNews.com) — The employee of an abortion facility in Connecticut will be sentenced this week after he pleaded guilty in a case involving the sexual abuse of three teenage girls. Former modeling agency owner Michael Britt, who worked as a janitor at the abortion center, is the subject of another case involving sexual abuse and abortion…

He took the 14 year-old to the Summit Women’s Center abortion facility, where he worked and which was located in the same building as his agency. The 17 year-old indicated he took her to the abortion center as well…

The Britt case follows just weeks after another abortion-sexual abuse case in Connecticut prompted observers to wonder why abortion facilities are not contacting authorities about the actions.

Kevon Walker, 22, was charged in May with getting his then 14 year-old girlfriend pregnant. He got the unnamed girl pregnant three times in six months and the girl wound up having three abortions as a result.

However, abortion businesses failed to report the statutory rape to authorities and officials only began investigating Walker’s actions when the victim’s mother contacted them.