Apr
29
Irate judge: DCF failed pregnant girl
Filed Under abortion, social services | Comments Off
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
WEST PALM BEACH – A judge said Thursday he was outraged that the Florida Department of Children and Families did not do more to prevent a 13-year-old foster child from getting pregnant.
Before rushing into court to stop her from having an abortion, Palm Beach County Juvenile Court Judge Ronald Alvarez said, the state should have done more to get her off the streets. He discovered during a Thursday hearing that the girl has run away from state homes at least five times and was gone for a month when she became pregnant early this year.
The Department of Children and Families failed to even notify the court that she was gone so police could try to find her, Alvarez said.
“To say I am angry is an understatement,” he said.
Alvarez held the hearing in Palm Beach County Juvenile Court to determine whether the girl, identified in court records as L.G., might be physically or emotionally harmed by an abortion.
But Alvarez said he will wait to rule on whether she can go ahead with the abortion until the 4th District Court of Appeal decides whether he has any authority in the case. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County believe that any court or state involvement violates L.G.’s constitutional right to choose.
The appeals court said Thursday it will move quickly on the case. The state has five days to submit its brief, and the ACLU and Legal Aid will have three days to respond. The girl is in her second trimester of pregnancy, her lawyers said, and an abortion will become more risky as time passes.
The ACLU believes this is another case of Florida leaders meddling in private lives and trampling the law to push a pro-life ideology. Critics of the state’s intervention compared the case to Gov. Jeb Bush’s attempts to block Terri Schiavo’s husband from removing her feeding tube and to his attempt in 2003 to appoint a guardian for the fetus of a severely disabled woman raped in state care.
But House Speaker Allan Bense, R-Panama City, said the state has a responsibility to act as a good parent to L.G. and evaluate her before she makes an important decision.
“Frankly, I would err on the side of caution,” Bense said. “The government is already involved because of the nature of the girl’s case. And if I were the parent, I would want to make sure that the child received a proper evaluation.”
Despite his strong feelings against abortion, Bush stayed mostly silent on the case Thursday.
“This is a matter that’s being decided by the courts, and DCF is acting in the best interest of the child,” his spokesman, Jacob DiPietre, said.
DCF has declined comment on who made the decision to stop the abortion.
The Florida Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state cannot create laws that require a teenage girl to get her parents’ permission before having an abortion. Because L.G.’s parents have lost the right to raise her, the state stands in that role, the ACLU said. They argue state officials have no more right to stop her than parents would.
In seeking this week to stop the girl from ending her pregnancy, DCF cited a state law that says the agency cannot consent to any abortion. Officials, without commenting on details of the case, said they are acting in the girl’s best interest.
L.G. has been in foster care for at least four years, since she was taken away from her parents for abuse or neglect. Caseworkers haven’t been able to find any families willing to adopt her, DCF attorney Jeffrey Gillen said Thursday in court.
L.G. has run away from several state homes and got pregnant during one of those periods 14 weeks ago, according to court testimony.
Two weeks ago, at a doctor’s appointment, she found out she was due to have a baby. She then told her caseworker with the Children’s Home Society, which runs some Palm Beach County foster care programs under contract with the state, that she wanted to end the pregnancy.
The caseworker drove her to the Presidential Women’s Center in West Palm Beach on April 22. There, she got an ultrasound and spoke with a health worker about her options.
The Women’s Center scheduled another appointment for Tuesday, when the girl would have a longer counseling session and then the abortion, Director Mona Reis said. “She was very vocal about wanting to end the pregnancy,” Reis said.
But the morning of that appointment, the Children’s Home Society called L.G. to tell her that the appointment was off. DCF went to court with an emergency motion asking Alvarez to stop the abortion.
Alvarez held a preliminary hearing the same day.
Legal Aid attorneys said the girl should have a right to end the pregnancy without delay.
The judge asked a court psychologist to evaluate the girl and for both sides to present evidence on whether she could be physically or emotionally harmed by ending the pregnancy or giving birth.
Lynn Hargrove, the court psychologist who met with L.G. under Alvarez’s order, determined she did not have any mental problems. The girl may have a mild mood disorder, she told the court Thursday, but nothing that would cloud her thinking.
“Her main concern seemed to be that she had to be at the evaluation,” Hargrove said. “She was frustrated at the delay.”
Hargrove said she reviewed research on the psychological effects of an abortion and found that teens have no greater risk of emotional problems after an abortion than adults. Women who have had abortions do not seem to have more trouble with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder than the general population, Hargrove said.
Ethelene Jones, a retired obstetrician/gynecologist who has held leadership roles with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, testified that legal abortions are safer than pregnancy and childbirth.
At the girl’s age and stage of pregnancy, her chances of dying from an abortion are 1 in 34,000. The chances are 1 in 10,000 that she would die while carrying the baby to term, Jones said.
DCF called only one witness at the hearing. DCF attorney Gillen asked Francis X. Crosby, a child psychologist from Boca Raton, to talk about a disorder called post-abortion syndrome.
Though considered valid by some researchers and pro-life supporters, the syndrome is controversial. Crosby testified that it is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or the American Medical Association.
“So far the research is still questionable,” Crosby said.
But some preliminary studies indicate that women with a history of psychiatric problems could be at higher risk for emotional harm after an abortion, Crosby said. Because the effects may not surface for months or years, women who undergo an abortion should get counseling long after they end their pregnancies, he said.
DCF’s attorneys tried to enter into evidence several former psychiatric evaluations they said showed L.G. had a history of psychological and behavioral problems, and said that might heighten her risk of trauma from an abortion. One report was nearly four years old.
Alvarez declined to accept those as evidence, upholding Legal Aid objections that they were outdated and irrelevant. “Children do tend to change between the ages of 10 and 13, don’t they?” he said.
At the end of Thursday’s hearing, Alvarez cleared attorneys, reporters and onlookers from the courtroom.
The 13-year-old was whisked inside through a side door to protect her privacy. She met alone with Alvarez and her court-appointed guardian.
Attorneys for the state and Legal Aid wrote their questions for the girl on notebook paper outside the courtroom. A bailiff then passed their handwritten notes to the judge.
They asked if she wanted a baby. L.G. said she does not, Alvarez said. She said she is only 13. She can’t get a job to support a child.
Advocates for children said the real issue raised by L.G.’s case is why DCF didn’t find adoptive parents who could keep the girl safe.
The question, said Florida’s Children First Executive Director Andrea Moore, “should be why did a 13-year-old languish in foster care and how is it she could find herself in this position.”
Karen Gievers, president of the Children’s Advocacy Foundation in Tallahassee, agreed. “They didn’t keep her safe. They didn’t get her a permanent family.”
DCF is “expressly forbidden” from getting involved in children’s medical decisions that are of an extraordinary nature, according to Gievers. “There are situations where government has no role. This is one of them.”
At the end of his hearing Thursday, Alvarez insisted the state should have done more to protect the 13-year-old before she got pregnant with a child of her own.
“Where are our priorities in life?” he asked.
Staff writers Alan Gomez and Larry Keller and special correspondent Dara Kam contributed to this story.
Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
April 29, 2005 Friday
FINAL EDITION
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