A story out of Pennsylvania illustrates the tragic and extremely dangerous consequences of laws that restrict abortion access. A Polk Township 13-year-old girl performed a self-induced abortion using a pencil. During the process the girl became horribly sick, began having contractions, and ultimately delivered the baby at home.
But this story gets worse. The girl was apparently in a sexual relationship with Michael James Lisk, a 30-year-old man who has now been charged with rape and concealing the death of a child. Apparently the girl was in contact with Lisk while she was in labor. According to the criminal complain, Lisk came to the girl's house and removed the baby in a plastic bag and buried it in a wooded area. A state police forensic unit later discovered the body and are planning to conduct an autopsy.
The ever-brilliant Care2 contributor Robin Marty's coverage of this story over at rhrealitycheck.org sums up the problem of restricting abortion access to women, and in this case, to girls. As Robin points out, Pennsylvania is a parental consent state, meaning that this girl had no real legal access to abortion. So what happened? Did she take the advice of anti-choice activists and embrace this "gift"? No. She tried to abort the baby with a pencil and nearly killed herself in the process. Because that's what happens when desperation sets in.
This is what the rabid anti-abortion folks don't seem to get. This child was dealing with this incredibly difficult circumstance virtually on her own, with only her rapist aware of what she was going through. And what he did was to desperately try to protect himself from prosecution, not to offer her any real help.
Regardless of what your position is on abortions, it can hardly be argued that if this child would have had access to trained professionals, without having to worry they would contact her parents, the outcome would have been substantially better than the horrible choice that she ended up making.
Right now the GOP is working overtime trying to restrict access to abortions and defund Planed Parenthood even though federal money is never used to fund abortions. However THIS story does much to illustrate just why it is so vital to keep access to the services provided by Planned Parenthood available to those that desperately need them.
Nobody wants to increase abortions in this country, and Planned Parenthood does much to educate young teenagers about the use of birth control, the risk of teen pregnancy, and the dangers of STD's. Imagine how this thirteen year old girl's life could have been improved if she had access to the materials and information provided by this organization.
Good post, Gryphen, thanks. I wish the people who need to see this message the most would get it. They get so caught up in ideology and never see the reality.
ReplyDeleteR in NC
the article does not say how far along she was. I assume she was in the first trimester.
ReplyDelete"He has been charged with rape and concealing the death of a child."
I can understand the rape - he should be jailed for that alone, but rapists don't always go to jail.
As for concealing the death of a child - how does PA law stand on a fetus? It's not viable out of the womb. It's a zygote, not a child.
The sad reality is that the anti choicers will look at this and say "serves her right"...the only way they'll "get it" is when they discover their dead daughters who made the same "choice" with pencils, coat hangers, scissors or worse in order to be in control of their own bodies. Then I would like to look at them square on and say "are you happy now?"
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those stories that just tick me off. None of these jerks ever thinks about anyone else but themselves.
ReplyDeleteI would not choose an abortion for myself HOWEVER I did not get pregnant at a young age. Bristol Palin was very lucky that she didn't live in a house where the parents said if you ever get pregnant don't bother coming home.
Many children are faced with those tough decisions. Hmmmm, how could you have a baby as a teen and have to raise a child when your own parents have abandoned you? Where is she supposed to get help? Not from the government according to those damn republicans. No, they don't want to help anyone even if it was a child with a child. I guess those girls should just have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The thought of having any child get pregnant & try to have a self-induced or back alley abortion is appalling to me. Wouldn't you want your daughter to go to a safe place? Don't have a daughter but that is my opinion. If I had had a daughter & she chose any one of those two options & died I can't even imagine how I could live with myself.
DebinOH
I can see why she was hiding it. She was also in an abusive relationship. 30 yr old men having sex with underage GIRLS is illegal. I know. I have a daughter who's birth mother was 12, when her 'boyfriend' was 28. He's still in Jail. Still, I wish this girl had gone to her parents and had this man arrested long before it came to this.
ReplyDeleteExactly; and of what use is "parental consent" in cases of incest?
