Ohio clinic told to cough up all its records
Published by punkass marc June 23rd, 2006The Cincinnati Planned Parenthood Clinic must give a family that is suing the clinic all records on abortion patients younger than 18, a judge ruled.
The documents are being sought in a lawsuit by the family of a teenage girl. The suit alleges that Planned Parenthood never got parental consent to perform an abortion on the girl, as required by Ohio law.
All records? Of every minor patient? To one family? No political agenda here, none at all. Nope.
UPDATE:
Thankfully, as reader Thomas points out, the names of patients would have to be blacked out if these docs are indeed to be turned over. Still a travesty for the PP office, but less so for the minors involved.
Okay, this is exactly why parental notification laws are evil. Because so many people cannot grasp that they DO NOT OWN OTHER PEOPLE’S BODIES. I’m put in mind of those father-daughter purity balls. It’s clear that a lot of men, bitter that they don’t have legal ownership of their wives, think having a daughter is a good replacement. And if she “gives” away Daddy’s Best Pussy to some other dude, then she’s in for a beating.
And apparently this one dad is going to get details on every other girl who’s had an abortion at this clinic so he can beat all of them, too.This is what the update is meant to correct.
They are requesting all documents to see if there is a pattern of prior law-breaking, which I see as legit: there is a law on the books stating patients must be 18 or older or have parental consent.
We don’t live in an ideal world, so not every daughter feels safe and comfortable enough to tell her parents she’s pregnant, or wants to terminate.
I almost got into blaming the victim, wondering why the daughter cracked and told her parents she had an abortion (or how else did they find out?). But my beef is with the parents, who are probably feeling shame that their daughter could not talk to them first.
I don’t know. I think “parental consent” laws are missing the fucking root(s) of the problem.
We’ll have to see what happens in the appeal.
Wait, now, why does the _family_ get these records from all these other women, Anne? Maybe the state could argue for them if it were trying to build some kind of case, but the judge is giving them to the family of this one girl, at least according to this bulletin, and that seems pretty effed up to me.Because I missed the very important sentence Thomas drew attention to below.
please, please, please tell me they’re going to appeal this injuction?
They are.
Marc, not to nitpick, but you didn’t include the most important fact (from this litigator’s perspective):
The records are redacted to remove the identifying information.
Sure, there’s a political agenda here; but this outcome is much less horrifying than if the anti-choice dad here were getting the identities of the patients.
God, I had a bad Friday morning. I totally missed that, and had obviously misread the Dear Ellie email, too.
Less drinking on Thursdays maybe?
Marc, your political point still stands. My gut tells me that this guy is an activist plaintiff using the facts of his daughter’s treatment to advance his agenda. If I were the judge, I would permit more than just the redaction. In most of my practice, most of the documents I get in discovery are covered by a confidentiality order and the use I can make of them is limited to the case. I hope the judge has signed some kind of confidentiality stipulation (a stipulation is an agreement between the parties, and they are often “so ordered” by the judge, making them an order of the court), which would keep the dad from holding a press conference to read off the ages and other non-identifying information to the news cameras or turning over the documents to the RTL orgs.