That is clearly an assumption with out any support. Do you have anything to offer besides unsupportable opinion? 
Why is there a smug assumption that requiring a minor child to obtain my approval for medical treatment means I am an over bearing ogre, with no trust, or open communication between the child and myself?
Why do you assume such simple and baseline advice should be offered to Bobcos?
Believe it or not, the belief that your child should sneak behind your back to get an abortion does not imply you have a better and more open relationship with the child.
There is nothing my kids cannot talk to me about. Maybe that is why your views on this and mine differ. I am worried about them getting sucked in by suave strangers with a bill of goods to sell, motivated by a political agenda, and steeped in propaganda.
Unlike you, I merely refuse to abdicate my parental responsibilities based on situational morality. The tougher the situation, the greater my responsibility to be there.
I know it’s just an opinon. But it’s based on my past experience as a teenage girl. There were LOTS of things I kept from my father and step-mother, and those things had nothing to do with sex. If there was anything to tell them regarding sex, you can bet I would NEVER have told them. (And if my mother had been alive, I probably wouldn’t have told her either. But I can’t know that for sure, obviously.)
But I am on your side here, Philly Style. Now that I have a child of my own, I realize that I’d be extremely angry if any doctor performed any medical procedure on her without my and my husband’s consent (unless it was a true emergency situation and we weren’t available).
I don’t quite understand this. Are you suggesting that a doctor would carry out an abortion on a minor through some sort of political motivation? Or do you mean something quite different?
zwaldd - yes, I would be quite happy for doctors alone to make the decision. I have quite a lot of faith in medical practitioners, and believe they would have as much interest in the child’s well being as any social worker. So if two doctors, or a doctor and a nurse, discuss with the child/young person and themselves, that’s as good for me as it would be with a social worker, or the child’s teacher, etc.
I am confident that most hospitals in most western nations would have good guidelines for this sort of situation, eg, some form of higher reference (like the consent of two doctors, or referring it to the senior doctor, whatever).
No, I am suggesting the Planned Parenthood would offer her only one “option”. And yes, I would suggest that they are not pro-choice, they are pro-abortion.
Particularly in a case like this, where they feel they know what to do better then anyone else.
You also miss the first point entirely. There is no right number of doctors, lawyers, judges, advocates, etc, that is the right number to steal my parental rights from me.
Why not firemen, baseball players, harmonica players, newspaper writers, or tribal leaders as well. What gives these doctors god like powers to make a “right decision”. Last time I checked, their opinions were no better then anyone elses. Leave the choice where it belongs, with the people legally charged with this child’s well being.
Philly - I guess that I have lived in countries with no experience of “Planned Parenthood.” In the UK, family planning clinics/hospitals etc aren’t really associated to political movements, AFAIK.
I remember the Family Planning clinic in my home town was both the stop off point for girls getting the pill and condoms, and other women having babies. All under the same roof, no agenda.
Also: because the wellbeing of the child is ultimate, parents don’t have ultimate, set-in-stone rights. That’s the the point people are trying to make. Because we know of children that are neglected, abused, beaten up (in some cases just for dating, let alone having boyfriends) that’s why ultimately we make provision for society to act for them, to mandate their care, instead.
It’s not about YOU being a bad parents, it’s because we can’t just easily subdivide children into “neglected/abused kids” and “ok kids” and put relevant “Doctor Decide” sticker on the ones with crap parents, that we give all of them the safety net of allowing them treatment without parental consent.
And if you seriously are trying to suggest that doctors should have no more decision power over medical matters than baseball players, well that’s just sad. Maybe you would like a harmonica player or tribal leader calling the shots next time you’re unconscious after a car accident, with no close relatives on hand?
And all pregnant teenagers a dragged kicking and screamning into planned parenthood where the equivelent of used-car salesmen brainwash your children into doing something they’d never ever choose to do on their own.
While as far as I know, Planned Parenthood will only provide one option themselves (which does not mean that they won’t provide a referral for other options), that doesn’t apply to many other providers , such as public hospitals and clinics and private doctors.