ReplyDeleteAnother facet to the "teen-age" pregnancy problem is that the fathers of these babies are often 21+ years old - legally adults, and make little or no effort to protect their young girlfriends.
I'm glad to see the 30 year old man who put her in this awful situation face charges.
Believe me, the world would change overnight if every man was held strictly accountable for every child they helped conceive.
This makes me CRAZY!! Why do they think that being pro-choice is advocating abortions? ARgh!! I can't imagine the angst that this child went through - imagine if she had someone to speak to about this? It seems she was fairly far along, she could have had more options than this. Ugh, this poor girl (and can her parents be very involved if she's having sex with a 30 year old?).
ReplyDeleteT
The GOP's obsession with abortion is %100 cynical political posturing.
ReplyDeleteThe GOP will go to any length for political points. This became obvious to me after watching the Terry Schiavo debacle.
What a bunch of assholes.
It occurs to me that the parents of this young girl should be held to account too. How could they not know she was 'dating' a 30 year old man, presumably someone not much older than her parents? Seriously. Or was this some 'friend' of the family, who took full advantage of access to a vulnerable teen? This is what the GOP ignores. It is the female who is victimized, always. Men can run away, deny, move on...a girl or woman who becomes pregnant has her life changed forever, no matter what decision she makes regarding the child. Even a married woman has her life turned upside down while the man goes merrily off to work. When I see these self-righteous fat, pompous white men proclaiming "right to life, heartbeats can testify in court" I want to scream. And why is birth control not a covered expense, while Viagra is? Because men need to keep women pregnant and at home so they can play masters of the universe. Too bad they are abominable masters.
ReplyDeleteThe article says alot about the need to help young girls. Probably no sex education at home or at school. As you can see from this story, abstinence doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteHere's another story from SW PA. Not sure when the parental consent requirement became law, but a few years ago, there was a story floating around my family circles about a local nurse who was fired because she broke confidence and contacted the parents of a young girl who had come to a facility (hospital, I think)to have an abortion. Her parents were not aware at that time, but the nurse knew her family, and because she was Catholic and felt obligated, she told the girl's mother.
It was interesting to watch different sides of the family - one side praised the nurse for her actions and said that more folks should do what she did if they could. On the other side, another family member, a nurse, was appalled that she broke any confidentiality. Besides HIPAA, I believe it has been traditional that nurses have always been required to keep confidences.
The conservative religious family member could not understand any aspect of confidentiality. No matter what she was told. If the religious values (commandments) are broken, forget the laws. Not sure if that's the best way to state this, but that's how it came out.
The conservative family member is also a Faux news watcher, Rush fan, and steady church goer. So listening to the dialogue that promotes ignoring laws, compassion for people, and a general ignorance and middle finger to people's rights certainly influences peoples lives. It gives them the confidence to take up these flags of ignorance and arrogance with little consideration for the consequences.
To me one of the saddest part of this story is how this young girl found herself in a situation with a much older man. Typical teenagers looking anywhere and everywhere for something different or a young person reaching out for something that she did not get at home.
She will never forget this for the rest of her life.
Anon @4:20...if she knew she was pregnant, I'm guessing she was much further along than "zygote." Remember, at 13, she may have had irregular periods anyway, not known much about reproduction (depends on her school system) and certainly was not ready to cope with a pregnancy.
ReplyDeleteBesides that, Ohio is now mulling whether a heartbeat (17 days) equals a baby, so they can prosecute women who have miscarriages (prove it) or legal abortions.
PA law just says 'unborn child," with no definitions.
I agree with you that this is a tragic tale but disagree with your path of logic. Even if we had more liberal laws regarding parental consent, more funding for abortions, etc-this type of situation would persist. This was a very minor child, unable to even drive herself anywhere. It was also a criminal situation. Her perpetrator would have been caught if he had gotten her care at a PP clinic or anywhere. So, he obviously had a vested interest in withholding proper care for her. Ironically, her ensuing medical crisis is what brought his crime to light. No ethical doctor, private or PP provider, would have given her a quick abortion and sent her sailing back into his arms, no questions asked. So, the federal funding/GOP/religious right agenda point is moot.
