Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
This is lame, and is primarily the kind of viewpoint Hilary Clinton wants to overshadow in order to remove abortion as the Achilles heel of the Dems. This all-out devotion to the idea of "choice" at the expense of logic leaves you looking fanatical and unrealistic.
You have a minor who wants a medical procedure performed on her, which can have long-lasting consequences both emotional and physical. Many states don't allow her to get her ears pierced without parental permission, but your blind service to "choice" warrants an exception here? I think not.
As a law student, I clerked for the only judge around who would hear the bypass motions. We did about forty per year. He would ask why they needed to keep this from their parents. Generally, the answer was "well, like, my mom and dad would be really pissed at me". He'd ask them about violence - past, present, fear of - and there would be nothing. (Believe me - the very few times when there was a real danger, the accompanying PP social worker would be all over it - "father has been reported to the police in the past for screaming at daughter", "father has been accused of slapping daughter" - so, it's not that the judge just wasn't getting a response.) He'd almost always sign off on the request. My impression was usually that, if the parents got notified, the kid would simply accept it and move on, but the PP worker would have a flaming cow.
They're kids. There are adequate safeguards for when they have good reason not to go to their parents. We don't nudge the parents out of the picture merely to serve your social causes. It was dangerous, back in junior high, to tell your parents that you got caught with a joint - but they didn't give us the secrecy option for that. I think you value this "choice" concept higher than you value the lives of all the kids who need parental presence in this situation.
(ETA - I should have STPed before posting. Looks like all this ground got covered yesterday. Never mind.)
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If I'm 17 and want an abortion, who is some stodgy Legislator to tell me I need to go tell some old judge who will then decide whether narc'ing to my parents is a good idea and whether my reasons are "adequate" for wanting to keep it from them. If my parents cannot overrule my decision then what's the point? And knock it off with the "getting caught with a joint" stuff. Smoking dope is illegal; abortion is not. And I don't get what you mean by: "We don't nudge the parents out of the picture merely to serve your social causes." Did I miss the law that prohibited kids from talking about their abortions with the parents? Who is the "we" that you contend are nudging parents out of the picture?
The pregnant person should decide whether they want to discuss the issue with the parent. And if I don't want to tell my parents that I will be getting an abortion for the reason that they will be "really really pissed", fuck your old judge if he thinks that is not a "good enough" reason. Maybe I think that apprising my parents that I got pregnant and aborted will negatively affect my relationship with my parents for the rest of my life and I don't want that to happen. If so, who are you to second guess me? And do you really think picking up the phone and calling a parent to say ,
"Hi. Your kid is going to get an abortion and there's nothing you can do about it. Just callin, Mr. Smith, to let y'all know that, eh?"
is going to help in the parent-child relationship, you're smoking dope (NTTAWWT). And as I (and Ty) have said before, if you are so concerned about a parent being able to provide info to a kid about abortion, why not do it now?
