Rape Victims - Poster Children for the Proabortion Left

All the recent angry banter about what constitutes rape and the lefty exploitation of rape victims to score political points got me thinking about this incident from a couple years back:

30-year-old Michael Lisk told police he had sex with his 13-year-old neighbor “too many times to count.” He said the rapes, which began when the girl was just 12, were “like a marriage where you have sex all the time.”

Twelve months of sexual abuse culminated in a horrific incident when the pregnant child jammed a lead pencil through her cervix to trigger an abortion. After three days of increasing pain, Lisk “advised her to ‘push hard’ when she got a strong contraction.” She delivered a stillborn baby boy into the toilet, and on Lisk’s advice, placed the body in a plastic bag and threw it into the backyard. He took the bag and buried it in the woods by his home.

The following day the girl’s mother took her to the hospital where medical staff discovered evidence of a recent pregnancy and notified police. Days later, the girl was violated yet again when the feminist Left turned her into the latest poster child for the abortion rights movement.

With absolutely no knowledge of this child’s situation, Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky insisted parental consent laws were to blame for the gruesome home abortion.

One of the intentions behind these laws seems to be to let an adult know that their teenager is sexually active, presumably so they can intervene, or that their teenager has been raped, presumably so they can help them. In this case, those idealistic goals catastrophically failed.

It’s not hard to see how the fact that this 13-year-old girl needed parental consent for an abortion — which likely would have tipped them off to her 30-year-old rapist — could have led her to do it herself.

Not that there’s any reason to believe this kid sought a medically-supervised abortion. And if she did? Any clinic near her home (and there are more than half a dozen within 30 miles) would have gleefully helped her stick it to the “anti-choicers” with a judicial bypass.

And heaven forbid a sexually active teen be forced to talk to her parents! Newsflash: most pregnant teens are afraid to tell their parents. That doesn’t mean parents don’t have a right to know.

Jill Filipovic at Feministe saw this child’s suffering as an opportunity to score points against prolife groups (and referred to the rapist as the girls '30-year old boyfriend':

[T]his girl obviously needed access to safe abortion care; if she had such access, she wouldn’t have had to self-induce abortion with a lead pencil. Abortion access would have lessened this tragedy by a significant degree. It’s shameful that, under the guise of caring about children and babies, anti-choice groups seek to limit abortion access for women and girls.

In Jill’s teen abortion fantasy, this child desperately wanted to terminate her pregnancy at the local Planned Parenthood, but the vast patriarchal conspiracy forced her to drive a sharpened piece of lead into her uterus instead. Cue the dream sequence sound effects. If only 13-year-olds could hit up the junior high vending machine for a dose of Mifepristone. Press 1 for Reese’s Pieces, press 2 for extra large cherry-flavored condoms, press 3 for abortifacient drugs. Why, abortion access like that would totally “have lessened this tragedy by a significant degree.”

There really are no words to fully address the depravity of this mindset.

The tragedy is that this child was betrayed, abused, or neglected by every single adult in her life. A child molester raped her more than a hundred times, impregnated her, and coached her through a do-it-yourself abortion by pencil. Reports suggest the fetus may have been “past 20 weeks gestation” but no one noticed or cared enough to help. And for three days after the self-induced abortion, no one realized she was ill.

A medically-supervised abortion might have lessened the trauma to the girl’s body, but to what “significant degree” would it diminish the tragedy? The life of a fetus that may have been past the point of viability was snuffed out in utero. A child who needed protection, guidance, and love got none of these things.

We may never know exactly why this kid risked her life to terminate her pregnancy. We may never know how many teachers, family members, and friends failed to keep her safe.

What we do know is that her decisions were influenced by a predator who wanted to destroy the evidence of his crime and ensure continued access to his vulnerable victim. Unrestricted access to abortion wouldn’t do a thing to change that, and neither will turning rape victims into political footballs.

One last irony: Lisk was arraigned on charges of rape of a child, deviate sexual intercourse, concealing the death of a child, and abuse of a corpse. Abusing the corpse of a baby you aborted is punishable by law. Killing them first in utero is not. Is it any wonder our children are failed on so many levels?