More on Prop 73

Just over a week until the California special election.

Valerie Schmalz on Protect Our Daughters: Support Proposition 73:

Harlon Reeves didn't learn his 13-year-old daughter had received two coerced abortions -- or that she had been repeatedly raped by her mother's live-in boyfriend -- until Texas child protective services notified him.

This is a situation that is not confined to Texas - as a series of call-in radio interviews in California this fall show, parents whose daughters are coerced into abortions are appalled, saddened and helpless.

In the Reeves family case in Texas, the abortion clinic had contacted the state with its suspicions after performing the second abortion on the developmentally delayed young girl, who was brought to the clinic by her molester.

Reeves' story spurred passage of Texas's parental notification law in 1999, and the girl's rapist was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Reeves' daughter is now in her 20s, but Reeves, who has another young daughter, has lent his name to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Liberty Legal Institute in support of a New Hampshire case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of New England, to be heard by the US Supreme Court November 30.

"It's one of those things where if just one parent would have been notified, all of this would have been exposed," said Jonathan Saenz, one of the Liberty Legal attorneys representing Reeves. "You would think if a little girl, who's 13 years old, comes in to have an abortion, something is going on. These child predators are taking advantage of a system that is broken. It is a real assault on parental rights; it's a real assault on young children."

Apparently this is what Planned Parenthood calls the emancipation of women. I, for one, intend to hold Planned Parenthood accountable.