I can’t be the victim of child abuse either. I’m still against it. That okay with you?
And in answer to your first question–a thousand pardons. I will now try to memorize the legal code for every jurisdiction in the U.S. It is my…duty.
Disingenuous responses aside, do you really think I believe my opinion carries the weight of law?
Is that what the law says? If so, then it is wrong.
BTW, let me point out that this became fodder for debate only because I was asked a courteous question, which I answered. The fact that this is my opinion isn’t lost on me–I was just answering a question.
IMO, the child becomes the grandparent’s responsibility, for good (until the child is 18), unless the child wants to assume parental rights at 18, and the grandparents relinquish theirs. I can absolutely envision a scenario where the underage girl helps to raise the child. But by definition, she hasn’t the capacity to make decisions for the other child.
But we can stop wisdom teeth from growing, right? By removing them at their first sign. I’m not saying we should, obviously. I’m just pointing out that this is a “choice” in the same sense any passive choice is. And we could certainly stop a child from proceeding through puberty, in the same way we can stop a pregnancy.
Well, you know what I mean. (Mom, is that you?)
Touché.
I didn’t realise there was a way avaliable to people to stop puberty, but i’ll take your word for it. However; neither going through puberty or not going through puberty require parental consent. I agree with you that neither option requires it. But if in law one of them did, it seems only reasonable that the alternative option also require consent.
Going back to abortion, the problem is this; pregnancy is a very big decision. Bringing a child into the world is something that will affect the rest of your life, and the rest of their life. Abortion is too. Now, I don’t think abortion should require parental consent (it’s a good idea in theory, but there are too many problems with it for me); however, that what the law says now. So then it seems to me to be just reasonable that if parental consent is required for abortion on the grounds that an underage person cannot make their own decisions wisely, that parental consent should also be required to bring a pregnancy to term, for the very same reason.
In other words; what about the situation means that a child is capable of deciding to have a child, but not capable of deciding to have an abortion?
I don’t know how you saw through my disguise as a British teenager, but yes, it’s me. Now go clean your room.
If the pregnant minor lacks the capacity to make the decision as to whether to carry to term or not, then are the parents equally within their rights to force her to have an abortion as they are to force her to have the baby?
At best, they’ll have a law that says she can go to a judge and beg him to give her an exception, which won’t do her any good if the judge says no. And yes, it has happened that the judge has sent girls back to their molester fathers to beg for an abortion; in Texas I’d expect most judges to do that, probably after a lecture about how sluts like her should keep their legs shut. If the father kills her, I expect most “pro lifers” would just shrug and say ( among themselves at least ) “Serves the bitch right”. Like Randall Terry once said, “Every woman who dies is a victory for morality”.
What would be the process for determing whether a girl had been raped by her father? How many hoops would she have to jump through to get her abortion?
I think I agree with this, in theory. In practice, I would not support a parent’s right to force a child to have an abortion, in the same way I would not support a parent’s right to decide for his child to pursue assisted “suicide.” I can’t support any law where another’s right to live is ignored.
But, if I set that aside for the moment, I do agree with your concept. The child is not capable of deciding that having a child is the proper course.
And all this time I thought you were an Italian-American housewife. I’ll clean my room later.
What’s the process when abortions aren’t in the equation?
Is Mom still in the picture?
This is a sick, vicious, malevolent law which does little to dispell the perception that the anti-choice movement is largely motivated by a desire to punish women for having sex. Anyone who would force a teenage girl to carry a pregnancy against her will (and many of these girls would necessarily be rape victims by statute alone) surrenders all credibility when they want to claim their position has anything to do with compassion. A law like this is indisputably anti-compassionate – mean, angry, judgemental, punitive, hostile, controlling, dehumanizing, smugly moralistic and, frankly, self gratifying. It makes them feel wonderful to humiliate children and force them to make destructive decisions that could ruin their lives. Fucking sicko, Christo-fascist nutjobs, man. Hillary for president, man. Stop the Christian Taliban.
This is a very interesting response. I’m suggesting that what we should have is the same form, but the other way around; needing parental consent to carry a pregnancy to term. The same situation, but flipped.
So by your suggesting this would mean a parent would have the right to force a child to have an abortion, that implies that the current situation allows a parent to force a child to carry their pregnancy to term. You’re ok with one, but not with the other.
Now, I get why you think that; you’re pro-life. It’s understandable that you’d want to make getting an abortion very difficult. But this law is ostensibly about making sure the child has all the information, and is capable of understanding it, not about a right to life. Would you agree that rather than being about “making sure the child can make an informed decision”, this law is really to just make getting an abortion that much harder?
