Mark your calendar for June 3.The 20th annual Ball for Life will honor Peggy Noonan and Ambassador Faith Whittlesey at the New York Athletic Club,180 Central Park South. I will once again be on the host committee, and I expect that by next week my mailbox will teem with missives from the most venomous of pro-choice scribes angered by this column. I hope the critical letters to the editor of The New York Sun will be much more discreet.

Someone asked me recently what I thought about the recent Florida ruling allowing an abortion for a 13-year-old girl. He wondered if I could research any offspring of children that young. I didn’t have to look very far, because an in-law of mine had her firstborn at 13 and three more before she was 20.

I did a Google search for the youngest mother and discovered that a Peruvian girl gave birth at 5. That may be a statistic for the Guinness Book of World Records, but all I could think of was, who impregnated that poor child? For that matter, who impregnated that 13-year-old Floridian?

For the past 32 years, abortion rights have been incontrovertibly linked with women’s issues, and yet concern for the female child does not fit into that sphere. How else to explain why statutory rape is covered up, under the guise of protecting the minor’s privacy?

In Kansas and Indiana, authorities are investigating allegations of statutory rape. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, which claim that releasing medical records would violate the privacy of the girls, are blocking the investigators’ efforts. Even though state officials would redact the records to protect the victims’ privacy, the abortion providers are refusing to cooperate. Clearly, the violation of the girls’ bodies is not their greatest priority.

The House of Representatives, by a lopsided bipartisan vote, recently approved legislation making it a crime to take a teenager across state lines to obtain an abortion. Abortion-rights advocates, chief among them New York’s own Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of Manhattan, offered an amendment to the bill that would have exempted grandparents or other adult relatives.

According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, 46% of children who are raped are raped by family members. That amendment would have exempted possible sexual predators. Fortunately, the amendment failed, but clearly the mindset of these pro-choice legislators seems to be more about protecting abortion than protecting children.

When I dared suggest in a previous column that women who have abortions suffer extreme emotional trauma, we received a letter from a reader asserting that “uncountable” women who have abortions go on to have successful, happy lives, and that just because some women regret their decision does not mean the right to an abortion must be taken away from all women. The reader suggested instead that women should be helped to understand their options and be strong enough to make their decision.

Ay, there’s the rub! Many of the women who have suffered most from aborting their babies were not given that assistance. Although I’m not one of the greatest fans of trial lawyers, one has to wonder why a hotshot tort attorney hasn’t filed a class-action suit against Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics named by these women in their testimonies.

Why is it that an obstetrician will refer to a patient’s “fetus” until he finds out it’s wanted – then it becomes her baby? Why is the right to an abortion more important than women’s health? Why is scientific research linking abortion to breast cancer, sterility, or future birth defects cavalierly dismissed?

If any medical procedure were proven to have the same deleterious side effects that abortion has, it would have been banned. At the very least, a warning to the patient would be have been made mandatory. Planned Parenthood has strange priorities, yet it gets government funds.

The campaign manager for International Planned Parenthood Federation, Eve Fox, issued a memo this month urging Catholic pro-choicers: “Please write a letter to the editor encouraging Pope Benedict XVI to reconsider his dangerously outdated stances on birth control, abortion and sexuality in order to help move the Catholic Church into the 21st century.”

Sorry, Ms. Fox, but a trillion letters to the editor will not change the pope’s mind. Pro-choice Catholics are free to leave the church at any time. Buh-bye.

Pro-lifers from all religions are free to join me on June 3 for the Ball for Life (www.ballforlife.org). The event will benefit Good Counsel Homes, which serves women and their children in crisis pregnancies. This great organization has its priorities straight: It benefits women.