Girl's 'forced' abortion blamed on government 'death panel'
'This is what happens in China. Girls are taken kicking and screaming'
A longtime veteran of the battle against abortion in the United States says the case of a Philadelphia teen who reportedly was coerced into a late-term abortion by a social services agency can be blamed on government's so-called "death panels."
The issue of "death panels" came up during discussion of President Obama's now-approved nationalization of health care services in the country, and critics said the plan included government boards that simply would approve or refuse certain medical services for some patients – or decide life or death.
Obamacare supporters vocally denied that such panels existed or would exist, but Troy Newman, chief of the pro-life Operation Rescue organization, said the Philadelphia case is documentation that they already exist and are operating.
The Philadelphia Daily News apparently was the first to document the case, in which social workers took a teen for an abortion even though the teen had been looking forward to having the little boy and even had picked out a name.
Further, the teen's mother had opposed the abortion, as had the foster mother with whom the teen was staying. The newspaper even reported that one social worker, Marisol Rivera, who said she didn't want to take the teen for an abortion, later was dismissed by the social services agency.
"This is what happens in China," Newman told WND. "Girls are taken from their homes, kicking and screaming, thrown in a van, taken to abortionists and they undergo a forced abortion."
He said it's also not that much of a rarity in the United States, citing cases he's witnessed where girls and women under direct supervision of various governmental agencies, from detention centers to foster care settings, were delivered to abortionists.
"It's something we've been following for years. We've seen forced abortions in prison settings. We've seen these women in chains brought to abortionists. We've seen foster care parents, and the whole system, force teens into abortion," he said.
He said the nuance now is that Obamacare will be installing in the nation a long list of new government oversight boards.
"Once you have these government oversight boards, the Health and Human Services Secretary, whomever he or she may be, with a radical pro-eugenicist mindset, all of a sudden the only money available is for abortion. There's no money for prenatal care. Then you have doctors who are not allowed to operate outside the government system," he said.
Many of the impacts of Obamacare remain to be determined because even members of Congress admitted they hadn't read the bill before they voted for it.
But Newman said the goal appears to be a "Big Brother utopia" with massive government controls over medical treatments that are available.
And he said there is no question about what the priorities will be under the current HHS secretary, Kathleen Sebelius. She was governor in Kansas, where Operation Rescue has its headquarters, before Obama picked her for the national post, and Newman long has documented her intimate ties to the abortion industry, from massive campaign donations she accepted from abortionists to parties she threw in the governor's mansion for abortion practitioners.
Likewise, abortion is rampant for those in the foster care system, Newman said.
"It's draconian. It is one of the most manipulative and oppressive systems," he said. In many cases, he said, the case worker "makes up the law and enforces the law."
"For all intents and purposes they are above the law," he said. "They do not have the best interests of the children at heart. They have their agenda as the first and foremost issue."
The Daily News reported the pregnant teen was told by a social worker either to get an abortion or have her 1-year-old toddler removed from her care.
The newspaper the social services agency obtained a court order for the abortion because the girl's birth mother refused to approve the plan, and by the time social workers made all the arrangements, they had to take the girl out of state because she was 24 weeks pregnant, and in Pennsylvania they are illegal at that stage.
The social worker who had not wanted to accompany the teen to the abortion, Rivera, then told the newspaper she was fired after the March abortion because of her decision.
"They hired me to work in child protection, not to kill children," she told the newspaper. Department of Human Services officials refused to talk about the case with the newspaper, citing privacy laws.
The social worker who stepped in to follow Rivera, Cynthia Brown, also wouldn't talk about the case.
Donald F. Schwarz is the city's deputy mayor for Health and Opportunity and confirmed that 335 minors under DHS care between September 2006 and March of this year became pregnant. Of those cases, 119 resulted in abortions, 54 by judge's order, the report said.
Both state and federal law ban the use of public money for abortions but Schwarz said while the agency does get that money, it wasn't used for abortions.
Art Caplan, of the Center of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said there are questions of ethics that should be answered.
"You can't or shouldn't be threatening to break up a family depending upon whether somebody gets an abortion or not," Caplan told the newspaper. "That is . . . unethical practice, it's not even common sense."
According to LifeNews, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says he worries the Pennsylvania incident may become more commonplace under the government-run health care plan President Barack Obama signed that funds abortions.
"What can we expect from the new federal health care plan? Well, if this story from Pennsylvania is any indication, a multi-state pro-abortion campaign," he said.
"She was smuggled to New Jersey for the appointment – alone. Because the young mom didn't have the proper paperwork, she had to return a second time for the abortion, this time with a state government worker, who ensured that the baby never came home," Perkins continued.
"As for conscience rights of those involved? Forget it. The girl's original social worker was fired for refusing to participate in the abortion," he said. "And while the state insists it didn't pay for the abortion (the city of Mayfair did), a state worker did accompany her and most likely paid for her transportation."
American Family Association of Pennsylvania also is calling for a formal investigation of the circumstances.
Richard Wexler, of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, told the Philadelphia newspaper, "If DHS's behavior is as described, it is shameful and inexcusable."
The foster mother reported the teen was excited about her son, and had told her 1-year-old daughter she was going to have a brother. The teen's birth mother, who identified herself to the newspaper as Deborah M., said, "Someone who went to go get an ultrasound, [found] out it's a boy, they give the boy a name, that's somebody who wants to have that baby."
But the foster mother reported Brown had talked about the pregnancy with the teen in her presence. She said Brown told the teen DHS would separate her children if she had the second child.
"She said that if she decided to have the infant she wasn't going to let her have both babies," the foster mother told the newspaper.
The foster mother said the teen was taken without her knowledge for the abortion. She had called the social agency in a panic when the girl didn't return from school that day.
About 8:30 p.m., she did arrive home.
According to the Daily News, the foster mother asked, "What happened?"
"The baby is dead," the teen answered.
Contact: Bob Unruh
Source: WorldNetDaily
Publish Date: May 6, 2010
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