Last year I read a piece written by a woman who worked in a court system in her state. It was an eye-opener for me, because it laid out in detail how apparently small single requirements could in fact be huge multiple barriers. She has since taken the post down, and when I inquired, someone who knows her told me that she took it down for “personal reasons”. I wanted to link to that post, but it’s not there anymore. I saved a copy for my own reference, but I won’t post it or even quote from it, because I do not want to cause the author problems. I do not want to risk a threat to her health, safety, or life. I don’t know what her personal reasons were, but I’m going to respect her decision to take it down.
So I’m going to do my best to express, in my own words, some thoughts on access to abortion services, including some of what I learned from that post. This is me speaking, with my voice, expressing my own opinions. So if you don’t like something in what I write here, argue with me. If you think I’m plagiarizing, two points:
1. I’m writing my own thoughts in my own words.
2. When the person I learned from tells me that she wants me to do so, I will happily link to her post, where you can read better writing than mine. It’s either this or be silenced in this discussion because someone else talked about something first.
Conversely, if you find what you read here interesting, educational or mind-blowing, don’t credit me. Credit her. You’ll just have to be abstract about it until she decides to respond, if she does.
Small-government conservatives are wont to tell us that one of the best reasons to keep governments small is that governments inevitably screw things up, and by limiting the size of government, we limit the size of the damage. Given that the default alternative to Big Government is not EqualityHappyLandForEveryone, I don’t necessarily agree. But I will agree with this general principle: If you give a government a task to do, a government will implement that task sub-optimally. In fact, a government will often execute its mandate in a way which bears little resemblance to the original intent of the legislation, especially if the legislation was a difficult compromise in a heated debate between bitter opponents.
Cue abortion legislation, entering Stage Right.
It’s easy to assert that, generally speaking, pregnant girls should consult with their parents before they make ethically difficult decisions with long-ranging effects. Someone has to raise them, and Western society broadly insists that, in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the parents are the best people to do that. The problem, of course, is that pregnant girls individually do not get to benefit from being a statistical amalgamation. Each individual doesn’t get an average result. She gets a hand-crafted, individualized result.
So, I sympathize with people who assert that, broadly, pregnant girls should seek the advice of their parents. But that’s a different thing from legally mandating that all pregnant girls everywhere should always do so. Let’s look at some of the ways in which such a mandate can go wrong when it get implemented by Government, and by a Society which is deeply divided over what to do about unwanted pregnancies.
Meet Jane. Jane is 15. She started having periods when she was 13, and they have not yet become regular at all. She is pregnant, but she doesn’t know it yet. Seven weeks into her hidden pregnancy, she starts throwing up in the morning. She thinks nothing of it until it lasts for over a week. Then she puts the morning sickness together with not having had a period for the last nine weeks, together with her breasts feeling tender and fuller in a different way from normal tender, growing breasts. She realizes that she might be pregnant. Four days later, she gets past the denial and decides to buy a home pregnancy test. She waits two days for the weekend and takes a bus a couple of towns over so that she does not have to buy them in her town. She buys two. She finds a public restroom, locks the door, and takes them.
Now Jane knows she’s pregnant. She does not yet know that she is nine weeks pregnant.
Jane lives with one parent, and the other parent is across the country, in another state.
It is Saturday. Jane is smart and purposeful. She uses the weekend to think about it, and decides that she wants an abortion.
On Monday, Jane goes to school as usual. She skips her first class. She has a cell phone, but she does not want the call to show on her bill, which she knows her parent sometimes reads. Fortunately, she has a few dollars of cash and her school still has a couple of pay phones. One is at the end of a hall where she can keep her voice low. Jane stuffs quarters into the phone and calls a medical provider.
She asks how to get an abortion. Maybe it’s a hospital, maybe it’s a free clinic like Planned Parenthood, maybe it’s a doctor’s office; doesn’t matter. The medical provider tells her that they don’t provide abortions. They also inform her that she lives in a parental notification state. The state says she can choose to abort but only after she notifies her parents that she is doing so. She explains that she does not want to tell her parents. They tell her that she needs to go to court and get a judicial bypass.
Jane calls the local court. The clerk confirms that Jane cannot get an abortion without either parental notification or a judicial bypass. She asks how to get a judicial bypass. They don’t know, because they’ve never done one.
They do not tell this to Jane, but in fact most of their judges refuse to hear such cases. Some of them have personal pro-life convictions which prevent them from being able to rule impartially. Some simply don’t want to do them because it will hurt their chance of re-election; in places where judges are elected, it’s not surprising that judges might shy away from being tagged politically as abortion providers.
Turns out that just because the law requires something doesn’t mean that government has to provide that thing.
That requires that the legislature set up a structure and allocate funds, which is complicated in this case by the fact that they’re telling the Judicial branch how to run things, always a dicey proposition.
If you’re about to reply that such people shouldn’t be judges, yeah, no kidding. But let me welcome you to a little thing I like to call Reality, where judges and police officers and court clerks and lawyers all must come from the available pool of actual human beings, who are sometimes flawed, and who sometimes get scared, and who sometimes make compromises in order to get that political sausage made.
So Jane asks if there is any court anywhere which has actual judges who hear such cases. The court refers her to such a court. It’s on the other side of the state.
Jane cannot get across the state on her own; she has no car, no driver’s license, and does not have cross-state bus fare or enough free time where she can skip school and take a bus across the state without raising questions anyway. She decides that she must notify her parents. She lives with her … (I rolled actual dice for this, and considered same-sex parents while doing it) … father. He has divorced from her mother, and has custody. Her mother has visitation rights, though she has not exercised them in several years.
She tells her father. They discuss it. He disagrees that an abortion is the best course, and refuses to drive her anywhere to get one.
Parents have tremendous power to restrict children.
Parents can’t keep children from having sex, by they can certainly limit their options afterward. Jane now has notified her father, but still cannot get anywhere to get an abortion.
Over the next few days, Jane and her father have further discussion, and after long discussion, her father reluctantly agrees that an abortion is the best course. He can get time off from work two days from then, and they find a clinic which provides abortions and drive there.
At the clinic, a staffer listens to their account. They do a basic medical exam. The clinic does not do ultrasounds, and there’s no reason to do an ultrasound on a healthy teenager anyway, so the best data for estimating the date of the pregnancy would be … her last period. (Remember, it is pretty routine for a 15-year-old not to have a regular period. Also, it sometimes happens that a teenager has a period while pregnant. Such periods are typically short and spotty … which also isn’t unusual for any teen period.) They tell her that they can’t know for sure, but based on her period, she’s around five to ten weeks pregnant, and probably isn’t further along than ten.
The staffer explains that Jane will need proof of identity, and proof that Jane’s father is in fact Jane’s father. Jane’s father has his driver’s license. Jane has no state-issued ID; she is not yet driving. The staffer asks if they have her birth certificate. Although birth certificates are laughable as identification because they contain no biometric data to match an individual human to that birth certificate, government bureaucracy will nonetheless accept one as identification. Jane’s father is not sure where her birth certificate is. They have moved several times since she was born. It might be with Jane’s mother. He asks how they can get a duplicate. The staffer tells him that he must apply for that in the county of Jane’s birth, which happens to be in the state across the country where Jane’s mother lives.
