For safety's sake

Prop. 73 recognizes the importance of parental guidance

By Margaret Mele
From the November 2005 Print Edition

What can’t you legally do when under 18 years old? You can’t smoke, drink, vote, own a gun, enlist in the military, gamble, be a delivery boy, see an X-rated movie, or rent a car. Without parental permission, you can’t even open a bank account, go to a tanning salon, get a tattoo or piercing, have a tooth pulled, or take an aspirin at school.

What can you legally do? You can get an abortion without telling your parents.

On November 8, California voters have the chance to reevaluate this absurdity with Proposition 73, the Parent’s Right to Know and Child Protection Initiative. Put on the ballot by the people to amend the State Constitution, it would require either parental notification or a judicial waiver before a girl under 18 could get an abortion.

Parental notification laws have widespread support both publicly and judicially. 35 states have parental involvement laws today, and for the past 20 years more than 70 percent of Americans have supported such laws. In 1981, Life/Contemporary American Family published polls showing that 78 percent of people polled supported parental notification laws. In 1998, a CBS News/NY Times poll showed 78 percent of those polled favoring parental consent. In 2003, and again in 2004, 73 percent of those polled in Gallup surveys supported parental consent laws.

Supreme Court decisions concur with public opinion, consistently upholding state laws as constitutional. Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter observed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that parental notification and consent laws are based on the rational assumption that children will benefit from discussion with their parents and that children often do not realize their parents have their best interests at heart.

Proposition 73 would facilitate improved medical care for minors seeking abortions. Requiring parental notification would allow parents to help their child obtain high-quality care by giving parents a chance to help select a health-care provider. Adults have superior ability to evaluate and select the correct physician, as the Supreme Court recognized in Bellotti v. Baird: “[minors] are less likely than adults to know or be able to recognize ethical qualified physicians, or to have the means to engage such professionals.” Parents seeking to guide their child are more likely to recognize bad health-care providers than a panicky teen who doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore.

Parents can also ensure that the physician has all relevant medical history and information. Complete medical and psychological histories are important because they help the doctor assess risks in determining the treatment. Even the most informed minor is unable to provide this because she doesn’t have the authority to grant the physician access to her medical records. Parents, on the other hand, can refer providers to sources of medical history and authorize the release of relevant records and information.

The medical and psychological consequences of an abortion are serious and long lasting. Parents are better equipped to respond to post-abortion complications than young girls alone. Infection is a common complication but many of the symptoms are similar to other infirmities, making children unlikely to respond. Infection is only one of the many abortion complications that can result in death, mainly because children don’t recognize, or ignore and deny, the seriousness of those complications. Without parental guidance, hemorrhaging may be mistaken for a heavy period and post-abortion depression for typical teenage angst.

Studies have found that most teenage pregnancies are the result of predatory practices by men who are substantially older. Parental notification will provide increased protection to minors against sexual exploitation by adult men. Opponents claim children would be hurt if their abusers were notified, but Proposition 73 would protect those children with judicial bypass and would remove them from unsafe environments. The status quo condemns these girls to return to a vicious cycle of abuse.

According to the American Academy of Pediatricians’ Committee on Adolescence, studies show that two-thirds of adolescent mothers were impregnated by men age 20 or older. In California, a study of 46,000 pregnant school-age girls found that 33,000, or 71 percent, were impregnated by post–high school men whose mean age was 23. Most mothers age 15 or younger were impregnated by men six to seven years their elder. Men age 25 or older father more births among female California minors than do boys under the age of 18.

These girls’ sexual partners, who could be charged with statutory rape, are involved in the decision to get abortions on a large scale. A recent survey confirms this — in a study of 1,500 unmarried minors having secret abortions, 89 percent said that their partners were involved. Secretive abortions protect criminals by killing all the public evidence of their misconduct and allow children to return to abusive relationships. Young girls may not report this abuse for many reasons.

It is important that parents and doctors are involved so that they can make sure a girl is doing the right thing and not being manipulated by her partner through fear, infatuation, or misguided loyalty. Proposition 73 not only gives parents the opportunity to protect their children, it also provides civil and criminal protection to the child and her parents and makes it illegal to perform an abortion on a minor who has been coerced by the clinic, doctor, or anyone else, including a parent or boyfriend.

Minors cannot be sentenced to death by a jury because they have poor or under-developed judgment. Yet these same children can choose to end another life using that very same judgmental capacity, and they can do so without notifying their parents, who are legally and morally responsible for the children’s well-being. Proposition 73 aims to change that.

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