Don’t Count on Abortion Clinics to Help 10-Year-Old Sexual Abuse Victims
Katrina Trinko /
In recent remarks on abortion, President Joe Biden sought to pull on Americans’ heartstrings by telling the horrifying story of a pregnant 10-year-old.
“Just last week, it was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim in Ohio—10 years old—and she was forced to have to travel out of the state, to Indiana, to seek to terminate the [pregnancy],” Biden said Friday, according to a White House transcript.
Leaving aside the question of whether this incident actually occurred—and there are reasons to be skeptical—the fact remains that abortion clinics don’t have a stellar track record when it comes to reporting sexual abuse of minors.
Whatever your views on abortion, surely all Americans should agree that when a girl is pregnant due to sexual abuse, it’s imperative to report the crime and get help for the victim.
Yet Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, has often been silent in these instances, according to an explosive 2018 report from pro-life organization Live Action.
Planned Parenthood is “one of the biggest accomplices to child sexual abuse in the nation,” states the report, which adds that the organization is “a haven for sexual abusers and sex traffickers … a favorite place to take their victims to cover up their crimes.”
Planned Parenthood did not respond to an email requesting comment on Live Action’s report.
The report details several specific instances where abuse victims received abortions at Planned Parenthood, but no reporting of the abuse occurred. All of the examples in the report are from state health departments, court records, media reports, and accounts from former Planned Parenthood employees.
In one case, a girl was impregnated by her father at 14, 16, and 17, but the abortion giant, which provided three abortions for the girl, never told authorities. In another instance, when a 13-year-old was impregnated by her stepfather, Planned Parenthood preformed an abortion (with no notification to her parents) and again, didn’t report the abuse.
In a third example, a 12-year-old girl, who was being sexually abused by her 23-year-old foster brother, got an abortion at Planned Parenthood. True to the pattern, Planned Parenthood employees didn’t tell the 12-year-old’s foster parents or the authorities.
So in other words, Planned Parenthood is great if all you want for child sexual abuse victims is abortions, not justice and deliverance from their sexual abusers.
Sue Thayer, who worked at Planned Parenthood for 17 years, including as center manager of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland’s clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa, before being let go, told Live Action:
We were all required to be mandatory reporters, but, if we saw a case—questionable abuse or even for sure, I mean, this kid is being abused—we really were discouraged from calling it in, just because they didn’t want to have the trouble—the angry parent, the angry boyfriend, whatever it was. So, more than once I was told, ‘No, that is not reportable. You don’t need to call it in.’
Thayer wasn’t the only former Planned Parenthood employee with concerns. Another one, Catherine Adair, was quoted in the Live Action report as having similar qualms.
“So many things would happen in that counseling room that really bothered me. There’d be girls coming in with their abusers,” Adair said. “Against all protocol, the abuser would be let into the counseling room—that was where they were supposed to be separated from whom they were with, and men were never allowed back there. But with these young girls, they’d be allowed back there.”
“Even if they knew—even if I went to the manager and I said, ‘Look, there’s something going on here’—she would say, ‘She’s better off with the abortion. We can’t do anything about what’s going on at home, but at least we can give her the abortion,’” Adair added.
What?
Again, regardless of views on abortion, surely we all want to help victims of child sexual abuse?
Right?
Consider the heartbreaking case of Denise Fairbanks, who says she was raped by her dad starting when she was 13. In 2004, Fairbanks, then 16, became pregnant and went to Planned Parenthood. According to a lawsuit she later filed, Fairbanks “tried to put an end to this abuse, which had started in 2000, by informing a Planned Parenthood employee that she has been forced to have sex and to do things she did not want to do.”
But there was no reprieve for Fairbanks. According to her suit, which was later settled, “Planned Parenthood … did not report their knowledge that Denise was a victim of sexual abuse.”
The sexual abuse continued for another year and a half.
As I alluded earlier, there are reasons to be skeptical about Biden’s story of the 10-year-old. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler examined the story and found that it originated in an Indianapolis Star article with just one source: Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indiana abortionist who claims she performed the abortion for the 10-year-old.
“There is no indication that the newspaper made other attempts to confirm her account,” Kessler writes.
Furthermore, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told Fox News in an interview Monday that there hasn’t been a “whisper” of a case of child sexual abuse that matches the claims of The Indianapolis Star’s article.
“We have regular contact with prosecutors and local police and sheriffs. Not a whisper anywhere,” Yost said.
If the story is true, let’s hope that Bernard and anyone else who had contact with the girl reported the sexual abuse and that this poor child no longer will be abused.
But if you want to help child sexual abuse victims, don’t assume that abortion clinics are there to help the victims. Instead, if Planned Parenthood’s track record is any indication, the abortion clinics instead might be best at aiding the abusers, not the abused.
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