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Parental Consent Laws
Some Nevada politicians liken parental consent laws to ordinances
that require a teen to have parental permission before getting
her ears pierced. “If teens need to get permission
to get their ears pierced, they should have to get permission
to have an abortion,” is the logic that Jim Gibson, mayor
of Henderson and gubernatorial candidate, uses.
What is the problem with this kind of thinking?
- Young women who have healthy relationships with their parents
talk to their parents about abortion. Getting an abortion
is expensive and in some cases it is an emotional experience,
making parental involvement crucial for the vast majority of
teen girls. Barbara Bailey is a Public Defender who represents
teens who wish to skirt Pennsylvania’s parental consent
laws by getting permission from a judge to get an abortion. Ms.
Bailey said to the New York Times, “I
don’t see teens who
have good, healthy relationships with their parents [looking
for abortions] - they tell their parents. It’s the
teens whose parents aren’t around, or teens who have such
bad relationships with their parents that they are truly afraid
of telling them end up here. They are fearful their parent will… kick
them out of the house or do something physically violent to them.”
In short, parental consent laws hurt most the teens that live
on the fringes of society. Last year in
Michigan, a young woman had her boyfriend hit her repeatedly
in the stomach with a baseball bat until she aborted a fetus
that was not yet viable outside the womb. She survived the ordeal,
but a young woman who received a back ally abortion in Indiana
did not.
- Abortion is the safest
surgical procedure performed in the United States today. For
mayor Gibson to flippantly compare the abortion procedure
done by a trained medical professional, to getting one’s
ears pierced by someone who may not have a high school diploma
exposes a complete lack of understanding about the abortion
procedure
Why do we have Parental Consent Laws?
Anti-choice activists had hoped parental consent laws would
cause a sharp drop in teen abortion (and a sharp increase in
teen motherhood). According to a March 6, 2006 article in the New
York Times, “For all the passions [parental consent laws]
generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or
get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced
the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates
hoped for, an analysis… shows.”
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