COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical Tuesday that hundreds of medical records from an abortion clinic are important to the case of a 14-year-old girl impregnated by her soccer coach and who had an abortion without her parents’ consent.
 

In a case that seeks sweeping access to private medical files on behalf of a single plaintiff, lawyers for the girl’s family argued that information drawn from a decade’s worth of records is necessary to prove the clinic had a pattern of violating Ohio’s parental consent law.
 

Family members also believe they will find that Planned Parenthood of Cincinnati routinely ignored signs that underage patients were sexually abused or statutorily raped by adults, said Charles Miller, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
 

Planned Parenthood attorney Daniel Buckley countered that the clinic has a legal obligation to protect the privacy of its clients’ records. Planned Parenthood denies underreporting or ignoring cases of abuse, he said.
 

The case involves a girl who was 14 at the time of her abortion in 2004. A police investigation revealed that the girl gave the clinic a phone number belonging to her soccer coach, 21-year-old John Haller, rather than that of her parents. Haller was later convicted on seven counts of sexual battery.
 

Miller said the plaintiffs seek only three items from each record on other minors treated at the clinic: the patient’s age, whether she had a sexually transmitted disease, and whether she entered the clinic pregnant.
 

Chief Justice Thomas Moyer questioned how any of those three facts about Planned Parenthood patients would advance the family’s case for damages.
 

“Where’s the linkage?” he asked.
 

Miller said the family hopes to make a statistical argument. National figures show that about 60 percent of underage girls’ sex partners are over 18, so Planned Parenthood should be reporting suspected improper sexual activity among about half of its underage abortion patients.
 

Justice Paul Pfeifer wondered what value the records would have in making that argument when they don’t include the ages of the men involved. He noted that Ohio law requires neither the girl nor her parents to volunteer the identity of the father to employees of the clinic.
 

“Are they required to interrogate?” he asked.
 

“No, but they’re not entitled to stick their head in the ground,” replied Brian Hurley, another family attorney.
 

Hurley said abortion clinics should be expected to ask underage girls to identify who got them pregnant. Otherwise, they’re shirking their duty to potentially identify statutory rape between adults and minors and the type of abuse endured by his client.
 

Buckley argued that the family already has all the access it needs to argue its case on behalf of the girl, including her own medical records, statements of the nurse, the doctor and the social worker.
 

He said the family is seeking unprecedented access to the medical records of third parties that will be of little use in the case. Federal courts, for example, ruled out using damages against third parties in an individual smoker’s case against tobacco giant Phillip Morris, he said.
 

The 1st District Court of Appeals ruled last year that the records weren’t necessary for the lawsuit. It says the suit is about whether Planned Parenthood violated its legal duties to the girl’s parents in performing her abortion.
 

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