Mother arrested for attempting to intervene in her 14-year old's decision to have abortion

Original story
Tuesday, March 22, 2005

"By Joyce Morrison, Southern IL News Correspondent

For legal reasons, the names of the family and the 14-year old girl that are the subject of this story have been withheld at this time.

GRANITE CITY - A Sothern Illinois woman was arrested last week (March 17) after trying to intervene on behalf of her 14-year old daughter's effort to have an abortion. The girl was allegedly taken to an abortion clinic by the mother of the man allegedly to have impregnated the 14-year old.

According to the girl's mother, her 14-year old daughter was called off from school in Madison County by a woman posing as the girl's “grandmother.” The woman took the girl from her home only minutes before the girl’s mother returned home from work.

It was later determined that the woman who had posed as the "grandmother" to the school authorities was the mother of the male who had fathered the unborn child the 14-year old girl was carrying. The age of the male has not been released.

When the parents were notified their pregnant daughter was not at school, they suspected she had been taken to the Hope Abortion Clinic in Granite City. The parents and grandfather were the only persons authorized to request school absence for the fourteen year old female.

“My husband and I rushed to the abortion clinic where we saw our daughter’s name on the roster and the time she had checked in,” the mother said. She then went into the clinic and searched a room filled with young women awaiting abortions but did not see her daughter.

She took a seat near the main desk and said, “I was told I could not prove my daughter was there so I began calling her name. A medical tech at the clinic told me , ‘It’s your daughter’s rights, it’s her body. You have no rights.’”

After continuing to call out her daughter’s name and telling her “don’t do it,” authorities were called and the mother was arrested.

The 14-year old told her mother she could hear her but when she asked employees to give her mother a message, they came back to the room and told her that her mother had left.

Angela Michaels, of Small Victories Ministry, was tipped off as to what was happending at the Hope clinic. According to Michaels, she witnessed police placing the mother’s hands behind her back, taking her into custody. As the police were putting the mother in the squad car, she was crying out, “Please, please, help me...my daughter is in there.”

Michaels said, “Exactly one hour later at 10:35 a.m., the 14-year old emerged from the clinic looking disheveled. The 14-year old told us that employees kept her in a quiet room until the procedure was performed and she was told that her mother had left.”

Employees assured this girl on her departure, “No-one will ever know you were here, we’ll bury your records.”

In the meantime, the woman who had taken the girl for the abortion was slipped out the back door of the clinic.

The police in the community in which the family lives allegedly told the girl's mom that they couldn't intervene despite her making a charge that her daughter had been raped (by statute) because the charge was stale--7 weeks after the incident. They did tell the girl's mom that, while she had no right to stop the abortion, she did have a right to go into the clinic and speak to her daughter."

People wonder why South Dakota passed the law that they did recently:

Source Story

LifeSiteNews.com
Tuesday March 22, 2005

South Dakota Adopts Strictest Abortion Restrictions in US

PIERRE, S.D., March 22, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds signed four new bills into law Thursday, including one measure mandating that doctors tell the woman that, by aborting her child, a human life ends. The bill stipulates that a doctor must inform the mother in writing and in person, no later than two hours before the abortion, that abortion ends the life of her baby, and "terminates the constitutional relationship women have with their fetuses."

Among the three other bills is one that mandates, in the event that the US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, abortion become immediately illegal in that state, listed as a felony with a maximum of two years prison for an offence.

The third bill, sponsored by Sen. Brock Greenfield, requires doctors to inform parents before a minor child undergoes an abortion. "This seeks to clear up a loophole," Greenfield said when the bill was introduced last month.

The final bill, sponsored by Rep. Roger Hunt, sets up a task force to study the effects of abortion. "In the 32 years since Roe v. Wade was decided, there's been a whole body of scientific knowledge developed," Hunt said of the bill in February. "It would be profitable and very worthwhile to learn and study that, so as the issue of abortion comes before the Legislature in the future, we'll have good information upon which to make decisions."

Last month, a bill that would have illegalized abortion in the state was discarded in favor of the lesser bills, signed into law Thursday.

That is where Bishop Carlson was the Bishop until he was recently appointed Bishop of the Saginaw diocese. Maybe they should move him to Illinois.