By Jeremy Lott on 9.25.06 @ 12:07AM
Parental approval sometimes isn't what it's cracked up to be.
It was the kind of story that made-for-television movies were
made for. However, network execs won't want to touch this one with
a ten-foot coat hanger.
On September 15, the 19-year-old girl Katelyn Kampf -- and, no,
that name isn't made up -- phoned police from a shopping center in
Salem, New Hampshire. She wanted to report a kidnapping: her
own.
Two things transformed this from the local crime of the week
into a larger story. First, she was allegedly abducted by her own
parents. Second, and more important, was the reason for the
abduction. Her parents wanted to force her to have an abortion.
Upon learning that their daughter was about five-months pregnant
with the child of one Reme Johnson, Lola and Nicholas Kampf ordered
her to abort.
There's been a lot of speculation about why they did this but here are
the facts: Johnson was black and serving a six-month sentence for
possession of a stolen weapon; Katelyn had dropped out of Boston
College, probably because of the pregnancy.
So: At best, they were upset that their daughter was setting
back her own prospects. At worst, they were worried that their new
grandchild would be bad seed.
She refused to have the abortion, which enraged her parents.
According to the affidavit that police took from Katelyn, they
threatened to kill her and kill her unborn child. When that didn't
work, they "chased her out into the yard, grabbed, and tied her
feet and hands together," and added duct tape for good measure.
Then they threw her bound body into the Lexus.
They were at the family home in North Yarmouth, Maine, and they
set out to drive to New York to have the abortion. Katelyn got
loose in New Hampshire when her parents stopped to go to the
bathroom. She gave them the slip, called the cops, and the case is
currently winding its way through courts in both Maine and New
Hampshire.
Why take her to New York? According to the Kennebec Journal, Maine may have "one of
the most liberal abortion laws on the books," but that isn't the
problem. The real concern is "a dearth of abortion providers,
especially those willing to perform late-term abortions." The
squeamishness of family doctors about such things, you see, "is
sending some women to abortion clinics in urban centers such as
Boston and New York."
That's one theory, anyway. My own Neanderthal explanation is
that the Kampfs could have found a physician in Maine if their
daughter were willing to go along with it. But if they wanted to
find an honest-to-badness abortionist, who would be willing to take
a bribe to ignore the gag or the drugs, they needed to go
elsewhere.
The thing that propelled the story to national prominence is the
racial angle. Were the Kampfs driven mad by the fact that the
father of their grandchild-to-be was black? That's the Jerry
Springer question that dozens of stories have asked. Some readers
have taken the bait.
One letter to the Concord Monitor by a
black New Hampshire resident explained that the writer was "at a
crossroads when it comes to the Kampf family....Their daughter was
in college and apparently pregnant by an African-American, who is
now in jail."
The correspondent decided to saw "against the grain" in order to
"side with the parents" who "have raised their daughter and given
her everything she needed to become a young adult." "These are
great parents in my book," he explained, because they tried to keep
her from destroying her life.
However, he was a lot closer to the grain of elite opinion on
this one than he could have known. A Boston Globe news report tried to frame the story by
explaining, "Katelyn Kampf did not subscribe to her parents' vision
for her life."
Maybe -- just maybe -- that was because she didn't believe her
life was the only one that mattered.
topics:
Television, Abortion, Books, Movies, Law, Africa