ReplyDeleteI am pro-choice, but 13 year olds should not be going out and getting abortions without parental consent. As tragic as this is, I'm glad things worked out as they did and that her manfriend will go to prison and not knock up other girls.
ReplyDeleteHer parents may have been very involved, we don't know their relationship details to discern what was happening and how they hooked up.
Great Post!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
I am also guessing that this poor young lady may have damaged her self badly and now will not be able to have children in the future. And may have complications for the rest of her life.
this story is so sad and so unnecessary on so many levels. i look back on myself at 13 - 7th grade! - and i can't even imagine facing a pregnancy. even though my parents raised us catholic - liberal catholic - but catholic just the same, i like to think they would have given me a choice. i was so terrified of even the word abortion from the nuns at my catholic school that i would have feared being a pariah should i have gone through with one. nuns always seem to find out EVERYTHING.
ReplyDeletei knew a girl growing up who was about 14 or 15 when a 40 something year-old cretin-looking friend of her father's came onto her and they had frequent sex. she ended up having at least a couple abortions - legal for her to do so as a minor where we lived. as she was a few years younger than me and closer to my younger sister, i didn't find any of this out until many years later. her parents were such deadbeats, i think i would have had to skip them and call the police to get her any sort of help. which i would have. which is why no one told me.
i believe she was permanently traumatized by the experience even though she pretended not to be at the time. she now goes from skank to abusive skank and has no education beyond high school, even though she always dreamed of being a veterinarian, and had the intelligence to do so. crying shame. i think about her every time i read these kind of stories. sadly, having medically induced abortions might have saved her from a dangerous self-inflicted one, but it also allowed the cretin to stay in her life for too long, as pregnancy or a dangerous attempt at abortion might have finally alerted a responsible adult to her statutory rape. dying on the toilet of a self-induced abortion was the lesser of two evils in her case, and that is a desperately sad sad thought.
a correction to my post: NOT dying of a self-induced abortion on the toilet yet being able to surreptitiously continue her relationship with the cretin was the lesser of two evils in her sad case. i am pro-choice, but often when you look at the stories of the individual minors who choose or need an abortion there are so many more complications and sad details that are as life-altering as pregnancy and abortion. i wish we could put more of our energy into educating children and preventing as best we can statutory rape, date rape, violent rape, incest, and the like.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. We can never never go back to the bad old days.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in Illinois in the 1960s. We all knew how the rich girls had it... their parents would take them to O'Hare on Thursday night, they'd fly to Sweden and be back in school on Monday having only missed one day of school. No one the wiser. But unfortunately in the 1960s most girls did not have parents who could plunk down the equivalent of today easily $1000 - $1500 ticket (maybe more) as it was proportionally a lot MORE expensive to fly to Europe in those days. Plus most kids didn't even have passports.
So then you had the poor girls, the girls whose parents either couldn't do anything or girls who couldn't dream of telling their parents. You heard rumors... someone knew someone who knew a medical student who could "help you out." Things like that.
We can never return to that and unfortunately the biggest share of the responsibility for this lies in today's young women who have become blase about this freedom to choose. They have no clue that while in some cases it's a bit inconvenient - yeah you have to walk around the people praying on the sidewalk, or yeah you have to listen to a 5 minute talk about the procedure - as far as I know you can still get a safe, legal abortion in virtually every state in the country. They have no fucking clue how it used to be, and women of my generation I think are doing a bad job of telling them.
I mention this in the interest of keeping this information out there so more people are aware of another flip flop by Mittens Romney.
ReplyDeleteMitt Romney should never have run for governor of Mass. if he had plans to run for the presidency. He claimed to be moderate or even to the LEFT of Ed Kennedy during his run for senate. One thing he promised the people of Massachusetts was that he would not do anything to roll back access to safe legal abortion. He told of a personal experience which convinced him that abortion should be legal. He said when he was a young man his older brother's longtime girlfriend and fiance became pregnant before the marriage. Because of the strict religious beliefs of the families, the young people decided they could not tell their parents about the unplanned pregnancy and they decided to have an abortion. It must have been before 1973, when abortion became legal, because the young girl died from the botched procedure. This made an big impact on Mr Romney and his belief in safe, legal abortion, although he seems to have forgotten that now.