Can you prove your relationship to the person standing next to you, to the standard required by civil servants who will be in VERY hot water if they get it wrong?
The law, as written, does not require proof of identity or say what that proof might be. But the law, as implemented, requires both proof of identity and sets a bar for it, all to protect the people who must implement the law.
The staffer also tells Jane and her father that the law requires that both parents be notified. Her father explains that he has custody. The staffer explains that custody status is not mentioned anywhere in the law, which requires that both parents be notified. Her father does not have her mother’s current address and phone number with him. He uses his credit card to make a bunch of cross-country calls, and eventually he manages to get Jane’s mother on the phone. He explains the situation to her. She hangs up.
What constitutes notification?
Saying that you notified someone? An affidavit from each parent? Each parent’s signature on a form? The law does not say. There are people out there looking for the smallest excuse to shut the clinic down. For the protection of their staff and the clinic’s ability to operate, the clinic’s procedure prudently requires something more than someone’s say-so.
The father calls the mother’s number again, on speakerphone, from the staffer’s office. An answering machine picks up. He leaves a message. Jane’s mother does not call back. Even if they can “prove” Jane’s identity and her relationship to her father by finding a copy of her birth certificate, they are out of luck on notifying the parentS.
In other words, Jane cannot legally notify her parents, even though her father is standing next to her and her mother just heard the situation direct from her father.
Jane needs a judicial bypass. Her father drives her across the state, to the court which does those. They get passed around to three different departments to find the one which does them. The law says nothing about which department will provide this service, and as a political hot potato, it ended up in a department which is not immediately obvious. That department does them, but it tries to keep quiet about it, because come budget time they could find that their budget is slashed after protesters picket their department, and that would mean that the department could not fulfill its actual, intended, primary purpose.
By midafternoon, Jane and her father are in the right department. A staffer there tells them that judicial bypasses happen on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is Tuesday. They can drive back across the state and return on Wednesday, or find a hotel for the night. Jane’s father arranges for another day off from work, and they find a motel.
The fact that a service is theoretically available does not mean that it is actually available in practice.
Under the law, Jane has a right to seek a judicial bypass. The law says nothing about speed or ease of access.
On Wednesday, Jane and her father sign the forms and start the legal process rolling. That afternoon, the case is called and the judge hears them. [Coin flip] … She is puzzled about why they are wasting taxpayer money in the court system. Were both parents not notified, one in person and one by phone? She declines to rule, since there is no necessity for a judicial bypass.
The clinic which provides the abortion is not a part of the court system in any way. They do not coordinate. The court may regard the clinic’s precautions as paranoid, and refuse to aid their paranoia.
I, personally, have watched judges express puzzlement from the bench about why we took a precaution in a criminal case. They seem not to understand sometimes that if we hadn’t taken that precaution, we ran the risk of being ruled against by another judge, or by that same judge on another day in a different mood. Judges strive for consistency, but they’re human, and it’s an impossible target.
Jane and her father ask the clerk of court how to appeal the judge’s ruling. They are referred to the public defenders’ office. They call that office. The paralegal who answers the phone explains that there are no public defenders who take such cases. Yes, they defend rapists and murderers, and they receive the occasional death threat, but to date, none of them has been sniped from a distance or had their house firebombed, and they’ve seen the news coverage on abortion providers. They did have one who used to do it, an experienced attorney who worked pro bono on these cases, but he had to stop after his private practice fell off when he became known as the attorney who helped kill babies.
Also, the public defenders’ office is buried in casework, and if they hire a fresh-faced young attorney tomorrow who would be glad to take such a case, between case preparation, filing times, docket procedures, and other high-priority cases, it will be at least a month before their case can be heard. By that time, though she cannot know it for sure, Jane’s pregnancy is out of the first trimester and into the second. That will complicate the procedure if she manages to get access to an abortion, and also could complicate simply getting access.
The law permits and requires that Jane make use of a service, but it does not mandate the existence of that service, or access to it.
I could go on. There were other barriers mentioned in the post I am thinking of as I write this. But they were more specific, and I don’t want to get specific without the writer’s permission. Suffice it to say, that in that person’s actual experience with the court, there were further barriers to implementation of a system which could actually serve the person seeking the service.
You might protest that this is all very specific, very particular, and that while it might be true in one or two cases, certainly most cases differ in the details. Sure, that’s true. But I have read the accounts from enough people to know that there are many, many scenarios which lead down this road to disaster: familial rape, or one parent in jail, or both parents in jail, or paternity unknown, or mother kicked the kid out for being sinful, or, or, or… One attorney I read commented that familial abuse was not the exception in such cases, but the rule (which should come as no surprise in bypass cases, that families with serious problems are overrepresented among pregnant girls who don’t want to talk to their parents about being pregnant).
Parental notification laws restrict access to medical services. They do not ensure good parenting. They do not mandate a streamlined, responsive government. They restrict access to medical services.
If that’s your objective, to restrict access to medical services, then carry on. Advocate for parental notification laws. But don’t pretend that you just want parental involvement. Because you can’t legislate parental involvement. You can’t even effectively legislate parental knowledge.
All you can really do, ultimately, is legislate governmental involvement.
Good luck with that.
[edited for formatting]
At this point, wouldn’t it be simpler for Jane and her father to take a quick trip to a state without parental notification laws? Or Canada? Or is that illegal too?
From the anti-abortion perspective, this is not a bug. This is “working as intended”. Preventing abortion is the whole point of the law.
Thanks for calling attention to the fact that parental notification laws have very little to do with mandating parenting, and everything to do with restricting access to abortion, in any case that falls outside narrowly defined, ideal conditions–Especially in cases of incest, rape or abuse, notification laws expose young women to further distress wrought by the hands of the judicial system, while possibly forcing them to bear the burden of an unwanted pregnancy stemming from incest or rape. It´s depressing to see how many hard won rights are being chipped away at to win a few votes from religous zealouts and normalcy trolls.
I remember making this same point to coworkers in the early 1990s. They just couldn’t imagine that every family wasn’t just like theirs. And, it’s not always structural access issues. Unfortunately, sometimes 13 year olds are more responsible than their parents. The parents may be abusive or neglectful and when that’s the case, it’s not exactly a good or even functional environment to raise the resulting baby in.
If you think parental notification laws are poorly implemented to hinder access to abortion, there’s an even worse scandal with Putative Father Registries that in effect terminate parental rights of unmarried fathers in order to feed the adoption industry.
If you have never heard of a Putative Father Registry, that’s the whole point — in several states even municipal, county, and state governmental employees have no idea how to contact it, what purpose it serves, or even that it exists.