If your children believe there is nothing that they cannot talk to you about, then you probably won’t have a problem with them sneaking behind your back to obtain STD treatment, prescription birth control , an abortion, or prenatal care while trying to work up the courage to tell you about the pregnancy. But not all children believe they can talk to their parents about these things. Some are right, and some are wrong. After seeing what happened to my sister when she became pregnant at 19, and how the decisions she made under pressure from my parents affected her life, I knew I was right in feeling that it wouldn’t be a good idea to talk to my parents.
That’s odd, Philly. Last time I was in a PP clinic, the waiting room was full of women in late-stage pregnancy getting checkups. Others, like me, were there for Pap smears and birth control (which I always thought was a damn good means of preventing abortion, myself). Doing prenatal care seems rather out of character for a place that actively pushes abortion.
If there really WAS trust and open communication then your child WOULD go to you and the whole legal question would be moot.
Is there really anything in that list to disagree with? If Bob Cos takes me to task, well, that’s perfectly understandable but should you be getting irrate on his behalf?
When I was in high school the refrain I heard from girls fearing pregnancy was either “my parents are going to kill me” or “my father is going to kill me”. It was FEAR that kept these girls from speaking. Whether that fear was justified or not is another question (sometimes yes, sometimes no).
If you want to maximize the chances your children will come to you with problems of this magnitude you better make sure they aren’t afraid to come to you.
Truthfully, it applies to any parent.
Nowhere in my too-long post did I EVER state that children SHOULD be sneaking behind anyone’s back. I repeatedly stated my position that the ideal situation is for the matter of sex and pregnancy to be considerably delayed past the teen years. I do, however, recognize this is not a perfect world, and not all parents are perfect parents any more than all kids are perfect kids.
Then bravo to you. But these laws and loopholes were not passed because of the good parents and functional families.
You may not agree with the laws that say a young, pregnant girl who is in fear of her life (and there truly are such situations) may seek the protection of the courts. Clearly, this is not a universally held opinion, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m worried about young girls kept delibrately ignorant of the facts of life getting into trouble, then having to fear whether or not their parents will abadon them, beat them, or kill them.
YOU call it “situational morality”. I call it “dealing with reality”. Not everyone shares your moral code, but society as a whole will have to bear the burden of their decisions as well as yours.
I never for a moment doubted my parents would be there for me, no matter what I did or didn’t do. That doesn’t mean they’d be happy with my mistakes, only that they wouldn’t abadon me, hurt me, or stop loving me. No matter what horrible thing occured they’d do their best to help me get through it. It was an unshakable faith for me as a child, and even now as an adult. If you provide your children with the same faith then bravo - but you’re in the minority.
If you don’t want YOUR kids “sneaking behind your back” then you’d better make sure that trust in you is there - because if it isn’t they WILL sneak regardless of what you or the law says.
Um, maybe for you. Can I ask you not to make that decision for me? And can we not continue to try to define the parental right to know based on the very worst behavior some parents exhibit?
Sorry, but no. I can’t. Because your “right to know” will always be, in my opinion, way down on the list compared with the girl’s safety.
Um, no again. Because the worst behavior is precisely the reason for the laws.
Just as vicious thugs mean that we all have to go through metal detectors at various public places, vicious parents mean that sometimes you, as a parent, won’t get rights you feel you should have.
If a girl isn’t willing to let her parents know about some extremely momentous event, sorry, but I think that girl probably has a point. I had a great relationship with my parents and would have gone to them in any circumstances. Knowing them, they wouldn’t even have yelled, though the weight of their disapproval would have been great.
Still, a good parent/child relationship isn’t, in my opinion, affected by these laws. If a child is afraid of her parents, those parents should take a good, hard look at themselves.
Julie
I don’t know if you have heard of Victoria Gillick, but if not, it might be interesting for your to acquaint yourself with her story.
Mrs Gillick was a responsible upper middle class parent of ten children, including five daughters. She was Roman Catholic, and personally opposed to contraceptives, but IIRC did not campaign against them for others. What she campaigned against was girls under sixteen years being prescribed contraceptives without their parents’ permission. http://www.healthpromo.org/teenpreg/sec1.4.html is the best link I can find.