I support a woman's right to choose but sorry this story is completely one-sided. I don't see anything that supports the claim that this girl did not have any safe or legal choices. No where does it say she could not get an abortion. It's legal in PA. last I checked, you just need parental consent. So, where are the parents? The article completely ignores that this CHILD even has parents. No mention of them. I assume this girl is not living on her own. So where are they? What is the family story? The family could be a loving and understanding family but child is just too immature to face the situation she found herself in. The kid is 13 fucking years old. She is the responsibility of her parents and her parents need to be involved in this decision. Period. My 13 year old can not go to an R-rated movie without my consent but you think its OK for her to have an abortion with my consent. Bullshit.
ReplyDeleteGryphen, ask yourself this - How would you feel if your daughter at the age of 13 wound up pregnant and went out and had an abortion without your knowledge or consent?
Annonymous at 6:53, let me ask YOU this: Which would be worse, not knowing your 13 year old had an abortion or your 13 year old dying from a botched abortion with a pencil?
ReplyDeleteAs a woman who had an unplanned pregnancy in her teens and a very supportive family to boot, I know full well what its like to be a young woman and knocked up and afraid to tell my parents. I also know the near animal-like instincts women have regarding their own bodies. Women (and yes girls) will NEVER allow control of their bodies to be stripped from them. Ever.
ReplyDeleteThis brings me back to horrid family history. My great grandmother died from home abortion in 1930, when she found herself pregnant with her third kid inthree years. She left my grandfather motherless. My own grandmother somehow successfully took some oral concoction that induced a miscarriage in the mid 1940s. She nearly bled to death, but survived the experience .
ReplyDeleteThese kinds of things should never happen , but cetainly not in 2011.
I agree with the post at 6:53 about the young girls age. Without information about this girls relationship with her parents we can only assume that she could not go to them. If she had a good relationship with her parents it is unlikely she would be involved with a 40 yo man.
ReplyDeleteAnon @5:58:
ReplyDeleteHow do you know how "well" this turned out?
This child was a victim of statutory rape and was encouraged by her adult boyfriend to abort the fetus. She may have left herself unable to have children when she is ready.
Your backhanded "sympathy" can be tossed in the trash as far as I'm concerned.
I testify:
ReplyDeleteI was about 11 years old, and an avid reader of Jessen's Daily (or was it weekly then.)
The late Tom Snapp did a story on the unsolved deaths/murders in Fairbanks. Among his anecdotes was a story of the Ash Can killings. At least three women were found dead and dumped head-first into ash cans (from coal furnaces) in a drive-through alley between Second and First Avenue. It had a name but I don't remember. It would have been across from where the big statue is on the river. The statue known affectionately as "Where are the bars?"
I digress. There was never any resolution or cause of death in that story or any others I can find.
One day, I ran into Snap and asked him about them.
Abortions, he said. Backroom abortions.
Cause of death, I asked?
Infection in one, hemorrhaging in the others.
Anyone ever arrested, or suspected?
"The conclusion was that it was either a doctor with a drug or gambling problem who owed some of the pimps, or it was someone from the military hospital who was free-lancing."
I have always feared that the abortion rights would go backward to the time when young women were forced into horrifying measures. I think we are fast approaching that time.
In memory of the victims of the ash-can killings.
More on life and abortions in Fairbanks in the 1950s:
ReplyDeleteThe late Jessen's reporter Tom Snapp said that for the most part as the town grew in the late '50s, things got a little better for those seeking abortions.
Local organized crime at one point had a couple of doctors with overwhelming vices running back-alley abortion mills that had a pretty good safety record, although not perfect. (No more flying to Seattle, and bleeding to death at SeaTac.)
Personally, I think it may take some horrifying history lessons to help America see that the right to clean and private surgery is best. Collectively we seem to have forgotten how horrible this situation was.
