The Parents of This 15 Year-Old Found Out About Her Abortion From Her Diary. The Doctor Had Decided in Just 15 Minutes They Did Not Need to Know. The Law Agreed. Here They Reveal the Agony This Madness Caused

Daily Mail › February 14, 2004

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Summary

TO ALL intents and purposes, it was an ordinary family day - a sunny Sunday morning at the end of January. Helen Walden set about tidying her daughter Leanne's bedroom, as she did every weekend, while the rest of the family, including her husband Antony, went shopping to buy the ingredients for a roast meal.

But when she emptied her 15-year-old daughter's schoolbag to find her gym kit, Helen's world fell apart. For there, on Leanne's school planner, scribbled in childish scrawl alongside humdrum reminders about homework and lessons, her daughter had written: 'I had my termanation.'

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The Parents of This 15 Year-Old Found Out About Her Abortion From Her Diary. The Doctor Had Decided in Just 15 Minutes They Did Not Need to Know. The Law Agreed. Here They Reveal the Agony This Madness Caused

In case the clinical language - poignantly misspelt - was too obscure, she had then clarified its meaning in the most brutal, basic terms: 'Killed my baby.' In this way, Helen, 33, learned that her daughter had not only been in a sexual relationship, but had become pregnant and had an abortion, all without any effort on the part of medical staff to consult her parents.

When she confronted her tearful daughter, the stark facts emerged: two weeks earlier, dressed in her school uniform, Leanne had had the abortion carried out at a local hospita...

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