BUSINESS DOWN IN VIRGINIA AND ABORTION INDUSTRY OUTRAGED

RICHMOND, VA, Mar 5 (LSN) – According to preliminary statistics from the state health department and abortion clinics, girls 17 and younger got about 20 percent fewer abortions in Virginia in the first five months of a new law requiring them to have parental consent.  On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood and other state abortionists reacted to the loss in business by taking the state to court to argue against the constitutionality of the law which took effect July 1.  Figures compiled by the health department and The Washington Post indicate that teenagers 17 and younger committed about 700 abortions in Virginia from July through November 1997.  In the same months a year earlier, that group had 903 abortions.  Abortion supporters reacted angrily to the drop in business. Simon Heller, a lawyer with the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York said “It’s a shocking decrease in the number of young women obtaining abortions in Virginia.” Fiona Givens, a spokeswoman for Virginia Society for Human Life expressed her views saying, “It’s a win-  win situation for everybody: for the families, because the girls are not aborting their babies in secret, and for Planned Parenthood, because they’re always looking for ways to curb teen pregnancy and abortion.”  Apparently, Planned Parenthood does not share Givens' positive appraisal of the lower abortion rate as it argues in court that the new requirement for parental notification should be abolished.