DEAR ABBY: From time to time, you tell young women who think they might be pregnant and are afraid to tell their parents, to do so. I usually do not write letters like this, but I need to express my personal experience. I am a minister. Several years ago, I worked for Planned Parenthood and we had a young girl -- around 13 years of age -- test positive for pregnancy. We urged her to tell her parents, but she kept refusing, insisting, "Dad will kill me!" Of course, we knew better, and finally convinced her that the best thing was to tell her parents, have the baby, and get on with her life. Her father beat her so badly that she was in the hospital for more than a month. She lost the baby because of the beating and ended up in foster care. I will never again tell a young person that her parents will not go crazy, and I don't think you should do that either. Thanks, Abby. I enjoy your column. -- REGRETFUL IN FLORIDA
DEAR REGRETFUL: Thank you for the warning. Even though we wish all teenagers could disclose to their parents, as your letter illustrates, it is a sad reality that some of them cannot. And we, who care about young people, have to first be concerned with their safety. Although most young girls do involve their families, there will always be some who are unable to do so. For that reason, I do not believe that parental notification should be mandated by law. And because sex education is no longer taught in as many states as it had been before, I strongly urge parents to begin talking to their children early about the facts of life and their personal value systems, in order to create a safe and comfortable environment should a crisis occur.
One notes as well that James Holman, Don Sebastiani, and Tom Monaghan, the financial backers of Proposition 73 don't seem to have a long track record of worrying about women's health or family cohesion, but are reported to have been far more concerned about destroying choice. See, for example, this piece at Holman's San Diego News Notes discussing this very topic. On a related note, the language of the proposition itself and of the Arguments in the Official Voter Information Guide is chock full of anti-choice buzzwords and scare tactics:
- In the text of the proposed constitutional amendment, "Abortion" is defined as "any means to ... cause the death of an unborn child, a child conceived but not yet born." This assumes away one of the most controversial arguments about abortion, and encodes into the California Constitution the anti-choice definition of a fetus of any level of development. This is particularly important because of the way that precedent is used in law. Should Proposition 73 pass, the next attack on choice will begin with the words: "In 2005, the people of the State of California agreed that personhood begins at conception..."
- The description of the period of time between notification and procedure as a "reflection period" turns up on an awful lot of anti-choice web sites. [It would be an interesting bit of research to track down the authors of the various notice & consent statutes, to see where that language originated. I suspect there aren't that many different authors.]
- The Voter Guide's Argument In Favor of Proposition 73 brings up the Jim Sensenbrenner "sexual predator" bogeyman (which one can also find here):
When parents are involved and minors cannot anticipate secret access to free abortions they more often avoid the reckless behavior which leads to pregnancies. Older men, including Internet predators, are deterred from impregnating minors when secret abortions are not available to conceal their crimes.
- And, when push comes to shove, in the Voter's Guide Rebuttal to Argument Against Proposition 73, the anti-choice crowd just can't help themselves, using anti-choice buzzwords like "the abortion industry" and "abortion businesses".
Proposition 73 is a bad idea, when the people driving it say that they're doing so out of concern for the young woman at risk or her family, they're telling a flat-out lie that their own language and references betray.
No on Proposition 73. |
