A mother who tried to enter a St. Louis-area abortion facility to see her 16-year-old daughter last week was stopped by abortion facility officials and local police.
Granite City Police Chief David Ruebhausen said the woman was seeking entrance to the Hope Clinic abortion facility on Thursday morning when she went across the street to the Gateway Regional Medical Center and found one of his officers. Ruebhausen said she asked the officer to help allow her to enter the abortion business. The officer called the station, and he was instructed not to bring the woman into the abortion facility.
“Parental consent is not necessary,” Ruebhausen said, explaining that the Illinois abortion law allows minors to undergo abortions without the permission or knowledge of their parents. Ruebhausen said such incidents — of parents asking police to help them intervene in abortions or speak with their children who are inside abortion facilities – happen occasionally. But, he said, the law does not allow his officers to intervene on behalf of the parents.
The mother could not be reached for comment.
A group of protesters who were at the clinic Thursday morning said the mother told them that she had received a call from her daughter's high school alerting her to her daughter's absence. The mother then learned from her daughter's friend that her daughter was at the Hope Clinic abortion business, said Angela Michael, one of the protesters. Michael said the mother was not allowed into the abortion facility until several hours after she first requested to see her daughter. “I just stood there holding her and praying with her,” Michael said.
Hope Clinic executive director Sally Burgess said she would not comment on the cases of specific girls seeking abortions for legal and privacy reasons. She said “uninvited visitors” rarely come to the abortion facility looking for girls during an abortion, “but it does happen.” When it does, she said, “We're going to tell the patient what's going on.”
“We always encourage our patients to talk to their parents,” Burgess said. “But if the teen-ager is adamant, we're going to respect her privacy.”
Abortion facilities have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress because of their tactics that prey on teen girls and encourage them to get around the parental involvement laws of their home state. Some abortion facilities, such as the Hope Clinic in Granite City, operate in a location on the other side of the state border from a large city in a state that requires a teen to notify her parents before having an abortion. The Child Custody Protection Act pending in Congress would prohibit abortion facilities from conducting such secret abortions.
A leading pro-life advocate in Missouri said teens from her state drive across the Illinois border to the abortion facility in Granite City and encouraged Illinois to pass a similar parental involvement law to curb the situation. “I know that we all sympathize with the desperation that the mother of this young girl must have felt as she stood outside trying to save her daughter and her grandchild,” explained Pam Manning, president of Missouri Right to Life. “To even imagine that this could happen shows how totally perverse the abortion business is and the lie they make of their comment that they encourage the girls to consult with their parents.”
“I hope that this shockingly tragic incident is the impetus that the Illinois Legislature needs to finally pass parental consent legislation. I only hope that this sad tale reaches every person in Illinois so something will push the legislators to fix this abomination,” Manning added.
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
