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The Hunt Hits Home

Lauren

There’s a reason many locals rarely read the local paper. Little of great note happens around here that you can’t follow through the internet, and better news coverage of state and local events is done elsewhere. After a year of having a local paper subscription simply for the crossword, I cancelled. One less bill, water off my back.

Echidne of the Snakes reports on more incidences of fishing through OB-GYN medical records looking for cases of child abuse.

Only this time, I saw the name of my town. Looks like I should be paying closer attention to the local news.

Planned Parenthood of Indiana is suing the state after the attorney general’s office seized the medical records of eight juvenile patients, including five from the Lafayette area.

First note: Our local Planned Parenthood, which used to be one of three, now pared down to one in this college and factory town, does not offer abortion services. Unlike the PP Kameron Hurley described at her blog, you can walk directly into the clinic and up to the counter — but your wait is never less than an hour, even with an appointment. Walk-in days are complete hell, and I’ve waited as long as three hours just to get into an examination room. The primary use of our Planned Parenthood is threefold: a place to get nearly free birth control, a place for health screenings and regular checkups, and a place to get referrals to other PPs and specialists across the state.

Now think about this. If our Planned Parenthood does not offer abortion services but the state Attorney General is going after them anyway, this is about more than abortion. Is it necessarily about child abuse? Read on.

The lawsuit filed Monday in Marion Superior Court in Indianapolis seeks temporary and permanent injunctions against Attorney General Steve Carter and his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit from searching the records of 12- and 13-year-old patients.

The unit, since March 1, has seized records from clinics in Bloomington, Franklin and Lafayette.

“They’re using a pretty intimidating tool and twisting it in an effort to get confidential records,” said Betty Cockrum, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Indiana.

She said of Carter, “He does not have, under the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, the provision to seek the information he is seeking.”

Having come of age during the tail end of the HIV/AIDS PR campaign, a good deal of my friends went on birth control and got regular check ups at Planned Parenthood from the time of menarche. By the ages of 13 and 14, at least half a dozen of my girlfriends were on birth control for various reasons – yes, some of them were sexually active, but others simply wanted a regulatory effect on their monthly period. One girl reluctantly went on birth control after a six-week-long period. Another did it because she knew she would, at some point, be sexually active. Why not start now? she reasoned. Another did so because her family didn’t have insurance, and PP would become her only dependable option for healthcare.

Do any of these factors mean their medical records should have been available for legal scrutiny? Their demographic matches alone would have left them open for this legal hunt by virtue of their age and the venue they used for their health services.

Spokeswoman Staci Schneider of the attorney general’s office said the unit seized the records as part of an ongoing investigation to determine if Planned Parenthood has been reporting instances of child molestation.

Failing to do so constitutes abuse and/or neglect, she said.

“When you have knowledge of potential child abuse or neglect, you’re required to report that. There are standards to live up to … as a Medicaid provider,” Schneider said Monday.

“We’re pursuing because it’s our duty to ensure that Medicaid providers are following the law.”

This assumes that by honoring patient privacy, PP is breaking the law. Read on for more on this.

Unit director Allen K. Pope also has requested the records of 73 other patients at 19 clinics, according to the lawsuit, which names Pope and Carter as defendants.

The unit showed up at the Lafayette clinic, 1016 E. Main St., on March 7, said Cockrum. She said the demand for additional records is a “fishing expedition.”

Cockrum said she has not been told why the attorney general’s office wants the medical records.

Indiana law defines child abuse as sexual activity with someone age 13 or under, including cases in which the partner is also a minor, according to Cockrum’s attorney, Ken Falk of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.

Judge Loretta Rush, the juvenile judge in Tippecanoe County, said Monday that she wasn’t aware of the Planned Parenthood lawsuit. But she said the public would be surprised to know the number of Lafayette-area girls, age 13 and under, who become pregnant.

I’ve stood in front of Rush before as a CASA and I trust the woman’s judgement. She does not rush to condemn in even some of the shadiest cases I’ve heard of, and has always struck me as being quite fair.

But it does strike me that the state attorney general did not consult with the only juvenile court judge in the county before looking for medical records of young women who may or may not have been abused in this county. If there is anyone one would want to consult, it is the person who rules on every such case that comes into the system. Further, it surprises me that Rush does not (according to this article) appear to be concerned about the implications of bypassing her professional authority OR the legal implications of dipping into people’s medical records just to make sure.

That the state Attorney General didn’t contact the supreme authority on this county’s figures — but went straight to the Planned Parenthood — tells me this isn’t about child abuse except on a rhetorical level. But because our PP doesn’t provide abortions, something feminist experts have named as a primary reason for this sort of witchhunt across the nation, tells me it isn’t about abortion either.

Then what the hell is it?

“I’ve had more young pregnancy cases come into the juvenile justice system in the past year to 18 months than I’ve had in the last six years total,” Rush said.

Rush, contacted at home Monday evening, couldn’t provide specific numbers, but she said she’s aware of one pregnant 10-year-old, two pregnant 11-year-olds and “several” pregnant 12- and 13-year-olds in recent months.