The common element in both parental notification laws and putative father registries is that, by design, they are difficult if not impossible to navigate and use as intended.
@Dianne
Can’t speak to Canada, but as for taking a trip to another state, that depends on a lot of factors. Obviously, driving to another state may be a huge logistical burden, but let’s leave that aside and assume that this family can do that.
If they live next door to a state without any kind of parental notification laws, great. That’s the best case scenario. Right now, 36 states have some kind of parental involvement law, so they’re already losing the odds on that one. And if they’re in a state with parental notification laws, and surrounded by states with parental *consent* laws, there’s really no point in them going anywhere.
Assuming they can’t get to a state with no parental involvement laws, what they need is to get to a state with a less restrictive, better defined law that is put into action in a more sensible way. And knowing that depends on quality of information. Many of these laws look reasonable at first glance to the average person — it’s only once you get into the nitty-gritty of actual implementation that you see the loopholes. So, to know which state would be preferable, they’re going to need to talk to somebody “in the know.” At that point, they’re pretty much at the mercy of a telephone game. If the clinic they’re at in Home State has kept open good communication lines with the clinic in Next Door State, and if the clinic in Next Door State has good communication lines open with the courthouse — so that they actually know what happens to girls once they get sent there — then the family may stand a chance of getting some accurate information about whether or not Next Door State is a better bet. If their Home State clinic doesn’t communicate with Next Door State clinic, or if Next Door State clinic doesn’t have a friendly face at the courthouse who will answer their questions honestly, then it’s just a big dark mystery for everybody. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. Nobody knows.
There’s also all the intricacies of how the law gets put into place in Next Door State. So, Home State only does bypasses on Wednesdays. But Next Door State only does them on Tuesdays, only in the capital city, and only at 8 am. So, the girl and her dad would have to go back home, having wasted a day off work, then drive down to Next Door State on a Monday night, find a hotel, and go to court on Tuesday morning, on potentially nothing but the hope that this is going to work.
If they do get to a Next Door State, they’re again pretty much at the whims of the courts. Some judges may feel comfortable signing on somebody from another state. Some won’t — they feel (not inappropriately) that this isn’t their job, that Neighboring State should be handling this, and that it’s crossing a legal boundary for them to start passing judgements on citizens from another state. Some judges would happily do it if nobody *told* them the girl was from another state, but they can’t say that and make it unofficial policy in case it gets out, so they’re at the whim of the intelligence and discretion of court clerks.
So, short answer, yes, it’s possible, but it’s possible in the same way that bypassing these laws is possible in the first place: full of barriers, extremely difficult, and one big crapshoot for the girl.
I remember the blog post you’re talking about, and I thank you for writing this. Last year, after an illuminating talk on U.S. laws affecting women’s rights, with that post in mind, I approached the speaker and asked for her thoughts on parental notification laws. She replied (I paraphrase), “Oh, they’re fine.”
It definitely made me consider that there’s a lot less information out there than there should be about the grave and numerous hurdles these laws present.
Excellent post, Grace, thank you for bringing it to us, and for the respect you’ve shown the OP in paraphrasing her work. Just a good job all-round.
Long ago, iirc, Massachusetts had a consent law with judicial bypass. Since this was for minors, the judge had a multi-step process to go through: if the pregnant minor was found to be of adult competence for purposes of making the decision to terminate a pregnancy, that was it, but if the minor was not of adult competence, the state (in the person of the judge) had to step in as a substitute for the parents and decide whether carrying the pregnancy to term and raising the baby as a single mother was in the best interests of the (already judicially determined to be incompetent) minor. After a few years they did a study and found that in no case where a pregnant minor had been determined incompetent to decide whether to abort did the court also decide that it was in her best interest to be forced to become a single mother. So the law was ditched.
That’s how a working polity does things.
I don’t need to pretend. I believe that if you’re going to have notification laws you should ALSO have functions that make them work. My solution is “change the functionality,” not necessarily “change the law.”
To use a similar example: many women want stronger rape laws. It would be complete BS to say “don’t pretend that those women want anything other than innocent men being tossed in jail on random accusations” because although they would prefer rapists to get punished, presumably they ALSO want a system that protects innocents.
But also, you said
Because you can’t legislate parental involvement. You can’t even effectively legislate parental knowledge.
But doesn’t your example demonstrate the opposite? I personally wouldn’t suggest that a non-custodial parent who gave up visitation should be entitled to know at all. But the mother was in fact informed. And the father was not only informed, but also heavily involved.
What happened is not ideal. But although it might be ideal for Jane to tell her parents the next AM and have her dad march out and buy her Plan B, as a practical matter “ideal” never happens.
Using this scenario: is the cost worth it? Let’s say that Jane eventually gets an abortion at 15 weeks, with her dad’s help. Is the long-term outcome for Jane and for society better or worse if 15-year-old Jane gets an abortion on her own at 8 weeks, or if Jane gets an abortion late in the first (or even early in the second) trimester, after telling her father and with her father’s involvement? After all, Jane has three more years as a minor under her father’s roof, a lot of growing up left to do, and a lifetime ahead of her.
I can’t help but note that hypothetical-Jane actually didn’t have great judgment, in hindsight. She thought she couldn’t tell her father; she was wrong. That sort of teen error is why the “free-action” model can be problematic.
But that doesn’t make it perfect by any means. A good system would be designed to promote parental involvement in cases like this, but without all the headaches. It would also be designed to promote good functional workarounds in cases where telling a parent isn’t possible.
The current system isn’t working. It’s no surprise that the solutions of “fix the system” or “stop the notification” are politically based–it would only make sense that you and I would have different opinions on that.
But you can still examine the facts.
Again: it is working, from the point of view of the authors and principal supporters of those laws. If Jane does not have an abortion for whatever reason, that is a success. If one’s goal is to prevent abortion – and that is, in fact, the goal of the organizations that author these laws – then “Jane didn’t get an abortion because her father couldn’t reach her mother” is a superior outcome to “Jane was easily able to procure judicial bypass.”
I don’t have a problem with the concept of parental notification, in theory. Certainly, if you are going to be making decisions on behalf of an underage person, one can imagine that it would be useful to know that she has gotten pregnant and undergone this procedure.
But if these laws are truly not requiring parental consent, then it seems much more logical to notify the parent after the abortion takes place. If you really don’t need your dad’s or mom’s permission, then it shouldn’t make a difference whether you tell them, “I’m getting an abortion tomorrow” or “I got an abortion yesterday.” Clinics could give young women an official form to take home to have their parents sign and mail back in, saying, “Yup, I was notified.”
And if there’s ever any doubt about whether a signature is real, then the hyper-efficient government can look into it, after the fact.
All prolifers support notification, I assume, but not all notification people are prolife by any means.
Even post-notification is going to get a fair number of young women killed. Maybe instead of punitive attempts to force notification, we should have some kind of positive incentive. How about “if you prove to us that you notified your parents we’ll pay for a semester of college”?
