&quotRESPONSIBLE ADULTS” AND ABORTION

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. We will return to that measure’s merits in a moment. It is worth considering, first, exactly whom, in context of this controversy, Planned Parenthood considers a “responsible adult.” This is not a theoretical question. One Rosa Marie Hartford, of Shunk, Pennsylvania, directly inspired the legislation at issue.

In the summer of 1995, Hartford’s son, Michael Kilmer, had eyes for a local girl named Crystal Lane. Crystal’s mother, Joyce Farley, vehemently objected to his attentions — Kilmer was 18 at the time; Crystal was only 12, just out of seventh grade. But the young man secretly pursued Farley’s daughter just the same. And one day in July, he plied Crystal with alcohol, so much that she passed out cold. While she was unconscious, Kilmer had sex with her.

At 6:30 A.M. on August 31, 1995, a few weeks past her thirteenth birthday, Crystal Lane crept out of her house, leaving a note for her mother. She had gone to school early, the note said, and would return late from an afternoon visit with friends. But Crystal saw neither school nor friends that day. 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. Even when the abortion is intended, as in this instance, to destroy evidence of a rape.

At the Binghamton clinic, the rapist’s mother identified the girl as her stepdaughter, “Crystal Hartford.” She presented and signed a false medical history, paid for the abortion, and bought Crystal lunch when the deed was done. Then Rosa Marie Hartford escorted Crystal back to Pennsylvania, dropping her off at 5:30 P.M. 30 miles from home, bleeding and in severe pain from what would turn out to be botched surgery. 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.

Michael Kilmer eventually plea-bargained multiple charges of rape and corrupting a minor. He is currently serving a 30-month prison term. Rosa Marie Hartford was sentenced to probation upon conviction of “interfering with the custody of a minor” during Crystal Lane’s trip to Binghamton. 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. 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.” 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.

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. Kathryn Kolbert used much the same argument as lead plaintiff’s attorney in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 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.

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. In essence, the House sustained the unimpeachable judgment of more than 20 state legislatures that people like Rosa Marie Hartford are not “responsible adults.” 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. The bill will then be sent to the president. Who, his aides say, will immediately veto it.

Which brings us to a separate but related abortion issue. In its New York Times advertorial, Planned Parenthood also complained that Congress is “trying to outlaw the safest and most common forms of abortion.” This was a peculiar protest. The only “form” of abortion Congress has lately attempted to ban is the infamously hideous, late-term “partial-birth” procedure. 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.” Perhaps the federation’s advertising agency was unaware of this key political nuance.

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. This has always been the abortion movement’s basic party line. And it has always been a lie. Here, too, recent real-world experience is at war with pro-choice dogma.

On April 7 of this year, Louann Herron visited the A-Z Women’s Center in Phoenix, Arizona, seeking an abortion. Her pregnancy was entirely without medical complication; she was undergoing a divorce and she simply did not want a child. 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. Herron was initially informed that the clinic could not help her.

But she wept at the news and appealed the decision. So she was invited back to A-Z nine days later, by then about 26 weeks pregnant. A nurse who was present there April 16 has since told the Arizona Republic that Dr. John Biskind instructed an assistant to fake a third ultrasound exam and produce results that suggested a less-than-24-week pregnancy. Biskind next dilated Herron’s cervix. The following day, at noon, he subjected her to a partial-birth abortion. Biskind finished the procedure at 12:40 P.M. and left the clinic at 2 o’clock. Two hours later, Louann Herron was dead; Biskind had perforated her uterus, producing a massive hemorrhage.

Three weeks ago, on June 29, a 17-year-old girl entered Biskind’s office. She, too, like Louann Herron, sought a purely elective abortion to end an otherwise normal pregnancy. She, too, like Louann Herron, was given a questionable ultrasound exam. The girl was 23.6 weeks pregnant, the clinic’s records certify. 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. So he delivered the infant alive, after inflicting a skull fracture and two deep facial lacerations. She will be adopted by a Texas couple, the only known survivor of a partial-birth assault.

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. They will probably succeed. Sometime soon, the Senate may make a similar attempt. But there is a fair chance the Senate will fail; 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. Partial-birth, in other words, may live — that those like Louann Herron, and uncounted unborn children, might continue to die.

There is much to say about all this, and THE WEEKLY STANDARD has said a good bit of it before. One thing bears repeating, though. 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. John Biskinds still run amok, beyond effective public sanction. That reason’s name is William Jefferson Clinton.

David Tell, for the Editors