They come to her attention in a variety of ways, including paternity cases and Child In Need of Services cases if the child is deemed a victim of abuse or neglect.

To my knowledge, none of the girls she mentions in these cases (which do become local news, by the way, especially if the paternal unit is a Hispanic immigrant, adding to a local hysteria that should be addressed in another post altogether) visited a Planned Parenthood. Perhaps they did.

Fullnelson comments:

[This kind of bill] [ed note: especially the kinds seen in Kansas and Missouri] seeks not only to charge teenagers experimenting with sex with “child abuse” (and, if convicted, requiring them to register as sex offenders), but also to make it the responsibility of teachers and health providers to report “substantial evidence of sexual intercourse” (whatever the hell that means!) as child abuse, thus reducing them to the role of panty-sniffing snitches. So if a kid seems to be speaking from personal experience in sex ed. class, the teacher is legally obligated to rat him out as a possible child abuser.

…It appears that this concept of requiring reporting of suspicion of underage sex as child abuse comes straight from the playbook of pro-life groups who accuse Planned Parenthood of “breaking [reporting] laws in order to sell abortions and birth control pills to minors.” [link]

This website is connected to LifeDynamics.com, a group led by Mark Cruthcher, which offers litigation support to attorneys in medical malpractice cases against abortion clinics. They had created this “scandal” about under-reporting of child abuse to go after school districts who failed to report teens who sought birth control information. LifeDyanmics.com also has a direct mail program and disseminates “research” on abortion issues, “designed to help the pro-life side win.”

I have come into contact with Betty Cockrum, CEO of PP of Indiana, several times since I took up the fight to maintain our Planned Parenthood. She puts up a good fight for the organization in a state that would rather have it impaled by crippling bill after crippling bill than offer free and safe medical care for young people, in part because it serves as a convenient pariah for all that is deemed wrong with liberalism by state Republican standards. This case, Planned Parenthood against the Attorney General, will likely serve as a test case. As far as I know, no similar cases have been brought to trial in the state – and I’m not sure many within state lines will see this underhanded attempt at smearing the name of Planned Parenthood, the only medical care that me and mine get for free, as a legal tragedy.

Teen pregnancy, especially at the younger ages, will oftentimes derail the life goals for every party involved. It is sad, it happens, and sometimes it is child abuse. But at no point does the mere suspicion of such become an easy excuse to put legitimate medical providers and an entire generation of youths on surveillance.

Related Reading:
Aufheben, formerly of Indiana, writes “So What’s Wrong With Young People Having Sex?”

UPDATE: The Well-Timed Period looks further into Indiana and comes up with these statistics.

# Total # of pregnancies reported in the 10-14 age group: 196. Lafayette (1 pregnancy).

# Number of births in the 10-14 age group: 131 births (out of 84,839 births).

# Father’s age for the 10-14 age group (most, 102, are listed as unknown).

9 thoughts on The Hunt Hits Home

  1. Lauren, I see two things going on.

    One is the attack on teens’ access to contraception. This bill is designed to intimidate girls into distrusting anyone who could give them safer sex advice or contraception by saddling those adults with an obligation to snitch. Without adult support, teen girls are more subsceptible to STIs and unwanted pregnancy. It has long been my view that the right _wants_ those things to be the consequences of non-maritla sex, either because they think it will scare teens into abstinence, or more darkly, because those are the punishments God intended.

    Second, Planned Parenthood is a giant target for the right- a brand name for a group of things they hate — abortion, yes, but also contraception and non-judgmental healthcare for sexually active women. They’re trying to take Planned Parenthood out altogether, and the more they can make their attack look like it’s _not_ about abortion services, the more traction they think it will get. And they’re probably right — the “covering up abuse” meme is starting, and we’ll be fighting this battle for a while.

    We know it’s coming. But we’re still playing defense. What we need is to counterattack and show that the attackers are the ones hurting children — and not in the ways that only the choir will say “amen” to.

    I have suggested on other blogs that these anti-choice propoganda mills have to be taped, caught in lies and exposed. I also think there’s something to be done with the young teens and pre-teens who give birth because they don’t have a choice — how often are the fathers prosecuted in those cases? Some forty year old gets a twelve-year old pregnant, she carries to term — and then what? One can’t argue that the baby needs a father — he’s a child molester and cannot be trusted around children! But demands for prosecution are much more effective with real facts. Prosecutors have subpoena power and we don’t, so it will be much tougher for us to get real data.

    My thoughts, worth what you paid for them.

  2. Thomas and Lauren, as for Life Dynamics (LDI), the organization apparently behind the “underreported child sex abuse” strategy, LDI has been caught on tape lying. Specifically, about 5 years ago there was a concocted “scandal” about abortion clinics selling aborted fetuses for research, complete with juicy quotes from a supposed clinic employee promoted by LDI PR. This reached the US Congress, where the supposed clinic employee was put under oath; he refused to confirm his prior statements, in other words, refused to lie under oath with consequent risk of perjury conviction and jail time. He was already facing civil actions.

