Everybody knows that it is well-nigh impossible for schools to deal in any way with sick children, because they have to have parental permission to administer pretty much any kind of treatment. As a result, the school nurse is going the way of the dodo, because they is simply nothing that she or he can do except send kids home.

I mention that by way of reminder. Schools–those supposedly in loco parentis institutions to which we hand our children–have to have parents’ say-so to give out aspirin. But according to the president of an Episcopal seminary, she has the right, even the religious obligation, to take other people’s kids without parental knowledge much less permission to have a surgical procedure. I’ll bet you can guess which one. From CNS News:

Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies.

Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. recalled the time she took a 15-year-old girl she had never met before to get an abortion.

“Although New Hampshire was closer to that girl’s home than Boston, as it happened, I did not take her across state lines,” Ragsdale said. “Nor did I, to my knowledge, break any laws.

“But if either of those things had been necessary in order to help her, I would have done them,” she continued. “And if helping young women like her should be made illegal I will, nonetheless, continue to do it.”

Ragsdale is a high priestess of the Moloch cult, one who famously maintains that abortion is a blessing. The “right” that she asserts is an extraordinary one: the right to take other’s people children, without their permission, across state lines for the purpose of undergoing a surgical procedure that, while generally safe (at least physically), nevertheless occasionally results in serious physical problems and can even be fatal. Given that we are talking about minor children here, this is about people who cannot legally give consent, so essentially Ragsdale is claiming that kidnapping should be legal if an abortion is performed rather than a ransom demanded. Amazingly enough, she isn’t alone:

Subcommittee chairman Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said a bill introduced in the House last summer – the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (H.R. 2299) – would make it an offense to “circumvent parental consent laws in a state by, without the parents’ knowledge, taking a minor girl across state lines for an abortion.”

He said he found it difficult to believe opposition to the law, like that expressed by the subcommittee’s ranking member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who called it an “assault to the reproductive rights of women.”

In general parlance, female children are not “women”–they are girls, who are still under considered under parental authority for virtually all purposes, including the above mentioned administration of aspirin. But for Nadler, as for Ragsdale and the rest of the culture of death, nothing–absolutely nothing–is of higher existential, much less constitutional,  significance than the right to kill one’s own children.

It is a measure of how obsessed the pro-abortion left is that it is willing to say, essentially, that everything else that we as a society believe is important must step aside when the sacramental rite of abortion is being performed. One rather wonders why they don’t just set up a church, and claim the right to abortion under the freedom of religion. They could even make Katherine Ragsdale their Presiding Bishop.

(Via MCJ.)