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Aiding a minor she never met before ?
(CNSNews.com) – Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies.
Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. recalled the time she took a 15-year-old girl she had never met before to get an abortion.
I wonder what Episcopal vows give somebody no choice but to break a law ?
“Although New Hampshire was closer to that girl’s home than Boston, as it happened, I did not take her across state lines,” Ragsdale said. “Nor did I, to my knowledge, break any laws.
“But if either of those things had been necessary in order to help her, I would have done them,” she continued. “And if helping young women like her should be made illegal I will, nonetheless, continue to do it.”
Ragsdale cited her vows as an Episcopal priest as the reason why she would “have no choice” but to break the law.
Subcommittee chairman Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said a bill introduced in the House last summer – the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (H.R. 2299) – would make it an offense to “circumvent parental consent laws in a state by, without the parents’ knowledge, taking a minor girl across state lines for an abortion.”
He said he found it difficult to believe opposition to the law, like that expressed by the subcommittee’s ranking member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who called it an “assault to the reproductive rights of women.”
Originally posted by RealSpoke
What does being emancipated matter? You would still be underage with the same mental capabilities. Just because the girl would have a legal paper saying shes now her own person?
When I was 15 I would have known if I wanted to have a baby or not. The same conservatives that shun abortion shun social programs that would help teen moms. And a lot of teen moms come from broken households that are usually poverty stricken.
I'm not trying to get in an ethical argument about abortion, I'm just saying...edit on 10-3-2012 by RealSpoke because: (no reason given)