The Dangers of Reasonable Assumptions

There are few events more life changing than a pregnancy. A well-planned pregnancy, for one, can signal the start of an exciting new life stage. On the other hand, an unplanned one can signal the opposite. Fortunately for young women, there is a multitude of safe and effective measures that can prevent or end an unwanted pregnancy. Unfortunately for these young women, it is getting harder and harder to access them. While the complex subtleties that constitute the state of abortion policy in contemporary United States could easily fill a series of books, I can use this column to address one of the vilest aspects of the current war on choice: parental consent laws.

Parental consent laws are a sinister and successful tactic of the anti-choice movement, which allows them to dress their agenda in the finery of good intentions. These laws force underage women to get the approval of one or both parents before receiving an abortion. These laws parallel the innocuous sounding TRAP laws in their ability to appear well intentioned at first glance while seriously impending the ability of women to exercise their freedom of choice.

What makes my stomach turn is the insidious nature of these laws. After all, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey Justices O’Connor, both Kennedy, and Souter observed that these laws, “are based on the quiet reasonable assumption that minors will benefit from consultation with their parents and that children will often not realize that their parents have their best interests at heart.” This assumption makes complete sense, and holds true in most, but not all, cases

According to a Guttmacher Institute study,  out of the consequences pregnant minors faced when their parents found out, 10 percent were uncomfortable living at home, 3 percent were punished and slightly fewer than .5 percent were beaten. While the last number seems insignificant, it works out to slightly less than a 1 in 200 chance. If there was any other law on the books that gave children a 1 in 200 chance of being beaten by their parents, it would be condemned in the streets as a barbaric assault on common decency.

If that was the sum of the effect of these laws, and young women were still able to get the abortions that they needed, I might still be able to stomach the laws. Unfortunately, the damage caused goes much deeper. LifeNews-the American Pro-Life website, not the Russian Pro-Kremlin news agency-reported, an 18.7 percent drop in abortion rates after states enacted these laws. This creates myriad problems for both the mother and the child.

A December 2008 report on the outcomes of teen mothers and their offspring commissioned by the New York State department of Health found these outcomes were much worse than those seen in older mothers. Teen mothers had only a 41 percent chance of finishing high school, and were more likely to end up on public assistance (even when race, income, education and other confounding variables are accounted for). The children, meanwhile, were more likely to be born prematurely and at a low birth rate, less likely to finish high school. In addition, 22 percent of the daughters ended up as teen mothers themselves. These discrepancies would be a black eye to society if these mothers had chosen this path, and when women are coerced it is much worse.

What these laws are in essence doing is creating a societal norm by which a woman can be old enough to be a mother before she is old enough to have an abortion. Perhaps it is because I hold the radical opinion that motherhood should be a choice, but to me this just seems wrong. Therefore, I would encourage anyone reading this to join me in an effort to make the scourge of parental consent abortion laws nothing more than a dark chapter in our history.