Fair enough. I have no illusions at being able to convince you you’re wrong in the abortion debate, of course. 
Well, there you have it. If you don’t agree with Diogenes on this matter, you aren’t merely wrong. You are evil, with horrible motives. You aren’t even misguided, folks. You are motivated by a philosophy devoid of compassion. It’s just that simple, no need to debate it.
Irrelevant. When there’s a needed abortion at stake, there is a ticking clock. A decision has to be made immediately and rape is hard to prove even with all the time in the world. The question is are we going to give a girl the benefit of the doubt or are we going to assume that she’s a slut until proven otherwise?
If the father is a sexual predator, the odds are the mom is just going to go along with whatever he tells her to do. Mothers are rarely a protective presence in a household where the father is abusive. If a girl becomes pregnant as a result of incest, and the mother knows that but still refuses to give consent for an abortion, what protection does the victim now have? She’s still completely at the mercy of her abusive parents (one actively, one passively). Is that just too bad for her?
No, obviously I don’t; I think you were trying to evade a debate about the realities of the situation by falling back on how you would like things to be. You contended that abortion should be considered equivalent to other elective medical procedures. You were presented with a very pertinent way in which it is substantially different to such procedures, and need to address that difference in the real world, either by showing a mitigating circumstance that is already the case, or one that could easily be implemented.
Well, fair enough, but if you say you see “no reason” why abortion shouldn’t be treated like any other procedure, and give the justification that the grandparents are responsible for the baby, you’ve got to expect to be called on whether that is actually the case or not. This law is being implemented in the next couple of weeks, and will begin to affect people’s lives directly. I can’t presently find anything in the Texas family code indicating that a parent has any responsibility to their child past the age of majority or graduation from high school (whichever comes later) or after emancipation through marriage. Certainly the new abortion notification measure (linked from the prior page) seems to contain no language detailing new responsibilities for the parents should they deny consent for an abortion. So, the reality indeed appears to be that a child can be forced into an 18-year commitment by their parents.
So you’d essentially give primacy of care to the grandparents, only transferring guardianship to the actual parent if the grandparents consent? All well and good that you agree that forcing a child to bear a baby should entail some sort of commitment, but you seem to be going way beyond this, and implying that the baby would in effect belong to the grandparents. Is this really what you want?
Here’s a good article on the matter, incidentally, albeit written in 2002 when Pennsylvania were the only ones with a consent law.
If it was just a philosphical disagreement, I wouldn’t care. What makes it actively malevolent is the attempt to legislatively impose those beliefs on others. An attempt to actively take away legal rights goes beyond simple disagreement.
What else would parenal consent to proceed with a pregnancy mean?
Well, I’m certainly no expert, but it doesn’t appear that parental consent laws are about making sure a child has all the proper info. It is about having someone making the decision who has the capacity to do so.
I think it’s like any other life-altering decision, any choice of this magnitude–it is up to the parent. Again, like virtually everything else.
Hey, I appreciate not being responded to as an evil monster, intent on humiliating children for the sake of it, devoid of compassion and intent on inflicting my religious fascism on the world. 
You know what, Strat, I’ve long ago decided that I don’t think you’re one of the mean-spirited or uncompassionate ones (just misguided ;)), but I still think your movement is full of people who are.
You can’t be this blinded by your own fanaticism to miss the fact that the pro-life side of this takes exactly that position, from their own perspective. Your position could be described as malevolent and imposing a belief system that destroys another’s rights, and using your logic, I’d dismiss your contribution out of hand. Most people coming to this particular forum have different objectives. Like, maybe, debating the topic, trying to convince and understand.
Frothing at the mouth over how the pro-life side has no credibility or compassion–that it’s deliberately malevolent and humiliating–is nutjob nonsense, which is not at all saying that one can’t disagree with the pro-life position without spouting nutjob nonsense.
Dio, saw this before my last post. And there are those in this very thread I wouldn’t have bothered the response on. So, thanks for the clarification. But I’d still give people the chance–don’t assume! I used to in these threads, and I discovered I was wrong more often than not.
So if the parent feels that the best choice is an abortion, they should be able to make the minor abort? Or do we then decide that the parent’s *aren’t * the right people to make this decision?
I’m not trying to attack you, I’m just honestly curious. You’ve said that you wouldn’t support a law that allows parents to force their children to have an abortion, but you also say that parents should be able to make reproductive choices (like they make other medical choices) for their children. So should they actually only be allowed to make medical choices that you *agree * with?