I know a number of divorced parents and their kids, and I deal with them on a basis that requires me to be in loco parentis for the kids a fair amount, including crossing international borders. I’m personally finding it hard to believe that a custodial divorced parent can’t lay his hands on the birth certificate for their 15-year old child. There are way too many times you need that document in a kid’s life; the more you move, the more often you need to get it out (school registration, etc.), so moving a lot should make him more likely to be able to lay his hands on it, not less. That raises a lot of doubt about this third-hand and impossible to verify story in my mind.
Parents have tremendous power to restrict children.
That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. Of society in general, not necessarily focusing on this law in particular.
Because you can’t legislate parental involvement. You can’t even effectively legislate parental knowledge.
Seems to me like this narrative proves exactly the opposite. Based on what I’m reading Jane would likely have found a way to have gotten an abortion without either of her parents knowing about it. But because of this law, both parents came to know about it and one of them got involved.
Excellent post, Grace. The anti-choice groups rely on disinformation, interference and confusion – anything that hinders abortion and even preventative birth control regardless of the consequences. Consider Pharmacists refusals to fill prescriptions then imagine a doctor or surgeon not treating a patient due to moral objections. I personally encounter groups that are just as virulently against any form of birth control as they are against abortion. I am sad to see hard won rights over the years being slowly lost due to religious zealots who force their views and beliefs on all.
As a married parent living in the same county my children were born in, it wasn’t simple to get birth certificates for my children to get health care coverage this year.
One child I’d never bothered getting a certificate for. It never came up. You don’t need a birth certificate to file taxes, register a child for school, or get medical coverage for the child. (I now need it for *insurance*, but the doctor requires no such thing.)
Simple, right? Go online & order a birth certificate. Except it requires an authorized requestor, and doesn’t say who those are. Presumably, “mother” is included. But the online form isn’t “click here & get birth certificate;” it’s “click here, download PDF application, take it to be notarized, mail it to us, and we’ll mail you a certificate within 8 weeks.”
I opted for “visit hall of records.” Except. I don’t have a valid state ID at the moment. I don’t drive, so renewing my ID card never seems like a pressing reason to skip half a day of work to stand in line at the DMV. Assuming I guessed right, that is, about what days the DMV is open. My husband could visit the hall of records–except he’s recovering from a heart attack and not able to stand in lines. My father could go pick up her birth certificate. Is “grandparent” an authorized requestor? I don’t know; sent off email to the Recorder’s Office to find out.
Next day, I get an answer: It is! Except, gah. Father also has no valid state ID. He doesn’t drive anymore for medical reasons, so he’s let his license lapse.
It only took us a week and half to sort out what paperwork needed to be done and which authorizations would work for it to get birth certificates for two girls living with their parents in the county they were born in. That’s not long for most paperwork; it’s a substantial bit of time for planning an abortion. And that’s without trying to get info & authorizations across state lines, without language barriers, without financial straits that make it impossible to miss a day of work. And without confusion about the records-and-courts system; I knew which websites to check for info, and I knew how to find a contact email for someone when I needed info not on the website.
Jane, 15-and-pregnant, may well not have these skills. Her father may not either. And if English isn’t their native language, they’re truly sunk.
The whole parental-notification fiasco is obviously meant to obstruct abortions, not inform parents–no other medical procedure requires notification of both parents.
coco, Bee, CaitieCat, LindaS, you’re welcome, and thanks for the support.
gin-and-whiskey:
gin-and-whiskey:
RonF:
The actual, individual details are beside the point I was making; I was trying to illustrate that a simple parental notification requirement is anything but simple and has many unintended and undesirable consequences … unless your objective is to put up barriers to abortion without caring about collateral damage, in which case all of the hurdles are the intended consequences.
As I said in the post:
I wanted to illustrate other things down the road, which required parental involvement, so I needed a parent involved.
It was a hypothetical. I could as easily have written a narrative in which telling one parent, or both parents, resulted in disaster. I’ve dealt with such cases in my own professional life. I could write a narrative in which Jane’s father locks her up, or throws her out, or beats her into the hospital, or kills her, and given a little time with Google I could back up each of those with a news clipping. We could suppose that Jane’s mother could not be reached; or that Jane was not smart and motivated, and caved to the father and never brought it up again and that giving birth resulted in a disaster; or that the judge granted the bypass; or that Jane had an early miscarriage with minimal medical consequences and everyone can do a happy dance; or that Jane had an early miscarriage but wanted to give birth and so now we’re sad again.
I was kind of hoping to avoid laying out eight or ten hypothetical-Jane stories…
RonF:
Not if you are trying to sell the law as mere notification, rather than an actual bar to abortion. I was illustrating the point that parental notification can be, de facto, parental consent. Which is a different law entirely, and a different debate.
RonF:
We have not been able to lay our hands on my personal birth certificate for about ten years, now. I’ve been able to work around it by skating on privilege in a small community; I go to HR at my main job, and ask nicely for a photocopy of their photocopy, and the part-time employer who wants it is willing to go with that because they know me and know that I’m not being false. But technically, they’re supposed to see, and copy, the original.
So that part is kind of autobiographical, for whatever that’s worth.
Maybe they live in a flood zone and got flooded. Maybe their house burned. Maybe the plumbing broke and destroyed the family records. Maybe the ex-wife is a vindictive so-and-so and took off with the paperwork. Maybe it was in the lock box with their spare cash and that burglar is out there somewhere, stealing their identities. Maybe dad is an incompetent chucklehead of a father. There are lots of real-life reasons a parent might not be able to lay his hands on a birth certificate on short notice.
gin-and-whiskey:
Yes. And the reasons it does not work are structural, and beyond the easy control of the legislature, or (being human nature) beyond government’s control entirely. The clinic imposes its strict standards not because it wants to or the law says so, but because there are people poised to drag it down given half an excuse of a reason.
This is not an engineering problem, where if we can just optimize the bells and whistles, everything will work right. Just getting this to work right requires building a structure which will stand against a determined and creative adversary. It’s not structural engineering, it’s actual conflict, both open and covert.
In war, when the enemy starts using rockets to blow up your trucks, you weld armor on. You adapt, they adapt. But legislation doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t adapt easily. It doesn’t get fine-tuned, when any change at all requires a hellacious investment of political capital and other resources. It’s as though you weld armor on, but the enemy can not only change weapons, but toy with the quality of the steel, and the welding, and the rest of the supply chain.
I am, myself, by default a scientific thinker. I like to find solutions to problems and optimize them, and figure out why they didn’t work and find better ones. I get the impression from you, and RonF, and Robert, that we all have that in common.
But this is politics, which is the art of the possible, and some things are not possible. One of them is designing and maintaining a fine-tuned system requiring lots of tweaking and maintenance, in an environment where other people are seeking to tear it down.
As I pointed out in the open thread, concept is easy. It’s the details that get you.
Which is one of the big points of my post.
Grace
Phil:
paul:
I love these ideas, in theory, especially the notion of incentives.