The problem with Mrs Gillick, and the verdict of the judges who initially supported her, was that they used her very well brought up, supportive family as the yardstick. Well-meaning though Mrs Gillick was, she was out of touch with the experience of a fourteen year old girl who grows up on a housing estate with an absent father, a drunken or disinterested mother, and no real family network of support. It’s this girl that the law needs to extend protection to.
The law’s aim is not to take away YOUR rights. It is to provide the safest situation possible for children not lucky enough to have parents’ as supportive as you.
Ultimately, this is not about “rights” “control” “parental decision” - it is about compassion and protection.
**Julie, this is a false dilemma. The choice is not universally between children’s safety and the parent’s right to know, as much as many in this thread would like it to be. That would be the only rationale for making abortion one of a unique class of decisions that do not require parental knowledge or consent, regardless of circumstance (if I am understanding what is being argued here).
And, sorry, but since it’s my turn, I simply cannot accept your assertion that you know what is best for my children. However wise you believe your position is, and however intensely you feel it should be so, you should not get to decide for my children, and the law should not make this a unique exception.
**So, I’ll ask again, do you apply this logic to all scenarios? If I could provide an example of, say, a parent who abused his child over missing curfew, would you take this worst-case example and conclude that parental consent for what time a child needs to come home is no longer necessary, not for anyone, anywhere? Do all parents lose the right to be alone with their children because some parents have sexually abused their kids?
**Your analogy falls short, because what we are discussing here is not an inconvenience in exercising my right, it is the eradication of my right. If you want to make the analogy apt, you would say that the actions of terrorists should mean that no one has the right to fly any more. After all, any one of us could be a terrorist.
I think this is being over-simplified in this thread. The world is not divided into abusive parents and wise parents. Children do not always avoid discussing things with their parents because they are avoiding an abusive scenario, or because the parents are not supportive. Children sometimes make bad decisions, and those poor decisions can also relate to inviting their parents’ involvement.
It is way too pat to assert that “good parents” shouldn’t have to worry about the law’s intrusion in this arena. It’s also interesting to see the pro-choice crowd, at least in this thread, decide that there is no right to choose as it relates to someone’s traditional proxy for making decisions–i.e., parents for children. In this case, choice is out the window.
istara, please see my response to Julie. I do not believe that these laws intrude only on “unsupportive” parents. And I do not concede that this is by definition the safest circumstance for all children, and particularly for my children. This was a telling line in your cite:
**This was identified as one of the conditions that would permit a doctor to provide birth control to a minor without a parent’s consent. I understand that a doctor is in the best position to explain how specific types of birth control work, what the side effects are, health risks associated with certain types of sexual activities, etc. But explain to me, what qualifies a doctor to determine what is in my child’s best interest, specifically when it may be contrary to what I as a parent believe?
It’s a bit circular, wouldn’t you say? What condition (among others) determines if it’s in a child’s best interest to proceed without a parent’s involvement? Why the fact that it is in the child’s best interest to proceed without the parent’s involvement, of course!
I’m really sorry if all you excellent, anti-abortion parents are offended at the notion of a safety net for teens in trouble, but yes, those laws and loopholes ARE written because of the Bad Parents™ in this country.
Want a comparable situation? When I was in high school my next door neighbor’s oldest child was emancipated at 16 - and no, it wasn’t because she was pregnant. She was in a terribly abusive situation and her mother had taken to locking her outside at night in February without a coat. Actually, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s an illustration of a serious problem. She went to the courts and the courts decided that, even at 16, she was more capable of taking care of herself than her mother was of taking care of her. So far as I know, the issue of sexual activity never came up. So she was made officially an adult, able to sign her own lease on an apartment, hold a job, and yes, make decisions about her own medical care. After which the courts went after the other two, younger children in the household and the bitch left town. Gee, should this 16 year old have tried to “go to her parents” about this, or was she justified in “sneaking” off to the courts? Was my family wrong to help her out, without consulting her mother? This so-called “mother” was locking her children in closets and systematically starving them for days, and there was that never-resolved question of whether or not the middle girl was being used in kiddie-porn, and, oh, yes, the two times we had to talk the youngest out of killing herself. Not to mention the nights I’d lay in my bed and I could hear her beating the kids through the wall that separated my apartment from theirs. I’m talking about a truly wretched situation that the mother had managed to hide for years - until her eldest daughter was old enough and experienced enough to figure out this wasn’t normal and to stop covering for her mother’s behavior.
