Posted on 06/12/2008 4:59:00 PM PDT by markomalley
A Hall County woman is serving a year in jail for pretending to be a girl's mother when she signed off on the girl's abortion.
In reality, Cindi Cook was the mother of the girl's boyfriend, who also was 16 when she became pregnant in early 2007.
Displeased that the baby would ruin her son's chance of going to college, Cook, 44, pressured the 16-year-old girl to have the abortion in the spring of 2007, found a clinic that would do it without her present, and paid for the procedure, DeKalb Solicitor General Robert James said Wednesday.
Last week, a judge sentenced Cook to a year in jail the maximum for a misdemeanor for interfering with custody and violating a parental notification law.
"This conduct is reprehensible," James said. "There's not a parent anywhere who'd be OK with what she did."
James said his office is now investigating whether the facility Northside Women's Clinic in Chamblee broke a state law that required parental notification when a girl under the age of 18 has an abortion.
According to its Web site, Northside Women's Clinic offers abortions through the 15th week of pregnancy, usually in about 10 minutes.
A woman who answered the phone Thursday morning said the clinic had no comment and did not have an attorney. She would not give her name or title.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not identifying the girl because she is a minor.
More than a year after the abortion, "she's still struggling with the loss of the baby," said Fenn Little, her family's attorney. "She's getting better, but there's going to be a lot of counseling and issues that have to be addressed."
Through their attorney, the girl's parents issued this statement: "The actions of both Cindi Cook and the Northside Women's Clinic have affected our daughter's life with much pain this past year because of the loss of her baby. It was a sense of helplessness. As for us, they took away our right to be there and help our daughter during a time when she needed us most. The outcome of the trial is a positive step forward in the long healing process that we must go through as individuals and as a family."
Yes there is. I worked in a Dr’s office for 2 years and in a hospital for 17.
Nah, I worked for docs for 2 years and we never asked to see ID, only insurance cards. Not even when they paid by check. We would not - legally *could* not - see a minor alone **unless it was in regards to reproductive health**. Not necessarily even birth control but a girl coming in for a Pap and routine check, or a guy coming in for an STD test. Mom or dad could send in a note however, giving us permission to treat their child, usually when grandma or aunt was bringing them in.
We had a few teens come in for various ailments without parent or note and in those cases we would call mom or dad and two of us would have to verify over the phone that we could see and treat the kid, then we’d note ‘S/W Mom on the phone, verbal permission to see patient’ on the notes for that visit. We never photocopied a single driver’s license though.
Exactly. We knew our patients and their families because it was a smallish town and we had several generations of family that all came to our docs. So while *we* would have known that the lady out there wasn’t really Janey’s mom, I can see it would be much easier in a walk in medical facility or clinic, where they don’t have an ongoing relationship with the patients and have never laid eyes on them before and probably never will again.
As an aside, I was thinking of the last few times I had to do an ER run for my kids (suspected appendicitis, eye injury) and while they asked for my insurance card and I had to sign paperwork, they never asked for my driver’s license. I could have sent the neighbor in with my card and said ‘Sign my name’ and they never would have known. Signing someone else’s name to anything like that makes the signer legally responsible for their duplicity and absolves the facility of responsibility for it.
“What is really sad is that the teen could not tell her own mom what was wrong.”
BINGO! I’m guessing that would’ve solved a lot of problems. Not only as far as taking away the boyfriend’s mom’s ability to coerce their daughter, but in being able to hopefully protect her from the emotional harm she is now dealing with.
While I would personally prefer to see clinics such as this shut down altogether, I would hope that in the future this clinic makes more of an effort to confirm the identity of those bringing children in for these procedures so as to comply with the laws on the books.
In this case, it was a boyfriend’s mom. It has been shown though in the past that pedophiles have done the same thing - lying and saying they were a father when they were most definitely not...
ping to read later.
I agree. I am astonished that this is only a misdemeanor. It really should be a felony, on so many different bases.
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