However, it took me about five seconds to think of a way to game that system: get pregnant, get an abortion, notify the parents (who might have suggested it in the first place, or known about it), get your free semester.
I believe that abortion should be legal and accessible. But I think we should look long and hard at something like a monetary incentive which might lead to more unwanted pregnancies.
Grace
OK, I’ve been pretty clear: I support notification as a good thing, but I’m not blind to the collateral consequences. Would you please accept that it’s possible to disagree about the balance between benefits and costs without being an Evil Prolife Antigirl Bigot? the false “either you ___ or you ____” and the “you must intend…” stuff is getting sort of tiresome.
I think notification is good. I think collateral damages are bad. Therefore I think that there are circumstances where the costs outweigh the benefits, and vice versa.
The difference is that you and a fair number of folks don’t seem to think notification is good at all. Or beneficial. And I’m getting a feeling that some folks are almost thinking that any collateral damages at all would be unacceptable.
in my view, there’s a difference between thinking that my pro/con balance is wrong versus thinking that my balance is irrelevant: the second group gets a lot less trust in the objective-evaluation department and it’s not really obvious that it’s worth trying to argue about it.
There are way too many times you need that document in a kid’s life; the more you move, the more often you need to get it out (school registration, etc.), so moving a lot should make him more likely to be able to lay his hands on it, not less.
I moved a lot growing up, and my mother is very organized and efficient, so she always knew just where our birth certificates and social security cards were. But … funny thing … when I went to get my learner’s permit, it turned out the birth certificate she’d been using my whole life wasn’t actually the proper, legal certified copy. I had to order one from another state. It took three weeks. Today, with the heightened concerns about identity theft, it might be harder to get one from out of state and take longer.
I think notification is good. I think collateral damages are bad. Therefore I think that there are circumstances where the costs outweigh the benefits, and vice versa.
Could you describe what you think the benefits of the notification laws are? For the girls. For the parents. Specifically of making it mandatory.
Would you please accept that it’s possible to disagree about the balance between benefits and costs without being an Evil Prolife Antigirl Bigot?
Is it? As with the two posts about whether it is possible to have a civil discussion of gay marriage and who it’s going to hurt, I’m not sure there is a “moderate” position that makes sense in this debate. I don’t see how forcing someone to act as an incubator at risk of their health, life, and sanity, against their will can be anything other than a horror to any thinking person.
But because of this law, both parents came to know about it and one of them got involved.
And, of course, there’s no way that that could ever go wrong. No parent has ever thrown their kid out for getting pregnant. Or refused to support them financially because they got pregnant. Or killed them for getting pregnant. And no kid has ever killed herself rather than face telling her parents something that will disappoint them. Or mutilated herself with a coat hanger to try to induce an abortion rather than face parental disapproval-possibly violent disapproval. Or…it goes on. Sure, a law that forces kids to tell their parents an intimate detail that they don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents about might sometimes have positive consequences-maybe it really does allow them to open up to each other more, for example, but it seems more likely to lead to bad outcomes. Why not have a discussion of how to talk to parents and how to decide whether to talk to parents part of the pre-abortion counseling for girls under 18 who seek abortions? That leaves the option open to refuse if it really looks dangerous but encourages teens to tell their parents when it isn’t.
The way I approach this:
I don’t believe that notification laws are a ‘good’. I don’t think that parents have a ‘right’ to know that is somehow satisfied by these laws. I think that people who think that they have a ‘right’ to know are way more invested in their daughter’s vagina than is probably healthy. I think that the degree to which notification laws are good or bad depends entirely on the outcomes the law produces.
I think that sometimes parents are very supportive … more supportive than the kids think they will be, and that they help the kids through an extremely difficult time.
I think that sometimes parents are extremely abusive … more horribly abusive than anyone suspects they might be, and they force the kid to remain pregnant.
I think that either is a possibility, but I think that neither is what’s common. I think what’s common is for the parents to react about how their kid thinks they’re going to react.
I think that kids are often bad at making decisions. I think, though, that they’re way better at making particularized decisions about whether to talk to their parents than strangers and legislators who know nothing of them or their situation.
I think that notification laws will probably create some good situations that the kid’s choices would not have created. I think that notification laws will probably create some bad situations that the kid’s choices would not have created. I think that the kid will probably be better at optimizing the good and bad situations than than strangers and legislators who know nothing of them or their situation.
Moreover, I think that particularized choices will be better at optimizing the good and bad than a one-size fits all solution. Even the most crudely particularized with very little personal knowledge would do better than a one-size-fits-all rule … but that’s what notification laws offer.
Finally, I think it makes sense for the person making the final decision to be the person most directly affected by the outcome, and that’s the kid in question. I have a very hard time with laws that add extra burdens but no extra help to people who already have a heaping helping of burdens and could do with a lot more help.
So yeah. There are costs and benefits. It’s just that we’re the wrong people to weigh them.
—Myca
gin-and-whiskey:
Once you become aware of an outcome, and you’re okay with that outcome, so that you continue to implement the policy which actively produces that outcome, is it fair to say that you intend that outcome, even if it’s not your primary purpose in implementing the policy?
In the long run, I agree that simple notification — just notification, and only notification, and nothing more than notification — probably leads more often to a good outcome than a bad outcome.
But they aren’t actually notification laws, as I tried hard to demonstrate in my post. They are hold-your-access-to-medical-services-hostage-until-you-have-proven-notification-to-the-satisfaction-of-a-non-governmental-entity laws. We shouldn’t even call them “notification” laws. That’s not their fault; it’s the nature of the theater they operate in. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s the fault of people who vote for them while considering only the impact they wish for, rather than the actual impact.
I haven’t called you evil. I haven’t called you a bigot. I haven’t even specifically called you antigirl.
But thanks for helping me get down to the label problem: I’m not going to call them “notification” laws anymore, either.
Grace
Once you become aware of an outcome, and you’re okay with that outcome, so that you continue to implement the policy which actively produces that outcome, is it fair to say that you intend that outcome, even if it’s not your primary purpose in implementing the policy?
It’s fair, but it’s meaningless. I know that when I drive an internal combustion vehicle I release pollutants in the atmosphere, and I keep driving (an Ultra Low Emission car) So, would you say that I intend to pollute the air? And if you do, would you also say it for all those of us who exhale as much as 4% more CO2 than they inhale?
As for the topic at hand, I think that it is very clear that the law is working as intended. It’s reducing the number of abortions. That was the goal of the people who fought for it, and I doubt many of them deny it. Of course, as I have always believed, and as Cain spelled it out of us, many of those people also believe that when they (or their family) are the ones who need an abortion, their higher resources will allow them to decide for themselves.
Myca:
Well, there I believe you and I face each other over an unbridgeable chasm. I think that parents have an absolute right to know about any kind of problem or situation such as pregnancy that their children face and an absolute right to know about any medical procedures that are not immediately necessary to save their child’s life that their children might undergo prior to the actual conduct of that procedure.
