A Woman's Right to Choose is a semi-regular feature of Gold-Plated Witch on Wheels.
The mask slips off to reveal the ugly face of the pro-abortion set when you read articles like this review of Girls on the Stand: How Courts Fail Pregnant Minors.
Author Scott Lemieux starts with this "explanation" of the popularity of parental notification and/or consent laws.
All things being equal, it is not illogical to assume that parental involvement will be beneficial to young women making the extremely difficult decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. The objection to such regulations, however, is equally obvious: Young women in loving families are likely to discuss the decision with a parent without state intervention, while getting the state involved may create serious risks for women in abusive or potentially abusive families.
This paragraph caught my attention because it assumes a level of openness in "good" families and implies that if a daughter didn't want to tell her parents she was pregnant, then the family must be "bad," the parents not worthy of notice about a highly important decision on the part of their daughter.
This is a favorite ploy of the pro-abortion movement, specifically where teenagers are concerned. The premise is that girls who don't wish to discuss pregnancy and abortion with their parents shouldn't be forced to. Why? Because the right for a teenage girl--who can't get her ears pierced or a tattoo without parental permission--to kill her baby is sacrosanct.
Yet anyone who has a teenager (or who remembers being a teenager) knows that adolescents dislike talking to their parents about a variety of issues ranging from car wrecks to curfew violations, and yet the law doesn't allow minors to avoid parental involvement in those issues. And anyone who thinks a teenager will feel comfortable talking about sex, pregnancy, and abortion with her parents is either a complete moonbat or hasn't been around teenagers.
Admittedly, Lemieux doesn't come out and say that parents must be "bad" if their teenage daughter doesn't want to talk to them about having an abortion, or that laws restricting minor access to abortion are overly restrictive. But it is the only logical conclusion one can come to from this:
Such a compromise, on its face, is not unreasonable. The state has a greater interest in intervening on behalf of minors, which makes the paternalism of such laws less transparently odious than similar regulations applied to adult women.
The link goes to an article about last term's Gonzales v. Carhart decision which upheld Congress's right to regulate abortion. If Lemieux genuinely thinks banning one late-term abortion procedure is paternalism, it's not difficult to see why he (and other pro-aborts) would consider parental notification laws to be paternalism.
I agree with the Partial Birth Abortion Act personally, and I agree with the reasoning of the SCOTUS that Congress can regulate abortion as part of its legislative power. But parental notification and consent laws strike at an entirely different issue. The right of parents to raise and educate their children is considered a fundamental one, and passing legislation which supports this is far different from banning any abortion procedure.
But as anyone who has read Echidne's site knows, many pro-abortion supporters think abortion should be legal and unregulated right up until birth. To logically argue that parents are responsible for their minor children and should be involved in decisions those children make doesn't compute with such people. To them, if a child is old enough to menstruate, parents can be responsible for every other area of a child's body, including immunizations, check-ups, and treatments, but the same parent responsible for getting medical treatment for a botched abortion should not play any part in the decision to get the abortion in the first place.
I'm not sure what sort of parent wouldn't want to be involved in his/her daughter's decision to have an abortion. The assumption that all adolescents would logically discuss abortion with their parents if the relationship is a "good" one is naive in the extreme. Basing government policy on this fantasy is even worse.
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