As I see it -- either we do it with care and dignity or it is done without either. My heart aches for that lonely youngster in Pennsylvania.
Girls will find ways to abort, they have been doing it for hundreds of years and a lot lost their lives also. We do not need to make it this hard for girls to be able to ask for help instead of having them terrified to ask for it.
ReplyDeleteShort Brief:
Girl still in high school gave birth to a baby boy put him out on the back porch when she went to school. Her family didn't know she was pregnant because she was scared to tell them. She was large girl so the pregnancy was not hard to hide.
The father finds baby in grave behind house month later because of buzzards.
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/030211/new_793203404.shtml
When I first read this, I was so horrified I thought it couldn't possibly be true, so I did a little research on my own. Sadly yes, it is true. It happened in June of 2010.
ReplyDeleteThis story is so awful every which way you turn it. Apparently this 30 year old man had been "dating" this little girl for a year -- since she was 12. Where were her parents? One of the articles I read said the girl and her MOTHER together called the man to warn him the police were on their way.
What saddens me also are many of the comments I read along with the articles, including several from the man's former "fiance" and ugggh, "friends". They sang his virtues, and painted this little girl as responsible for all of her actions.
With those kind of people in her life, it's no wonder this despicable thing happened.
Absolutely, positively, reprehensible.
I am the mother of a 13 year old girl, and we have a very loving family of four with very good communication.
ReplyDeleteI can't see any chance of her becoming pregnant at this point in her life..........when she isn't at school she is with me most of the time and sometimes at her friends houses with adult supervision, and no teenage to forty year old males around.
If it DID actually come about that she became pregnant, I would be completely oblivious. And I'd only give it a 50% chance that she would tell my husband or I. Why? Because she just would not want to disappoint or hurt us. Now, I have a very mature daughter, but she has little access to transportation other than me. However, she does have access to the Internet and most likely easily google-able do-it-yourself abortion instructions.
This is just one reason why I strongly believe that our daughters are much safer with access to safe and private abortion services. I would hope to be told, but I simply cannot count on it. And I imagine that the daughters of religious fundamentalists would be even more afraid of disappointing their own parents than mine would of disappointing an atheist mother who does not believe that premarital sex is a sin, or that abortion is murder.
An issue - interestingly - that no one seems to have mentioned is the far simpler one of making contraception much more readily available. I agree in this case that thirteen is frightfully young and the notion of charging her parents with child neglect (how DOES a thirteen year old have a relationship with a 30 year old man and her parents don't know? I mean, come on. Really how does that happen?) has a certain appeal.
ReplyDeleteBut she's not stupid. She's probably in seventh or eighth grade. And if that girl had been able to go into a pharmacy and after a brief chat with a helpful nurse walk out with birth control pills, we probably would not be having this conversation. I doubt very much that girl wanted to be pregnant and while technically we all believe she was being raped, in actuality the relationship was probably consensual.
It's important to talk about keeping abortion safe and legal but let's also talk about making contraception and contraceptive information much more readily available and inexpensive. By law. Every girl from the fifth grade on needs to be told: if you are sexually active you need to use birth control. Here's where to get it. No questions asked.
The odds are this child was looking for love in that man's arms because there was none at home.
ReplyDeleteThere is a certainty that she knew that going to her parents, or any other adult but him would not gain her the support she needed either before she became sexually active or after she became pregnant.
That is something that the people who make the laws never address. They never consider the individual circumstances.
@7:28 - Why does it have to be just those two options? Completely private abortion or death by a pencil? Quite extreme.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it horrible to require that the parents/guardians responsible for a 13 year old girl be notified and be involved in a major decision like this? I just don't see why when it comes to abortion, people believe that the parents lose all say in what their child does. But these same people want to hold the parents responsible when a minor child vandalizes property or breaks the law. I just don't get it.
My 13 year old can't walk into a tattoo parlor and get some ink without my consent. But a major medical procedure, no fucking problem. That is completely insane.
WTF are men thinking diddling with little girls? Isn't it about time for men to talk with each other...fathers to sons, etc.
