The Pocono Record reports that a 31-year-old Pennsylvania man, Michael James Lisk, had a long-term sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl who subsequently became pregnant, aborted her own child with a pencil, and had Lisk help dispose of the remains of the aborted child. The paper reports:

Still sick on Sunday, the girl went with her mother to Lehigh Valley Hospital. Staff in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit contacted Lehighton State Police to report they were treating a 13-year-old patient who appeared to have recently been pregnant. During treatment, she told hospital staff that she had caused the abortion with a lead pencil…

Lisk was arrested and arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Michael Muth and placed in Monroe County Correctional Facility in lieu of $50,000 bail. Lisk is charged with rape of a child, statutory sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, corruption of a minor, concealing the death of a child and abuse of a corpse.

If the young teenage girl went to a free-standing abortion facility, there is a good chance this case would have never been made public. Lila Rose and her organization Live Action have exposed numerous Planned Parenthood facilities that have helped cover up other alleged incidents of statutory rape.

And yet in a country with more than one million surgical abortions every year, Jill at Feministe suggests that this tragedy is not only the responsibility of Michael James Lisk, but the pro-life movement’s, for undercutting the “safety net” of accessible abortion. This is complete nonsense. Sure Pennsylvania has a parental consent law, but that hardly forces teenage girls to resort to dangerous  lead pencil self-abortions. When a girl barely in her teens has had an on-going sexual relationship with someone in his 30s, access to “safe and legal” abortion is not the primary problem in that girls life. To use this tragedy to bludgeon the pro-life movement is opportunistic and narrow-minded — tunnel vision that ignores the real plight of many abortion-minded girls.