Spencer Abraham and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

About the author: Spencer Abraham, who served as senator from Michigan from 1995 to 2001, is the Secretary of Energy. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Hispanic woman elected to Congress, is a former senator and a Republican representative from Miami.

In 1996, a thirteen-year-old girl was impregnated by an eighteenyear- old man in a small town in Pennsylvania. Since Pennsylvania requires minors to get the consent of at least one parent before undergoing an abortion, the young man's mother drove the girl to New York for an abortion without the girl's mother's knowledge. The young man's mother was charged and convicted of interference with the custody of a minor, and the young man was convicted of statutory rape. This case inspired the House of Representatives to pass the Child Custody Protection Act in 1998, which would enforce parental-involvement laws and...