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Wee anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, 20, has a fun undercover video project where she pretends to be a 13-year-old girl dating a 31-year-old guy who goes into a Planned Parenthood seeking abortion, set to the tune of a sweet underage abortion jam:
Well I’m a big girl now
EyyyeeeauuughhhhhRepeat.
In this video, shot in a Bloomington, Indiana Planned Parenthood, the clinic rep does some not-so-legal stuff to deal with this no-good very-bad situation: she doesn’t report the girl’s age to authorities, even as she acknowledges that it constitutes child abuse and rape; she conspiratorially puts on some after-the-fact earmuffs to pretend she didn’t hear the ages involved; then she directs Rose to go over state lines to Illinois where she can have a real secret abortion without parental consent. Ha, ha, oh, this is all terrible, good thing none of it’s real, right? Right? Watch it, after the jump:
Of course, though the 13-year-old here isn’t real, there are girls in her situation who get roped into relationships with older dudes, get pregnant, and are forced to consider abortion. That’s a sad, awful way for puberty to come a-knockin’. But as with the abortion question in general, the issue of reporting underage sex is, well, complicated. Megan at Jezebel nails it down:
It sounds good for a doctor to be forced to report abuse, but statutory rape isn’t the same as sexual assault or molestation—-which is why there’s a whole different category for it. When young women who have chosen to be sexually active see and hear about this video, are they likely to stop having sex until they turn 14? No. They are, however, far less likely to turn to a medical provider for information about birth control, STI testing or abortion services if they know they provider is going to pick up the phone and call the cops. That’s the consequence of these forced-reporting laws when it comes to statutory rape (which is, by definition, consensual but for the age of the supposed victim).