Nothing is wrong with it. In fact, it may very well be right. However, the question is whether the government should force disclosure when the pregnant person has not chosen to do so.
No, I don’t think anyone here believes that. The question is whether the government should force the teen-ager to disclose.
I have no problem with “convincing her it’s not the right choice”, provided she asked your advice. Although it begs the same questions I asked of Stratocaster, which I’ll repeat here for everyone:
**If you believe that you should have the legal right to prevent your daughter from having an abortion, what other rights and responsibilities do you believe follow from that?
Do you have the right to force her to keep the baby?
Do you have the right to force her to give it away?
If she keeps the baby, whether by your choice or hers, what do you believe your legal responsibilities to her child should be?**
And again, I’m all for it. Provided that it’s truly the girl’s choice.
Just like no one here is advocating that girls be *prevented * from involving their parents. It seems to me that people who are for parental consent laws assume that their children would not want them involved in the decision. They (and their children) might benefit more were they to spend their time and energy remedying that situation by improving their familial relationships, instead of demanding that the state keep them abreast of their childrens’ sex lives.
No, I just believe that if the state has no compelling interest in informing the parents either before **or ** after. If the girl wants to involve them, she will.
No, it isn’t for a “gotcha,” and yes, it is a simple yes or no question. My insistence on a response was more for clarification than anything else. I am not sure of your motivation. Is your insistence that physicians obtain parental consent really due to a belief that no child under the age of 18 is capable of making such a life changing decision without your help? If so, then it should be a simple “yes.” If your insistence stems instead from your very passionate belief that abortion is “evil,” that is the only time I can see it becoming complicated. You can’t say yes; that would endorse abortion. You can’t say no, that would be in direct conflict of your stated position that minors aren’t capable of making the decision for themselves. Please explain your thought processes, as what you gave was an equivocation, not an answer.
ExACTly. Talk to your daughters, people. “Don’t do it, ever ever ever, and keep your knees glued together.” Is not talking. They won’t listen to that. Teenagers vote with their feet. You are only going to be able to keep them under absolute control for so long before they rebel and take matters into their own hands. If you’d rather they come to you, you’re going to have to show them they can trust you to not flip out the second you hear something you don’t like.
You can, indeed, lock your child in her room for nine months. It gets a little dicey here, but there are facilities conveniently located just over the border in the Caribbean and Mexico that, entirely within the laws of their countries, will keep 24/7 watch on your child. It only takes a look at a few of their brochures to figure out what they use for codewords for “gay” or “pregnant.”
If you really want to stay in America, you can hire armed escorts to escort her to and from school every day. You an move the the middle of nowhere and start homeschooling. Teens have astonishingly few basic rights. It’s essentially completely legal to imprison them with no charges and no trial.
So Stratocaster, if an fire took out your whole family except for your daughter. Who then got pregnant, you would be entirely cool with her foster mother forcing her to have an abortion, right?
FWIW, I am going to tell my story. As a teenager, I was sexually active and I had decided that if I got pregnant I would have an abortion without telling my family. My family knew I was sexually active and was cool with that. They are also very pro-choice and would often take me to pro-choice rallies.
Why then, would I want to keep a secret? Well, my mother is somewhat nosy and likes to talk a lot. I am a rather private person and prefer to deal with things in the privacy of my own thoughts. Basically, the same reason why most adult women don’t immediately call up their moms to tell them they had abortions. I could just picture years of “meaningful talks” on the anniversary. I could just see her bringing it up at Christmas. To me the idea of having an abortion doesn’t conjure up strong emotions. I’ve never wanted kids and so I’ve always known it was a reality I might one day face. I don’t want it to be a subject of public discussion and I certainly don’t want other people “comforting” me and always bringing it up in a big emotional way when it’s not an emotional subject for me.
And, ten years later, I still feel the same way and i think that I made a good evaluation of the situation.
FTR, I can confirm with absolute certainty that, for some women, this is precisely the case.
I don’t. As I discussed with Maureen, for teens over the age of 14 or so, I don’t support parental consent laws. I do think that parents should be “in the loop,” able to give input and made aware of the decision.
Again: I am not stratocaster and do not share his views.
I don’t have kids, perhaps never will, and do not think this will ever apply to me if I ever am a dad. But to repeat things I’ve said earlier, drawing on my experience working wioth runaways:
There are plenty of parents who have failed their kids, (usually due to distraction; single moms working two jobs, dads with demanding careers, etc) who, confronted with a crisis situation, will suddenly start becoming useful people in their kids lives.
There are also plenty of immature teens who are completely wrong about how their parents will react to a crisis. The majority of the runaways we worked with were convinced their parents would be angry, or wouldn’t want them back; most of them were wrong.
Apologies, furt, I misunderstood. FWIW, the questions were not directed at you in particular, but at anyone who feels they should be able to prevent their child’s abortion. Frankly, I just took the opportunity to post them again because no one has answered them, and I feel as though if someone has really thought the situation through, they should have answers to these questions.
Stratocaster already admitted (if rather grudgingly) that if parents can be legally allowed to prevent their minor daughters from having abortions on the grounds that they’re too immature to make their own choice, then by the same reasoning parents must also be legally allowed to force their minor daughters to have abortions, as long as abortions are legal. However, I don’t think he could be described as “entirely cool” with the prospect, as he believes that all abortions are immoral (except, I guess, to save the mother’s life) and should be banned.
