State Puts Woman On Trial For Helping Teen Get Abortion

One August night, a 13-year-old girl crept from her house to meet a woman who offered to help the child get an abortion. It was the woman’s stepson who’d impregnated the girl.

Because Pennsylvania law requires parental notification in cases of such young females, the woman, Rosa Marie Hartford, took the girl across the state line into New York.

Now, in a case activists have called a historic challenge to abortion rights, Hartford is going on trial on a charge of interfering with the custody of a child. Jury selection begins today.

“I was helping out,” Hartford has said.

The prosecutor says that’s not the point.

“It’s kind of the old saying,” said District Attorney Max Little. “It’s 11 o’clock - do you know where your children are?”

Hartford’s lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York said this case is about abortion, not child safety.

“Nowhere else in the nation has a prosecution occurred when an individual has assisted a woman to exercise her constitutional rights,” said lead attorney Kathryn Kolbert.

“My biggest fear is that young women will be frightened by this case and not seek medical advice,” she said.

Kolbert was the attorney who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court against the Pennsylvania parental consent law. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 1992.

Hartford’s lawyers said they won’t comment further on the case until the trial is completed.

Little said the central issue is that the girl was too young to agree to the 60-mile trip to Binghamton, N.Y. The age of consent is 14 in Pennsylvania.

The girl left her home early Aug. 31, 1995, and hopped in Hartford’s car. When her mother later called Sullivan County High School to leave a message for her daughter, an administrator said the teenager never made it to school.

The mother called police and filed a missing-person report. The woman didn’t know her daughter was pregnant until the girl’s friends told her later that day.

Hartford faces up to 6 years in prison, but the prosecutor said he won’t seek a jail sentence - only try to send a message.

“Who has the right and or duty to attend to medical care, especially when it involved potentially life-threatening hazardous procedures? I don’t know that somebody across the street has the right to do that,” Little said.

Since Pennsylvania’s new abortion law went into effect two years ago, said Kolbert, many women have been getting abortions in other states with fewer restrictions, including New York and New Jersey. Hartford, she said, is just one of thousands of adults helping minors cross state lines to get abortions.

“To prosecute those people criminally, in my view, is an outrage,” said Kolbert.