Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson from the pro-life group And Then There Were None held a webcast with several other former abortion workers. These workers revealed how their facilities violated pro-life laws. Shelley Guillory worked at Delta Women’s Clinic, an abortion facility in Louisiana. Abortion workers are legally required to report any possible cases in which a minor is a victim of sexual abuse. If a pregnant minor comes in for an abortion, and the facility thinks an older man may be responsible for the pregnancy, the workers must immediately contact the authorities. If there is any indication that the girl is in an abusive relationship with an older man, it has to be reported.
In addition, Louisiana has a parental consent law. If a girl under 18 wants an abortion, she has to have the consent of a parent or guardian by law. Guillory explains:
When a minor came in, what was originally supposed to be done was that the parent was supposed to come in with the minor, [and we] verified [that they were a parent] through her birth certificate and mom or dad’s driver’s license. And then they would go through with the counseling process.
But Guillory’s abortion facility found a way around both the parental consent law and the requirement to report suspected statutory rape. She explains:
Well, that was never done at our clinic. Because we found that a lot of our minors were not being brought in by parents. So to get around that, we stopped doing the birth certificate verification, and just started doing this process where, okay, their driver’s license is verified – if “mom or dad’s” name was different than the child’s name, then the child had mom’s last name and then dad brought her in, and mom was remarried, and the child had dad’s last name. Now mind you, we have no idea who this child is and who is bringing this child in.
Guillory’s abortion facility got around the parental consent law by claiming that the minor’s parents were divorced and each parent had a different last name. If a woman took the minor to the facility, they wrote down that she had her father’s last name. If a man brought her to the facility, they wrote down that the minor had her mother’s last name. In this way, they were able to make the paperwork say that the girl was brought in by a parent.
However, the abortion facility had to put something in the paperwork about the father of the baby, in order to show that the girl was not a victim of statutory rape. So the charade went even further. Guillory says:
We were also taught to prep this child from the beginning that when they came in for abortion that the person they were pregnant [by] was no more than a year older than them. That way, no investigation had to be done as to, “How did this child get pregnant? Who got this child pregnant, and how old was the person?” So every minor that we had in, the person was only a year older than them or the same age. Which we knew was not true.
In this way, the Delta Clinic protected abusers. Guillory explains why the abortion workers deliberately hid statutory rape:
That way we didn’t have to get any law enforcement involved because – you have to stop and think. When we have a minor that’s come in and there’s suspected child abuse or sexual abuse we have to get law enforcement involved. Law enforcement has to be there from the beginning of the procedure to the end. They’re samples and specimens that have to be collected so they can do DNA analysis. Well this makes a lot of our other patients uncomfortable. So to get around that, we started lying about ages. So we had no conflicts as far as that was concerned.
Apparently, the workers had no qualms about sending teens back home to their abusers.
There were never any questions from authorities or inspectors about how the paperwork was done. If anyone looked it over, they said nothing about the fact that all minors had different last names than their “parent” and each one had been impregnated by someone a year older than them. In a previous Live Action article on the Delta Clinic, it was revealed that inspectors also never hassled Delta’s workers about conditions in the facility, even though it was filthy.
In fact, when asked why inspectors only looked at the patient charts that abortion workers handed them and did not pull any others, Guillory says, “Because we always had the same state surveyors that came in. They became our friends. We would feed them lunch. We had social chitchat. We laughed. It was never, ever a question. Never.”
The inspectors were big supporters of abortion and friends with the abortion facility workers. They overlooked everything. If they ever examined any of the paperwork on minors’ abortions, they never said anything about the obviously false information.
In the webinar, Abby Johnson talks about how enacting pro-life laws in a state does not mean that the laws will be followed:
Louisiana is a state that has a significant amount of pro-life laws on the books. I want you to be aware of that … Because laws don’t make any difference if there is no enforcement. And that is – laws are no good if they’re not enforced. And that is unfortunately what we are seeing across the country, state-by-state, is that we have all these really good laws on the books, and that’s certainly a victory, but there is no enforcement.
The Delta Clinic is not the only abortion facility to hide statutory abuse. Planned Parenthood facilities have a long history of enabling the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and protecting abusers.
Live Action’s Mona Lisa investigation found that seven different Planned Parenthood centers in five different states ignored statutory rape reporting laws and covered up the sexual abuse of children.
One example of Planned Parenthood’s negligence is the case of a 13-year-old teen identified as RZ. RZ was taken to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado by her stepfather, who had been abusing her since she was six years old. Now he was taking her for an abortion to get rid of a pregnancy, the evidence of his sexual abuse.
Planned Parenthood never notified the girl’s mother and never asked questions about RZ having a different last name than the man who brought her in. Maybe they used the same tactic as Delta Clinic and claimed she had her mother’s last name. Maybe they found another way to hide the sexual abuse. Either way, they did not report the abuse to authorities.
Planned Parenthood asked no questions, even when RZ’s abuser filled out the paperwork for her and left her at the facility, not even coming in to get her after the abortion. RZ walked out of the facility alone, to her abuser’s car, with no one at Planned Parenthood looking out for her. The abuse continued.
Eventually, RZ told her mother she was being abused and her mother immediately contacted the police. Through medical records, the mother found out that Planned Parenthood had done an abortion on RZ and sent her right back to her abuser without notifying anyone, allowing the abuse to continue.
RZ’s stepfather pled guilty to sexual assault and her mother sued Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood settled the lawsuit out of court. A judge who commented on the case said that Planned Parenthood’s actions were so heinous that punitive damages would’ve been appropriate. And RZ is just one young woman whose abuser was protected by Planned Parenthood. There have been others.
All too often, the abortion industry protects the perpetrators of sexual abuse at the expense of vulnerable teenage girls.
