The 17-year-old girl was in labor when she arrived at the emergency room, strapped into a wheelchair because her physical and mental disabilities made it difficult for her to sit upright. She could not speak.
Hospital staff remembered her from two years earlier – when she had given birth the first time.
“This is the kind of case that would turn a maggot’s stomach,” a police captain in Rialto, Calif., told me.
It’s also a story that was never published because 25 years ago, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Southern California, my editor was more concerned about protecting the girl’s privacy. Her circumstances were so singular that just laying out the bare facts of the story might reveal her identity.
Anyone who knew the family might recognize them and, by extension, the suggestion that her father – the man most likely to have access to her – also impregnated her. Not once, but twice.
Yes, it was the kind of case that would turn a maggot’s stomach. But it would stir the loins of men who think a zygote, an embryo, a fetus – all have primacy over a female human.
It’s easy to bash the stupidity of Congressman Todd Akin, who apparently doesn’t have a clue about ovulation. (He probably thinks females ejaculate.) But Akin isn’t too far removed from my former editor who killed that story.
And that editor was only slightly superior to the men who were inside Big Dan’s Tavern in New Bedford, Mass., and didn’t call the police when a woman was gang-raped on a pool table – a case that was still in the news when I learned of the severely disabled pregnant girl who was in no condition to consent.
When I suggested a comparison to my editor – that he was acting like a bystander at Big Dan’s – he screamed and became so enraged the whites of his eyes turned red.
These stories, and the people who excuse them, abound. It is not surprising that anti-abortionists have made gains guilting young women into lives of poverty for sexually satisfying their boyfriends – while their boyfriends move on to new conquests.
Which is why the pleading tone of Planned Parenthood’s repeated solicitations is as powerful as a white flag.
About a week after the Akin story broke, here came a long envelope in the mail from Planned Parenthood with this statement in bold on the front: This has got to stop.
Inside was the exact same four-page letter from Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood (and daughter of a former Democratic Party star, the late Ann Richards) that I received several months ago. I don’t remember which dustup elicited the first letter – the Susan G. Komen controversy? The Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh bout?
Even the envelope was the same: This has got to stop once again in bold on the front.
Clearly, it doesn’t have to stop. And it isn’t going to stop. Maybe Planned Parenthood likes having a fresh outrage to fuel its fundraisers, or else it wouldn’t waste paper and postage asking its enemies to stop being mean.
Cecil Richards fights like a girl (but not like Claressa Shields, and even she had to listen to her male sparring partner tell her before the Olympics that it was time for her “to think about children”).
So many girls never get to own their bodies. In the poorest and least educated countries, unwanted pregnancies continue to enslave girls and women. It’s easy to spot which countries are the worst: They are the ones that devalue – and abort – female fetuses.
Anti-abortionists love to seize on the forced abortion of female fetuses in places like China and India as proof of the evils of abortion. They never consider one reason females are devalued: Their bodies are easily claimed by others.
An absolute right to birth control and legal abortion would help change that. It is the only way girls and women can fight the consequences of the male sex drive. Planned Parenthood tiptoes around that; it might offend some of their male supporters.
The organization has a knack for ignoring the most passionate and straight-talking abortion advocates – women like former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders.
Here’s another, the woman who wrote these words: “One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. … Human beings are not stock-farm animals.”
That’s from “The Ayn Rand Lexicon.”
Yes, Ayn Rand. She would have never stood by and let the anti-abortionists seize the title, “pro-life.”
Don’t look for any quotes from Ayn Rand in a Planned Parenthood letter. It might offend the Democratic Party faithful, whose cautious defense has allowed abortion opponents to think they have a chance at dismantling Roe v. Wade.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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