As far as I can see, that’s pretty much the standard viewpoint among strong supporters of parental-consent laws. I have never heard such an advocate say “No matter which way the parents choose about abortion vs. carrying to term, they’re the ones whose judgement needs to be followed, because the pregnant minor is simply not mature enough to make her own choice independently. If the parents decide that their daughter should have an abortion even if their daughter doesn’t want one, that’s their right and their decision must be respected.”
Rather, the pro-consent faction seem to be implicitly equating “more mature” with “less likely to choose abortion”, and supporting parental control over the decision primarily because they figure the parent(s) will be more resistant to abortion than the minor daughter.
I don’t know how else to answer it. I’ve not held back or obscured a single aspect of my belief. I believe that parents should be able to make moral decisions for their children. In some instances, all alternatives are equally “moral” and it’s entirely a judgment call for the parent. In this instance it is not. You want it to be either/or: either I believe no child is capable of making a life-changing decision OR I believe that one of the alternatives in the decision is morally wrong. Well, I believe both. So, I recognize the legal standing that would permit a parent to force a daughter to have an abortion, but can’t endorse that.
Let me try an extreme hypothetical. Your own personal beliefs may not make this a good analogy, but work with me. Suppose the law permitted physician-assisted suicide for adults, for any reason the adult deemed fit, any reason at all. One could conceivably argue that a child should be able to avail themselves of this option. Without parental consent? I’d say absolutely not. I need to make this decision for my child, regardless of how strongly the child feels about it. Why? Because I don’t believe my child is capable of understanding the full ramifications of this decision. If this requires my consent, I will never grant it.
Well, then, you might ask, do you then support parents who would force a physician-assisted suicide for their child? Again, let’s assume in this ridiculous hypothetical that they have the same legal standing I want to have in refusing that consent. I might acknowledge their legal right, but I would argue strenuously that this ought not to be a legal option becauise it is simply immoral.
Again, I understand others may have a different value set so this analogy might fall flat for them, but hopefully it clarifies my position.
Her mouth isn’t my property either, but I can decide if she gets braces. Not suggesting that these are completely analogous, but I do assert that my daughter’s ownership of her body parts does not mean she gets to make her own major decisions. Otherwise, why stop at abortion? Every part of her belongs to her. Why shouldn’t she get to decide what she eats, does, where she sleeps, etc., in every aspect that affects her?
No problem; sorry if I was snippy.
Agreed entirely.
I think both sides on all aspects of the abortion debate tend to make absolute statements that sound tidy but really don’t hold up when you think about them for very long. (“A single fertilized egg equals a human being” vs. “a 38-week pregancy is no more human than a pimple;” “She’s not 18 so her parents are totally in charge” vs. “her body, her choice no matter what her age”). It’s why I posted my list of hypotheticals back on page 5, trying to point out the utter absurdity that comes from taking some of the arguments here to their logical conclusions. Your questions do the same thing from the opposite direction.
What both lists do, IMO, is suggest that we’re better off leaving behind the absolutist blanket pronouncements; when you get right down to it, few sane people believe them anyway.
Thank you. You’ve clarified your position for me. If I understand you correctly:
In this particular case your main objection is that abortion is evil and that comes before any other argument.
I really don’t like arguing analogies; to me they’re apples and oranges. If a child decides to commit suicide, they obviously need help. However, their therapist is not beholden to release confidential information disclosed during that threatment. I absolutely support that; if someone is going through painful life changes that include contemplation of suicide, the last thing they need is to answer questions they don’t know the answers to to an authority figure.
I’m sorry, I just read through that and realized I tapdanced around your question. While I would support parental notification wholeheartedly, I still would not go so far as “consent.” Notification allows that parent to reach out to their child and get them the help they need. We’ll leave it at that, as it’s a whole 'nother debate on its own.
Well, I’m sure there are lots of things you would consider “immoral” that I do not which are nonetheless legal. But your position earlier was that no one has any right to make decisions for your child but you. I don’t entirely agree with that, especially as it concerns abortion, but in the eyes of the law in most cases that would be correct. They don’t. However, you want to take away the right to make that choice by any other parent based on your moral code, which is also not right. If you are going to use the argument that it’s your right as a parent to make this choice and no one else’s, then you and I are in agreement that there should be no law governing it. Correct?
correction – page 4, post 145.
Slippery slope arguments cause my hair to ache.
Simply put, you cannot put getting a belly button ring or deciding to eat junk for breakfast every day because you feel like it in the same category of decision as an abortion.
No, my argument is that morally supportable choices for children ought to fall within the province of parental authority. I feel the same for all morally supportable choices. The fact that I feel so STRONGLY about this particular situation is because I think abortion is de facto wrong. I would feel the same, though, about the choice of where to send my child to school, as another example.
The legal code is filled with restrictions based on moral judgements–virtually every law on the book would have someone who disagreed with it morally. Is it wrong to have laws at all?
I find it curious that you read my response and think this is my position.
Thank you. I always appreciate it when someone reveals their own hypocracy. Call me lazy, but doing it myself takes too long.
Thanks for keeping the discourse civil. :rolleyes: Your non sequitur of a “gotcha” is just too much for me, you great debater you.
I’ve tried to be honest and answer your questions, but obviously I’ve dedicated the effort to the wrong person, to someone who is interested only in cheap shots. I’ll try to remember it for next time.
Forcing a person to bear a child is no more a morally supportable choice than forcing her to have an abortion, in my world. Both pretty much peg my Disgust-O-Meter.
Hey, your arguments were hypocritical. Don’t blame me for calling you on it. Improve your arguments.
I understand that’s the position of others. I was asked to explain my beliefs, so I did.