By Dave Andrusko
Gov. John Lynch
Okay, I understand that pro-abortionists live to undermine every law that gives parents even a whisper in the abortion decision of their minor daughters. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that 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.
The girl obtains a bypass by convincing a judge she is mature enough to make the abortion decision on her own. Without the bypass the abortionist needs to give written notice to at least one parent or guardian of a girl under 18 forty-eight hours prior to performing an abortion.
Nor should I be surprised that abortion advocates are in a tizzy because (according to the Monitor newspaper) “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.” And with the law going into effect January 1, they lament 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,” according to the Monitor’s Annmarie Timmin.
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. Timmin writes. “The website will also have a phone number minors or their lawyers can use when the court is closed to tell the court a petition has been filed.”
Not that this will actually happen, but what if—WHAT IF—there was a single day delay? That would be throwing a few grains of sand in the gear of the killing machine, which cannot be allowed to happen.
Best guesses are the article was prompted by Planned Parenthood of Northern New England calling the newspaper to ask that it print a story to put (unneeded) pressure on the court and (more importantly) to bash the legislature for passing the law last summer in the first place. That’s why they fault the legislature not the courts. “It’s just a bad piece of legislation without a lot of forethought,” said Dalia Vidunas, executive director of the Concord Feminist Health Center.
Of course, it was nothing of the sort. Timmin correctly describes the history of the law as “complicated.” It would take a small book to describe all the ins and outs, but in a nutshell, pro-abortionists took the initial 2003 law to court, keeping it from taking effect. A differently-constituted state legislature repealed the law in 2007 but pro-life lawmakers introduced an updated law in 2011.
The bill passed the House of Representatives in March, 256-102 and in the Senate May 25, 17-7. True to form the pro-abortion governor, John Lynch (D) vetoed the measure, but his veto was overridden in June.
At the time 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.’”
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.”
Worth noting in passing is this observation from Vidunas, of the Concord Feminist Health Center. It says everything.
“But not all judges know how to deal with teenagers,” she told Timmin. “Not all parents know how to deal with teenagers.”
Only Planned Parenthood knows how to deal with teenagers.
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