Planned Parenthood Pushing Teens to Secret Abortions in NH

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Dec 28, 2011   |   8:29PM   |   Concord, NH

As the new parental involvement law takes effect in New Hampshire, the nation’s biggest abortion business is pushing teenagers into secret abortions that have them using a portion of the law to avoid informing their parents.

Under the new law, an abortion practitioner must provide written notice to a parent of a minor seeking an abortion 48 hours prior to doing the abortion. The law, as required by the U.S. Supreme Court, contains a judicial bypass provisions meant to protect teenagers in abusive home situations who worry about the consequences they face if divulging their pregnancy to their parents or guardian.

The bill contains both a judicial bypass measure and a medical emergency exception which allows for ”a condition that, on the basis of the physician’s good-faith clinical judgment, so complicates the medical condition of a pregnant woman as to necessitate the immediate abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or for which a delay will create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

Although meant for extraordinarily rare circumstances, Dave Andrusko of the National Right to Life Committee notes the New Hampshire affiliate if Planned Parenthood has created a legal project designed to connect teenagers with attorneys who will walk them through the bypass procedure and into secret abortions without the knowledge of their parents. h

“Jennifer Frizzell, senior policy adviser for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, has created the “Judicial Bypass Advocacy Project” to assist under-age girls to negate as much as possible New Hampshire’s new parental notification law,” he notes. “The girl obtains a bypass by convincing a judge she is mature enough to make the abortion decision on her own.”

He notes that the Concord Monitor newspaper indicates “court officials haven’t told them or minors how to request a hearing before a judge or how a teenager’s maturity will be evaluated,” which has Planned Parenthood concerned that it will be less effective in pushing teenagers into secret abortions. The abortion business also laments that court officials have not “said which courts will hear cases or how minors can reach the courts after hours and on weekends, given that the law requires they be allowed to file a hearing request 24 hour a day, seven days a week.”

“Of course a Court spokeswoman said everything will be on the court system’s website December 30, two days before the law goes into effect,” Andrusko says.

At the time the parental notification law cleared the legislature and the veto from pro-abortion Governor John Lynch overturned, Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., National Right to Life director of state legislation, said:  “The New Hampshire Legislature has righted a terrible wrong by overriding Governor Lynch’s veto of the parental notice bill, and they are to be commended for protecting minor girls and the rights of their parents.”

Balch added, “It should be abundantly clear to Governor Lynch that his veto was out-of-touch with the people and flew in the face of common sense which dictates that an adult male predator shouldn’t have more rights than parents. With this override the legislature said to Lynch ‘Enough is enough. It’s time to protect New Hampshire’s daughters.’”