Parenthical notifications considered harmful

Many American states have some kind of law requiring parental notification for underage women wanting an abortion. The point of these laws is to enable proper communication between parents and children on this topic, that parents are not kept in ignorance of their daughter undergoing a (supposedly) dangerous medical procedure. Some girls however can’t tell their parents even they required to by law and those girls end up in the courts getting a waiver. But who are those girls?

Harriet J. has the answer, based on her own experience dealing with them. Ranked from most often to least often, these are girls who:

1. have dads missing in action
2. or a dead parent
3. or parents opposed to the abortion
4. or who don’t have an ID
5. or who have been raped
6. or who have been raped and don’t (want to) know it
7. or who come from an abusive family
8. or who cannot let their parents know as they would not be able to deal with it
9. or who are in some kind of legal wasteland

And she also knows who these girls are not:

The girl who just whimsically doesn’t want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and “Gosh! I didn’t realize my baby has fingernails WHAT.”

And the upshot is:

So, there you go. Girls who can’t tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still can’t tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole – then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who can’t tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.

But of course, as Harriet J. and her commenters are fully aware of, the overt reasons why these laws are passed are horseshit. The real reason is to a) make it that much more difficult to get an abortion, b) make it easier to shut down abortion clinics for “breaking the law” and c) perhaps most important, punish these girls for having sex in the first place. It’s the last impulse that makes abortion and sexual politics so frustrating in the US, as this is something that you can’t reason people out of, as it’s not a position they have reached through reason.