I was unaware that such procedures only involved their daughter’s vagina. In any case, why do you think this way?
Dianne:
I don’t recall pretending that there’s no way it can go wrong. Are you pretending that having 13-year old children having access to such drugs can never go wrong?
Really? An absolute right? So a right that trumps the child’s right to safety in cases where they would be abused or kicked out of the house if the parent were notified?
Are you pretending that having 13-year old children having access to such drugs can never go wrong?
Which drugs are we talking about? This is about access to abortion, not plan B. Certainly things can go wrong, but they’re less likely to if the 13 y/o in question gets to a legitimate OB for the abortion rather than trying to use her older sister’s birth control pills or a bottle of bleach to induce abortion, which is where kids are going to turn if they’re forced into it by parental notification or, worse, permission laws.
I don’t think anyone thinks that parental notification/consent laws will never lead to suboptimal outcomes, or that their absence will never lead to suboptimal outcomes.
I think that both can go wrong in ways that the other might have prevented. The question is who is best suited to decide whether it’s going to have a good outcome for a teenager to tell her parents.
Option 1 is “The teenager herself” She knows her parents, knows her life situation, knows her parents likely reactions, knows whether her dad is an angry, abusive drunk or whether he’s loving and supportive.
Option 2 is “lawmakers and citizens who have never met the teenager and know nothing about her.”
I’m betting the teenager herself is going to be better at optimizing outcomes. I’m going with Option 1.
If you believe that the teenager ought to be compelled to tell her parents in all situations (which is what these laws do), then the burden is on you to argue that having a bright-line rule like this will lead to on-balance better outcomes than otherwise.
I don’t think it will, but maybe it will. Convince me.
I mean, part of the problem here is that these are not really parallel positions. One group is arguing “It’s always better for the parents to be told!” Or, at least “Things will be better if the parents are always told.” The other is arguing “Sometimes it’s a good idea to tell them. Sometimes it’s not. You gotta look at the particulars.”
Nobody is arguing that the parents should never be told, so obviously the situationists carry the day. I mean, that shit is elementary.
—Myca
I just want to thank everyone who’s participated in these discussions on this and other related threads in recent days. I have not been persuaded that my position is wrong, but I have been given a great deal of insight into the reasons that other people hold their varying views, and the discourse has in the main been very respectful on all sides, with just about everyone assigning good faith to the people they were arguing with.
I think it’s probably because Amp didn’t participate much. That guy’s just poison to a good civil conversation.
You’re right, Robert, this has been a really civil and respectful thread. There’s a reason I like commenting here.
Since we’re having a good and civil discussion, I’d like to ask the proponents of notification laws a question. Okay, a couple questions. In what circumstances do you think a teenager should be able to get an abortion without parental notification? Should she have to prove that she’ll be abused or kicked out of the house, or that the pregnancy is a result of incest? Or even if she can prove that, do her parents still have an absolute right to that information? Or if she states, in all sincerity, that, for example, she would rather kill herself than have her dad who’s a Baptist minister think she’s a slut, is that sufficient to decide that the harm from making her tell her parents is probably greater than the harm of not telling them?
If one parent is absent, how much of an effort has to be made to find them, and what counts as “notification”? Or is it acceptable to notify one parent?
Also, if we’re arguing this from a perspective that adults have the absolute right to know about anything medical affecting their child, should we require parental notification for birth control pills and condoms as well?
Okay, that was way more than a couple questions, but the basic gist I’m getting at is, if there’s a parental right to know, are there cases where the girl’s safety or health overrides it, or are there cases where a clinic should be able to say, “Yes, we made a good faith effort to notify the parents and couldn’t locate them.” and go ahead with the procedure?
Grace Annam @19:
Of course it’s possible to game the system. It’s possible to game any systemthat offers incentives. You hear stories about people deliberately injuring themselves to collect worker’s comp, or buying a bigger house than they need to get a bigger tax deduction, and so forth. In this case, though, I think it’s a) pretty unlikely, except in the fevered mind of anti-choice activists and b) a sign of something terribly wrong with our educational funding system if any significant number of young women do decide to undergo an unpleasant, not-cheap medical procedure in return for one semester’s fees at their local public college. You could raise the money faster by selling blood…
KellyK –
How old a teenager? 13 is a teenager. So is 19. Pretty huge difference in capability across that age range, even ignoring the huge individual differences. But to make it a manageable discussion, let’s lump ’em into two groups: children, and near-adults. Near-adults are the ones who are living adult lives (working, going to advanced schooling, pursuing romantic relationships at an adultish level, often beginning to live alone).
I think that children need parental control and notification on everything. “But my dad will kill me!” is indeed horrifying, but I don’t see any way to give the system sufficient judgment to make those calls in any realistic way. If he is, literally, going to kill her then she’ll have to avoid the formal system and the adults working it will have to make conscience calls to help her. A girl whose parent will murder her if he or she discovers the girl is sexually active is not a girl whose life problems can be resolved by the birth control dispensary.
So for children, formally, no, there are no circumstances where the clinic staff has the right to override the parental right to know. Or, if you prefer, there is such a circumstance – one where the clinic staff is convinced the girl’s life is in danger, and sends her to child protective services, and CPS begins hearings and procedures to terminate the parent’s rights and put the child into foster care. There isn’t a circumstance where “your mom sounds like a real monster, so here’s the pill and we’ll just kind of roundfile this paperwork, now go on home to the monster and good luck” is acceptable. If the problem is that bad, treat it as though it were that bad. If it’s not that bad, if it’s teenage drama and “my dad will kill me” means “my dad will not let me go to the concert this weekend and will yell at me a lot and hurt my feelings”, oh well.
For older teens, I am comfortable with more leeway on the part of adults in that teens’ life helping her out. How do we draw the line between my groups? Beats me.
No, it is not. Are you seriously asking that question?
It can be fair to say that you fail to account for the consequences.
It can be fair to say that you don’t properly consider the other effects.
It can be fair to say a lot of things.
But to say that you INTEND something is pure obnoxious sophistry. And it’s even worse when you’re not even factually certain about the link of outcomes. “if you don’t support this then someone may do a widely variant and personal multistep set of outcomes which may result in XXX happening” gives you even less right to suggest that you intend XXX to happen.
Do you intend to put innocent men in jail? No? Why, then, do you support rape cases–which, like all other imperfect prosecutions, put some innocent men in jail? Etc.
As for this:
Or not.
UI mean, she knows her parents, presumably. But she may have an incredibly bad ability to judge them, and it may not be possible at all
She is more likely than others to have bad judgment, because she’s a teenager and teenagers are often stupid.
It may not be possible because it can be surprisingly hard to predict someone’s decision making process about something that loaded, unless you’ve seen it before. The net is rife with stories of people (men and women) whose opinions on child-raising and abortion changed the instant that they, or their partner, or their daughter, looked at a pee stick.