ReplyDeleteI spoke with my son long ago..we had a neighbor who was divorced with young middle and elementary school daughters......he allowed them to walk around outside the home naked. And yes, he got them taken away....
I also worked with a girl whose uncle threw her on the bed during a house daytime party of some kind.
Back in the day you could corset yourself up for many months but she eventually had to tell her mother. She considered suicide.
I heard rumors of girls in high school sticking the garden hose up their vagina...can you just imagine that?
Thank you Gryphen for posting.
Annonymous at 6:53, let me ask YOU this: Which would be worse, not knowing your 13 year old had an abortion or your 13 year old dying from a botched abortion with a pencil?
ReplyDeleteC. Neither.
Kids seem to think that there should be no consequences. "Mom will be maaaaaad!" Will Mom kill the child for being pregnant? Probably not. Will she call the police on the 30 year old abuser? Very good chance.
OK, might Mom scream and cry? Most likely.
Chances are, no matter how mom and dad react, the kid will survive and live to tell the tale.
Do you think that by getting pregnant that anyone should be able to get an abortion?
What is abortionists were required to take a DNA sample of the baby for all underage people? Protecting the abuser should not be an issue.
If kids threatening to get themselves maimed is going to get us to let them have secret abortions, will they also get to manipulate us into buying them really cool shoes or the ultimate prom dress or they will kill themselves?
SHE'D BEEN IN THE RELATIONSHIP WITH LISK SINCE 2009-- when she would have been 10 or 11 when it began.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't want my daughter dead, but if her death happened and it turned out that we found the predator and this didn't happen to other girls, I would hopefully see a silver lining eventually.
No, abortions for very young girls are wrong and if it means that we set a limit and there are some deaths, so be it. How many more girls would this jerk have hurt had she not been found out?
No one says anything about her parents. From what I could tell, she was protecting her scumbag boyfriend who didn't care about her anyway.
One of the problems with making notification of parents part of the law: where does the girl get help who is pregnant by a father/ brother/ uncle/ relative who may blame the victim? ('she tempted me'/ 'she is a little whore' OR in older times, i.e.: my case, had I become pregnant by my foster father: 'she was screwing around with the boys at school' -- and he did say he would have testified in court to this when I asked him later on.) We know for a fact that girls become pregnant by controlling males in their own families.
ReplyDeleteAs to the matter of prevention, girls and women need to have correct information and materials readily and confidentially available to them.
Without the safeguard of privacy for the victim, the law does not make abortion services available to all women and girls. I am very suspicious of mothers, but especially of fathers, who post that they are entitled to this information. To whose interest are they attending?
We can create organizations that ensure suitable confidential safety measures are available to girls at risk (people and mentors who are pledged to assist pregnant teens). We get behind young persons' athletics, don't we? Or, is it only the welfare of boys teams that attracts money and attention...? What is the reality here?
"how DOES a thirteen year old have a relationship with a 30 year old man and her parents don't know? I mean, come on. Really how does that happen?"
ReplyDeleteMaybe he was her minister. Or the principal of her church school.
Seriously, some of you people appear to believe that all parents love their children and want to protect them. Geeze. I can remember, back in the days when "irregular" OB patients (as in, underage, or baby death, or adopting out) were not cared for on the maternity unit. I wound up with a 13 year old girl on my floor, and as I went in to check on her and reviewed her chart, I discovered that, at THIRTEEN mind you, she had had two abortion and this was the SECOND baby she was giving up for adoption.
Her mother was there. I told her mother: when she goes for her six-week postpartum checkup, tell the doctor she needs birth control pills. "She won't take them," the mother said. "We don't believe in birth control."
There is nothing you can say to a parent like that, because she's not even coexisting on the same planet.
Most kids who feel they can tell their parents will, and if the kid feels that she can't, she probably has a really good reason for that.
That said, there's an assumption because abortions are legal, that a kid would know how to arrange for one. There may not have a clinic for this girl. Some states have only one or two clinics to cover the whole state. The child would have to know (a) where the clinic is (b) how to contact it (c) how to pay for it and (d) how to get there.