  3. Hypothetically, if you knew that in several cases these Planned Parenthood clinics had failed to report cases of serious abuse (adults having sex with these children) would that change your view on this story?

    Your post has a lot of speculation on motives that you really have no proof for and certainly one could take the article you have quoted and speculate so that ‘reading between the lines’ give you a scenario like I have outlined.

  4. Dave:

    First, if it were a problem with Planned Parenthood, then Tiller’s clinic wouldn’t be a subject of similar efforts.

    Second, if any jurisdiction were serious about prosecuting child-rape, they would start with those that produce live births, because the case is so easily proved — a paternity test on the baby probably establishes guilt without the need even to put the victim on the stand, depending on state procedural requirements.

    Finally, a you see from Nancy’s comment, LDI has an anti-abortion axe to grind unrelated to child-rape, wo we’re not really supposing their motive. I think their motive is pretty clear.

  5. I didn’t say it was a problem with planned parenthood as a whole,, simply it could be a problem with some clinics.

    As to your second point, IF you only go after those cases that produce live births, you are certainly providing a very strong incentive for aborting any pregnancies that result. Kids getting raped is a problem whether it produces a baby or not.

    I will accept that LDI has this motive, but the jump from them to the Attorney General seems to be speculation. If the Attorney General had some good reasons for suspecting these clinics were failing to report cases of this type, and while that may not be the case here, I think everyone will agree that it could happen, what should they do?

  6. But Dave, the AG’s we’re talking about ran on anti-abortion platforms, so they have an anti-abortion motive. And if, as you said, acting exclusively on live births incentivizes abortion, what does acting exclusively on abortions do?

  7. You were the one that advocated an ‘exclusive’ approach, not me. Unless you have evidence that the AG is not prosecuting child rapes when the child has a baby your question is a non-sequiter.

    Do you find it impossible that an AG who ran on an anti-abortion platform would also want to punich those who fail to report child rapes.

    I find in instructive that there has been no answer to my originial hypothetical, which leads me to speculate that even IF these clinics were not reporting child molestation, you would not support the seizing of these records.

    Correct me if I am wrong on that.

  8. Do you find it impossible that an AG who ran on an anti-abortion platform would also want to punich those who fail to report child rapes.

    The clinics report that they have been following the letter of the law, which is presumably why they chose to sue the state. Again, considering that this type of legal action is being taken across the nation and not just with a particular PP or a particular set, this wholly appears to be a witch hunt.

  9. Dave: I wasn’t advocating an exclusive approach. I was advocating adding investigation following live births to investigations following terminations. There has been no announcement by these AG’s that they are pursuing the fathers of children borne by children, though that announcement would significantly blunt the criticism of their tactics. I therefore infer they are not doing so.

    As to your original question, medical confidentiality is a creature of statute, and I am agnostic on what its reach should be. However, I do want it applied equally as between poor clinic patients and affluent girls with private doctors, and I do want it applied equally as between abortion providers and delivery units.

    Therefore, if a hospital could quash a subpoena for the records of the 13 year old mother, the same should be true of Planned Parenthood. If a girl who has a private doctor examine her when she is 13 and pregnant can shield those records, so should the girl who uses Planned Parenthood. (Allowing a privilege to shield evidence of a crime is hardly unheard-of. Both attorney-client and priest-penitent privileges permit either a victim _or_the_offender_ to describe the offense and shield that disclosure from discovery.) _If_ under an equally applied privilege doctrine, PP has a disclosure obligation and violates it, then I think they ought to be held in contempt. That’s what happens when people get subpoenas and refuse to honor them. Whether it’s a “cover-up” to fail to disclose is probably a question of intent where the extent of their obligation is not clear. If it can be proved that they _knew_ their application of medical confidentiality was unreasonable under state law and applied it anyway, there’s a case that ought to be prosecuted. More likely, they have a decent argument for the application of privilege and thought they were within their rights, in which case it’s not generally criminal to withhold information, and the extent of the privilege ought to be tested by subpoena. I’d have to see the Indiana and Kansas reporting statutes and medical confidentiality statutes to really state an informed opinion.

    On the political motivations of the AG’s: of course it is _possible_ that they just want to prosecute child rape. I’m applying Ockham’s Razor. If federal AG Gonzales says he intends to shut down the porn industry, and then goes on a campaign of prosecuting their unpaid-overtime violations for grips and staffers, is it _possible_ that he’s really after labor law violators? Of course it’s possible. Is it far more likely that he’s using any tool at hand? Of course that’s more likely. When a state AG runs to the religious right, against abortion, and then does things which obviously have a suppressive effect on abortion, but states an unrelated motive, what is the more likely? That the actions are unrelated to the campaign promises, or that the stated independent motive is pretextual?

    Finally, you didn’t answer my question. Pulling the records of young girls who terminate pregnancies, without also pulling the records of young girls who carry to term, is a strong incentive on those girls and the men who molest them to carry the pregnancy to term, is it not?

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