Lawmakers aren’t involved on a personal level. they’re involved in statistics. EVERY law has some bad outcomes. If you give Plan B to everyone, some folks will have a bad outcome. if you give Plan B to adults only, some folks will have a bad outcome. The lawmakers’ job is to compare which is better.
OK, how about Option 3: her parents.
You may ask “who knows their parents better than their kids?” I think it’s a lot more reasonable to ask the reverse: “who knows their kids better than their parents?”
As a compromise measure, I’d make all parents opt in or out to abortion/plan B notification. If they opt out then their kids are free to abort or buy Plan B or both. If they don’t opt out then the kids can either tell them or go for a judicial bypass. It’s a simple database.
You could require it for school registration and could also require it to be a part of every divorce/custody filing.
Robert, thanks for the long and thoughtful reply. I agree that there’s an important distinction between young teens and older teens.
I would leave 18 and 19 year olds out of this discussion completely, since they’re legal adults. In my mind, once you turn 18, you should not be legally obligated to get your parents’ permission for anything to do with your own life, ever again. Can parents put restrictions on adult children, especially if they live with them, are paying for their college, or have them on their health insurance? Sure. They can say, “You must do X or you can’t do Y as long as you live under my roof” and they’re free to kick the kid out or whatever if they so choose. But that’s between them and their adult children, and it’s not a health care provider’s job to make sure a legal adult has their parents’ permission for anything.
For teens who are minors, I think that if a kid can legally consent to sex, they should be able to legally consent to abortion, birth control, or pregnancy. If we as a society decide that they can’t make those decisions, then they also aren’t competent to make decisions about sex.
I have more thoughts on the actual substance of what you said, but at the moment, there’s a dog sitting next to me who really needs to be petted, and possibly have me throw a tennis ball a couple bazillion times.
I think that it’s no accident that some of people arguing for parental notification laws are also anti-abortion in general. In both cases they are arguing that the person most affected by the decision (to continue the pregnancy, to tell the parents) should not be the one to decide, and instead would like a law in place that would provide the limited ability to grant exceptions.
gin-and-whiskey, I think that the parents most likely to kick their kids out of the house, beat them, etc. would most certainly elect to receive notification. Anyone who opts out would probably be someone safe to notify. I don’t suppose we could create such a system, but then notify the people who said they didn’t want to be notified, and not notify the ones who wanted to be notified…
(ETA: I do think that there would be plenty of “safe to notify” parents who opt to be notify, but I think almost no “unsafe to notify” parents would opt not to be notified.)
You make a good point. On reflection, I think that I overstated.
That said, I do not think that we can simply absolve people who advocate for a given policy blameless for collateral effects of the policy. We have an obligation to be aware of, and to mitigate to the extent possible, collateral damage for policies which we campaign for. When we are making a cost/benefit assessment (as in your example of criminal prosecution, above), we have an obligation to be aware of the actual costs and benefits.
It’s easy to choose the excellent over the awful. But it gets difficult when we are choosing the lesser of two evils, particularly when the different people at the table assess the evils differently.
I know that you, and RonF, and Robert, assess the evils differently from me, and Myca, and many others here. I think that you’re getting exercised because you feel that we are accusing you of lying about your intentions, and I can understand that, because I get pretty pissed when someone accuses me of lying (which happens with reasonable regularity, because a significant percentage of people who commit crimes really don’t have any ability to understand personal integrity in the same way that I experience it, and so they think nothing of accusing other people of the things which they do routinely when they can get away with it).
So, fine. I don’t know you and we’ve seldom addressed each other even here on Alas. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Your intentions are as pure as any human being’s can be.
Now, whether or not you think “notification” laws are a net good, will you agree with me that, setting aside whether they actually get the notification job done, they can and do act as functional barriers to some kinds of medical care?
Grace
But there are hundreds of situations where a person or institution is legally obligated to provide information about a child to her/his parents. This argument could be used against of them.
A child may legitimately believe that a parent will punish them or abuse them if the parent is notified about grades, misbehavior, felonies, or psychological or medical conditions. It does not follow that schools, police, and doctors should therefore always leave it to children to inform their parents about everything, no matter how important.
If you concede that it is _ever_ reasonable to legally mandate parental notification for anything, then you are conceding that this particular line of reasoning does not hold water.
No, her life problems can’t be solved by a clinic, but they can help her with the problem that they exist to address–the fact that she’s pregnant.
See, on the one hand, I totally agree that if the girl’s well-being is in danger, the problem needs to be treated as though it’s really that bad. However, to my knowledge, CPS doesn’t whisk potentially abused children off to safety the minute they get a report. They do things like interview the parents first. This is as it should be, because it would be deeply wrong to lose your kids, even for a day or two, because their teenage drama was misinterpreted as evidence of abuse. But, if a kid is being abused, and CPS doesn’t find evidence of that, now it’s infinitely worse for them because they told. And sometimes CPS messes up really badly, like interviewing the kid with the parents present, which of course is going to lead to a “No, no abuse here. Everything’s fine,” answer.
The other problem is that calling CPS doesn’t actually get the teen medical care. Let’s say a girl is really lucky and CPS gets her into a safe foster care environment before anything awful happens, and she’s still at the stage of pregnancy where she can legally have an abortion. The same parental notification law that ignores custody with divorced parents may not have any provisions for foster parents to count as the “notified” party, and now her foster parents are the ones who have to jump through the 47 hoops to get a judicial bypass.
It seems to me like there are two fundamental disagreements here. One is about what rights a parent has, and whether they trump a child’s right to safety and body autonomy, and whether the child’s and parent’s rights are different depending on the age of the child.
The other is more about cost-benefits analysis and actual implementation. It seems really clear to me from Grace’s initial post that if the goal were to have parents be notified, the particular law would define what constitutes notification. Because there is no definition, it seems more like the goal is to prevent abortions and provide a way to shut down clinics. (Which isn’t to say what individual supporters of parental notification might have as their goals. Let’s not even go down that path again.)
Not necessarily. It’s perfectly consistent to believe that grades, for example, are much less personal and private than whether a kid has had sex and what they do about the pregnancy, and that therefore the child’s right to safety and/or privacy outweighs the parent’s right to be informed in at least some cases.
That is a good point, but in addition to KellyK’s point above, I would say that people are a lot more reasonable about things like grades than about the idea of their kids having sex. I think they’re a lot less likely to actually kick the kids out of the house or kill them over a bad grade. Probably even less likely to beat them. And telling a teen’s parents about a bad grade probably doesn’t make them more likely to drop out of school–i.e. doesn’t lead to bad outcomes through actions the teen takes. The threat of telling the teen’s parents about an abortion could lead the teen to take unwise actions, like trying to do a self-induced abortion or giving birth in a restroom and throwing the baby in the dumpster.
KellyK:
That’s generally true. However, when it’s necessary to the immediate health and safety of the child, the police can and do take children immediately. We don’t like to, because it can create a host of problems for the children and for us, but there are situations where those problems must be borne because leaving them is clearly not an ethical option.
