JEFFERSON CITY — Senate Bill 2, sponsored by John Louden (R-St. Louis County), would provide for civil liability for people who intentionally enable a minor to obtain an abortion without the consent required by Missouri parental consent law, even if the abortion takes place outside Missouri.

Compensatory and punitive damages could be awarded to the minor under this bill.

“In Missouri, we pretend to have this parental consent law, but it is really meaningless because a simple drive over to Illinois can bypass the Supreme Court tested parental consent law,” Louden said.

The current law provides for criminal penalties for violations of the parental consent law, but due to Constitutional venue requirements, the law only applies to abortions occurring in Missouri.

Illinois clinics providing abortions have in the past advertised in the yellow pages of Missouri as not requiring parental consent.

The bill has passed in past legislative efforts both chambers in the legislature, but has not managed to pass both in the same year.

Louden’s bill would also require any physician performing abortion in the state of Missouri to have clinical privileges to provide OB/GYN care at a hospital located within 30 miles of the location at which the abortion is performed.

Alison Gee, testifying in opposition to the proposed bill, said doctors performing abortions need not be OB/GYN and would find it difficult to get surgical privileges for OB/GYN as required in the bill.

“Hospital administrators who oppose abortion may simply choose not provide those clinical privileges having nothing to do with the legality of the procedure but having to do with ideology,” Gee said.

Opponents of Louden’s bill questioned the need for parental consent, especially in the face of young girls who are victims of rape or incest.

“What more important time is there to have the parents involved in the decision?” Louden said.

And when dealing with incidents of incest, “Number one we have judicial bypass, and number two, by allowing a young, minor girl in that situation to quietly go over to Illinois … the person protected is the one doing the incest,” Louden said. “That is the insidious nature of this Illinois bypass.”

Judicial bypass allows minors in certain circumstances to petition the courts to allow an abortion without parental notification.

Elaine Larson, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, testified in opposition to the bill.

Larson has worked at Fulton State Hospital for the past ten years, and for seven of those years, she worked with women with various mental diseases and personality disorders.

Larson provided senators with parts of a patient’s story to illustrate how this bill would affect her patients.

The patient is currently 23 years of age and came to Fulton when she was 18. Her father and several of her mother’s boyfriends beginning at the age of five raped her.

She could tell no one at the time because some of these men had threatened her life.

When she finally did tell, no one would believe her until she was found to be pregnant at age 12 by her father. Her father was sent to prison and her stepmother supported the girl.

The patient and her stepmother talked at great length about her decision. At age 13, she chose to have an abortion.

“Under this bill, her stepmother could have been sued by the girl’s mother,” Larson said. “The young woman is still getting support from her stepmother, and her biological mother still believes she made the wrong choice.”

Allison Hile, from Webster Groves, Missouri, is the Director of Information and Education at the Hope Clinic for Women.

Statistics from the clinic kept since Dec. 1, 2004, show 184 minors have received an abortion. Of those 184, 16 were minors from Missouri who did not have parental consent.

“They had a variety of reasons for not telling their parents,” Hile said.

Fear of abuse, stress in the family, a recent death in the family, drug use, and the straight-A student who did not want to disappoint her parents, Hile said.

“One girl came with aunt had witnessed her sister telling her father she had gotten pregnant several years earlier,” Hile said, “The father, in a rage, went up to her sister’s bedroom, took all of her belongings … and threw them out the second story window onto the snow in the front yard.”

“He then proceeded to go to the Christmas tree and take her Christmas gifts from underneath the tree and put them in the dumpster behind their home, declaring loudly, ‘no daughter of mine will get pregnant out of wedlock,’ and disowned her,” Hile said.

“These are not families who live behind the proverbial white picket fences,” Hile said.