An Illinois appeals court has ruled against a woman who sued a Planned Parenthood clinic because it did not inform her that the abortion she requested would take a human life. As reported by LifeSiteNews.com, “The plaintiff, identified only as Mary Doe, had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago in 2004, before which she says she had specifically asked a clinic counselor if her unborn child was a human being. Two years later, she filed a malpractice action against the clinic based upon the fact that the counselor had erroneously told her no.”
On August 22, the First District Appellate Court dismissed the case, affirming a lower court decision. “No court, regardless of where it sits, has found a common law duty requiring doctors to tell their pregnant patients that aborting an embryo, or fetus, is the killing of an existing human being,” wrote Justice Rodolfo Garcia wrote in a 16-page court opinion, as reported by the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. Garcia said the “negative answer from the Planned Parenthood counselor to the plaintiff’s question of whether ‘there was already a human being in existence’ during the plaintiff’s intake evaluation simply reflects the opinion of Planned Parenthood on when life begins.” He wrote that it was clear from the consent form the plaintiff signed that she knew “there was going to be a termination of pregnancy and that she would not have a child.”
The plaintiff’s attorney, Harold Cassidy, who argued a similar case in New Jersey, said that he would appeal the ruling to the Illinois supreme court. “This is a woman’s rights case,” he said following the decision. “This is the right of a woman to make a decision herself and get all the information she needs and apply her own discreet, moral or philosophical beliefs as they exist.”
Cassidy said that Planned Parenthood had taken the liberty in the case to replace “Mary Doe’s” judgment with its own “by denying her the scientific facts and giving her their philosophical viewpoints. And the court is saying that at Planned Parenthood, she should expect nothing more than getting their philosophical point of view.”
Georgette Forney of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a support and activist group for women who have had abortions, said of the ruling: “It’s sad that judges are willing to compromise a woman’s health.” She told LifeSiteNews that had the lawsuit not been “related to abortion, but to a transgender person who had changed their mind, [the court] would have been more understanding…. A woman’s pain isn’t being acknowledged in order to protect the right to abortion.”
Photo: Bryan Howard, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona, Inc., stands out in front of a Planned Parenthood facility in Tucson, Arizona, earlier this year: AP Images