CPS can do the same, but when possible they do it with officers alongside. I’ve been called to an apartment where they found conditions no child should live in, and CPS simply waited for us, and then removed the children while we provided scene security. I’ve also been called to the station to help CPS workers who know what they are likely to find when they go over, and so we go over with them.
(Caveat: procedures and the quality of CPS and police services and personnel can and will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.)
Grace
Phil:
To measure such a law’s impact, perhaps we should not describe what we want people to do. Perhaps we should describe what we are willing to have the law hold hostage until people do it.
In the case of requiring that parents be notified of a child’s grades, I’m not aware of any immediate negative consequence which accrues to the child if she does not put her report card in front of her parents. Eventually, she may get detention, and/or the school may have to call the parents direct. But we do not say, “I know that you may need surgery, little girl, but first we’re going to have to have your report card countersigned by your parents.”
In the special case under discussion, we have developed a law which puts a child’s access to medical care under lock and key until the child has met our requirements, even non-governmental requirements which were never specified in the law.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that calling it “notification” and leaving it at that is a dangerously inaccurate shorthand. It foregrounds the law’s objective (in cases of people like gin-and-whiskey; ostensible objective in the cases of people who support notification as a functional bar to abortion), while setting aside the law’s price.
What would be a better name than “parental notification laws”? Parental gatekeeper laws? Medical barrier laws? It has to be short and pithy.
Grace
Yes of course: for some percentage of girls, in varying degrees. I don’t think I’ve ever said otherwise. Notification obviously has cons as well as pros.
The fact that it involves medical care does not, in and of itself, show that the balance lies towards the cons. At least in my view.
I can be convinced by data, though. It’s a balancing act, after all. Show me data on the %ages and perhaps I’ll support your side.
You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that the comment to which you were replying did not reference ‘prolifers’ or ‘people who support notification’. It’s certainly true that the accusation of ‘strawman’ is overused quite a bit, but the textbook definition of a strawman argument is what you have just done: reconstructing an argument I did not make (and in fact was careful not to make, or even imply) in order to attack that, because it’s easier. That’s not really conducive to a civil discussion and it does not present your argument as well-intentioned and honest.
I am quite sure that most people who are in favor of parental-notification laws really just want parents to be involved in their children’s medical decisions, and are well-intentioned. I am also quite sure that the people who write those laws, and the organizations that are the primary fundraisers and political engines behind those laws, are doing so because they want to end abortion, period, and believe that parental notification laws are likely to reduce the number of abortions. I believe this both because of a long history of observing such laws, and the opposition of those organizations to such things as one-parent notification and judicial bypass options, as well as flat-out lies offered in support of these laws.
Re notification, the things that baffle me about support for such laws are
– the conflation of ‘notification’ and ‘permission’; presumably, notification means that my kid only has to show that she notified me but doesn’t need my permission. On the other hand the law grants me a de facto power (veto over the abortion) that it does not grant me de jure, and do we really support laws that by their effect go way behind what they’re “supposed” to do? (And what about the issue of having two parents; if Dad supports an abortion but Mom doesn’t, whose position controls?)
– the absolute mess of any alternative for minors whose parents will not comply with the law and/or are abusive. “Well let’s just take them away from their homes or turn them over to douchecanoes in the court system” is not really a solution, and while my preferred solution to said douchecanoes is to fire them, tar and feather them and hire court clerks and judges who will do their fucking jobs, I admit a more practical solution is in order.
Yes, this is one of the big problems. Presumably, if “notification” were all that’s actually required, a $15 fee to cover a couple of certified letters (plus small admin costs) would be plenty. That’s less than the requirements the courts have to notify someone that they’re on trial for a felony–why should these notifications be any more strict?
The purpose of these laws isn’t “parents need to be notified;” it’s “parents must have the right to *prevent* their child from getting medical care that the parent disapproves of.”
Of course, a pregnant teenager — even a very young one — doesn’t have to notify anyone of her intention to carry to term and keep the baby. That’s a decision that is both more dangerous medically than abortion by several orders of magnitude and that has far greater implications for the course of that girl’s life. How do we understand parental rights and responsibilities in that context? How does the “absolute right” to know come into play there?
Chingona – just a quick note before I jet off for Christmas, never to be heard from again, “several orders of magnitude” means, at minimum, 10000 times the magnitude. An order of magnitude is a tenfold increase, and several is a minimum of five. Bearing a child is a few times riskier than aborting the child last time anybody showed me numbers, but not even close to several orders of magnitude riskier.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. And that is a separate line of reasoning than what I was critiquing.
Likewise, whether parents are more or less likely to beat or abuse their child when they are notified of grades, or school suspensions, or suicide attempts, we could always assume that the child knows their parents better than the government or the voters.
We do not make such an assumption because that line of reasoning does not hold water. Instead, we can look to better, more reasonable arguments to justify why mandatory parental notification is reasonable in some aspects of a child’s life but may be unreasonable in other situations.
Thank you, Robert. I stand corrected. The risk is not even one order of magnitude greater. However, “a few times riskier” understates the risk by nearly the same degree that I unintentionally overstated it. The risk of death from an early abortion is around 1 in 1 million. The risk of death from childbirth in the U.S. is slightly greater than 1 in 10,000. So, having a baby is about 100 times as dangerous as having an early abortion, just in terms of risk of death. (The further along you are, the more the risk approaches that of childbirth, which is something to consider when we look at the impact of parental notification. laws. Desire to avoid a second trimester abortion isn’t just about the additional development of the fetus at the point.)
Regardless of the medical statistics, as a parent, speaking personally, the degree of my freak-out if I learned that my daughter were six months pregnant would be about, well, maybe an entire order of magnitude greater than if I learned she had an abortion six months before without my knowledge. (ETA: And I totally get and agree that the concern over a 13 or 14 yo having sex is legitimately greater than, say, a 17 yo, but concern about a pregnancy vs. abortion would also be greater at that younger age.) I would never say that having a baby as a teenager automatically ruins your life, but it is going to make a lot of things a lot harder, and it’s a decision about which I definitely would want to have the “have you really thought this through?” conversation with my kid.
And on that note … Merry Christmas.
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Man am I glad that the laws in the state where I live are not as strict (or confusing) as some others. We do have a parental “notification” (it plays out more like parental permission, since at the clinic where I work the parent has to sign off on forms) law, but only one parent needs to be present. (Which can still turn into a hassle–parents in these situations can be remarkably self-centered about not being able to keep to their normal schedule due to focusing on their daughters’ needs.) Also, while we need to do “due diligence” (ie, someone can’t bring in some random friend who appears to be their same age and claim this person to be their guardian and get an abortion), we don’t need absolute proof that one person is the parent of another. (Which would get super-tricky, considering how many people don’t have the same last names as their parent/s.) While parental consent laws are still aggravating, and while I don’t think the law should be legislating family relationships (as I’ve heard other people call it), there is certainly less legal rigamarole to go through than what is described here.