Kansas Pro-Life Group Wants Attorney General to Monitor Underage Abortions
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 30, 2009
Topeka, KS (LifeNews.com) — A statewide pro-life group is calling on Kansas Attorney General Steve Six to monitor abortions on girls who are minors. Kansans for Life says it is worried that abortions are occurring on girls who are not legally able to consent for sex — making it so the man who got her pregnant is guilty of statutory rape.
The issue of abortions being used as a means of covering up cases of statutory rape is not new, and pro-life advocates have spent years trying to highlight the problem.
Kathy Ostrowski, the legislative director of Kansans for Life, talked with LifeNews.com about the issues in her state.
"Prior to January 2007, Kansas’ mandatory reporting’ statutes required physicians, school counselors, and certain others with access to children, to report incidents to the proper law authorities when they believed a child had been injured under Kansas laws detailing illegal sexual activity," she explained.
"The old reporting law had applied to children ‘injured’ but the new law requires reporting of children ‘harmed,’ — defined as ‘physical or psychological injury or damage," Ostrowski said.
In 1992, a previous attorney general issued an opinion saying a minor’s pregnancy was not necessarily a reportable injury.
Former pro-life attorney general Phill Kline revised that opinion in June 2003 when he interpreted the reporting mandate to cover abortion centers, since a pregnancy for girls under 16 was evidence of illegal sex, and thus, at least legal injury.
Abortion businesses responded with a lawsuit which they won in July 2006 at the district court level — temporarily gaining an injunction against the need for clinic reporting of underage pregnancy, specifically for girls under 16.
Ostrowski said the legal victory was widely publicized but its overturning hasn’t received much publicity.
"Both the Aid for Women decision and injunction were vacated in September 2007 because the group of statutes upon which the case had been filed had been overhauled in January 2007," she explained.
As a result, "Attorney General Six should announce what Attorney General Morrison didn’t: that the state’s duty to prosecute child rape overrides the clinics’ privacy argument and ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," she said.
Ostrowski said that, under Kansas Law, DNA form unborn children is required to be collected and sent to the KBI from abortion centers for girls under age 14 obtaining abortions.
"However, that still leaves the problem of abortion-destroyed DNA evidence of statutory rape cases for minors 14 and older," she said. "Six should be enforcing the improved child protection law on sexual harm, which is enhanced by new 2009 regulations from SRS, the state child protective agency."
Related web sites:
Kansans for Life – https://www.KFL.org
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