At thirteen, she may not have had any decent sex education, because one of the things the Right has done is force changes in sex education programs so that kids only hear "don't do it" and don't get accurate contraceptive information, let alone accurate abortion information.
Ivyfree
The assumption seems to be that all parents are created equal. If a pregnant 13-year-old allows a pregnancy to progress because she fears her parents' reaction, then parental consent is a barrier. Not all parents are kind and loving, and what, pray tell, does a child do if the person who has impregnated her is her parent?
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that Republicans claim to want small government, but their desire to police the womb calls for more government intrusiveness?
Maybe Republicans should focus on men, instead of attacking a woman's right to privacy. Maybe they should go after 30-year-old men who think nothing of committing statutory rape.
10:13am
ReplyDeleteYou just equated having an abortion with getting a tattoo? You called "getting ink" a major medical procedure? There are absolutely no words to describe how utterly ridiculous that comparison is.
This is just terrible. Parents should be making sure their children have and know about birth control. It is so messed up parents think it's so cute that little ones have boy /girlfriend s. They start with that way to young. Then when they get to be teenagers they wonder why they have a kid having a kid. I'm with everyone else how did a man that age have a relationship with a girl that age, and nobody knew? dumming down of america again. what is one of the first things America usually does in a 3rd world country - give out birth control. I guess this goes along with them wanting to water down the rape laws.
ReplyDeleteThis thirteen year-old's first bad choice wasn't the pencil. She was in a bad choice situation from the get go. There must be much much more to this story. Where are her parents? Is she part of a viable family? Are there any adults around her who might have, should have, protected her from a 30 year old predator?
ReplyDeleteWould like to know more about what went on before the pencil. Someone is culpable here.
@12:08 - That is the point, it is utterly ridiculous that things like an R-rated movie and getting a tattoo require parental consent for a 13 year old yet an abortion does not even require the parent to be notified in many states. The schools here can't take my kid on a school sponsored supervised class trip to a local museum unless I sign the consent form. But an abortion, a major medical procedure, sure, go right ahead without my knowledge. That is fucked up.
ReplyDeleteI hear the arguments about "Well what if it's the parent that is the one who got the girl pregnant?". I say, arrest that bastard and find another family member ( mom, grandmother, aunt, uncle, whoever ) that the girl trusts and inform them. We are talking about a minor here, a child. And if an appropriate adult can not be located in this child's life, then child protective services needs to be brought in and the child needs to be put in a foster home.
Her not wanting to tell her parents could be for a good reason, or it could be for an over exaggerated one. No one knows; it could be because her "boy"friend, a man with no honor, knew that he'd be found out and he convinced her not to tell.
ReplyDeleteSo many on here understand abusive cycles, yet who has mentioned that a person in one is being manipulated? One of the first things abusers do is psychologically cut their victims off from their families.
Hasn't anyone seen (often temporary) bad kids from good
families? I have-- they'll convince you that their parents are controlling and manipulative, but then you see that they have tried to reach out, they have done what they could.
There are some parents who are nutty but not illegal-- those have to be dealt with till the kids turn 18, then they can leave.
Watch this movie:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313196/
@ 4:01 PM
ReplyDelete"... then child protective services needs to be brought in and the child needs to be put in a foster home."
Dear Heart, I was in a foster home when this happened to me. Putting the minor girl 'away' in foster care is no true answer to this problem (although I agree the offender should be brought charged and locked up -- I do not know if it is possible to rehabilitate such a person).
It is conservative 'values' of fear, condemnation, ownership and control over those they see as 'others', whether because of difference in age, skin color, gender, heritage, socioeconomic status, religion, etc., etc., that is at the root of this problem. And it is a recurring, ongoing problem -- just because the offense to me was over 50 years ago is no indicator there has been any impact on the offenders. It transfers on from generation to generation, sometimes as a family tradition, as gang initiation, a school's rite of passage, a church's 'blessing' ('it happened in the Bib-b-ble!').
This will not cure itself, especially if it is seen in any way other than predatory actions of an elder, more powerful player.
.
Safe, Legal and Rare.
ReplyDelete