And do you honestly think the mother in question didn’t fight her daughter’s emancipation? You think she didn’t howl about how her parental rights were being usurped?
THAT’S why we have a mechanism for emacipating minors who are capable of handling the responsibility, and for over-riding parental authority. Because, no, you do NOT have unlimited rights over your children.
If your daughter becomes pregnant and she doesn’t come to you then yes, communication has broken down and yes, it does reflect badly on you as a parent. Meanwhile, there’s a pregnant teen and future baby to contend with - and it’s not a matter where decisions can be put off.
Bob Cos and Philly Style, what about a situation where a girl doesn’t want an abortion but her parents insist she have one? Should the parents have an unfettered right to subject their daughter to this procedure, or would you support a 16 or 17 year old girl going to court to prevent an abortion?
(This isn’t entirely hypothetical - when the gal who had the locker next to me in high school became pregnant her parents just assumed she’d choose the abortion option and started making arrangments. She made a pretty eloquent speech to them about why she was opposed to the idea and convinced them otherwise. She had the baby and put the kid up for adoption. But what if she hadn’t been able to convince them?)
Would you object to your pregnant daughter going to a pro-life agency that assisted pregnant teens in getting medical care without going to you first? Would you object to her going to your local minister for advice and counseling before she spoke to you? Is it her going outside the family that you object most to, or is it that she might go somewhere that doesn’t share your morals and ethics?
It’s true that the choice is not always between the child’s safety and the parent’s right to know. It’s often between the parents right to know and the child receiving medical care at all, or sooner rather than later. That is not a false dilemma. I’d prefer to know whether my child was being treated for an STD, or having an abortion or received a birth control prescription or receiving prenatal care just as you would. Given that you believe abortion to be immoral, I suspect that you wouldn’t be too concerned that your daughter hid a pregnancy from you past the point where abortion would be safe and legal . You might, however, prefer that she be treated for an STD without your consent instead of walking around untreated because she didn’t want to tell you. You might prefer that she be able to receive prenatal care from the beginning of a pregnancy without your consent rather than going without for the four or five months it takes her to tell you about it. I don’t know your position regarding birth control, but you also might prefer that she get a prescription without your consent rather than becoming pregnant. And society as a whole has an interest in teenagers with STDs being treated and pregnant teenagers receiving prenatal care and even teenagers receiving birth control. * Imagine that rather than reproductive issues, the situation involved something different, say TB. For some reason, teenagers are unlikely to tell their parents when they believe they might have TB. Maybe some believe their parents will be abusive, and some of them are even right. But most of their parents won’t be abusive, and most of the teenagers don’t even fear abuse, just their parents’ disappointment or even just the difficulty of telling them. Does the state have enough of an interest in avoiding people walking around with untreated TB to dispense with the requirement for parental consent? Or something more likely to be hidden from parents-drug treatment? (which I believe minors can also consent to on their own). Does the state have enough of an interest in curbing drug abuse to dispense with the requirment for parental consent if the likely alternative is that the child won’t get the treatment?
*While you might be able and willing to support any child your daughter has without any government assistance, that is not nearly always the case.
So are you suggesting that it’s only “anti-abortion” folks who favor parental consent laws?.
73% of Americans favor “A law requiring women under 18 to get parental consent for any abortion”
(other polls have similar findings ranging from 70 to 80% approval of such laws).
Note, I’m not using these polls to provide evidence that a position is correct, but to dispute the idea only “anti abortion” folks support parental consent laws. A significant number of self identified “pro choice” folks do as well.
**I will ask again. Then do you support similar restrictions of parental authority for other types of abuses? I provided examples. Why aren’t there people lobbying to keep all parents from being alone with their children because the worst parents sexually abuse their kids?
** Right. Any unfortunate circumstance that occurs must be the fault of the parents. Couldn’t possibly, not in any situation, be the fault of these children you are agruing are mature and wise enough to make life decisions for themselves. They are, apparently, responsible only when it suits your purposes.
Have to run to Mass. I’ll try to address your other questions later.