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Parental consent in California

Jill

Alley Rat has a powerful post on her experience with an underage friend who got a safe, legal abortion in California — something that may not be an option for many girls there if the state passes its parental consent law. Alley makes an important point when she writes that girls almost always tell at least one parent before they have an abortion; the ones that don’t generally can’t, or strongly feel that they can’t. Read her whole post, as it’s much more eloquent and compelling than I can possibly be right now.

36 thoughts on Parental consent in California

  1. friend who got a safe, legal abortion in California

    Well the abortion wasn’t exactly “safe” for the baby now was it?

    What a ridiculous story. You have to play on people’s emotions because you lose the battle in the court of logic and reason.

    No matter, California is dying. Hopefully Mexifornia turns out better. I have high hopes.

    🙂

  2. Well the abortion wasn’t exactly “safe” for the baby now was it?

    Lame …

    Do us all a favor; keep your fetus fetish to yourself.

  3. California is dying? Subtract California’s exports from the total US exports and see what’s left, you bigoted (“Mexafornia!”) moron.

    In any case, Billy, it’s pretty obvious everything you say is a projection. “You have to play on people’s emotions because you lose the battle in the court of logic and reason.”

  4. Also, I’m wondering, in the world of respecting “innocent life” and all that, what is your problem with Mexicans?

  5. The “Mexifornia” thing isn’t just bigoted: it’s also deeply ignorant of history. California always was “Mexifornia”: in fact, California was part of Mexico before it was part of the U.S. And if the U.S. was incapable of handing demographic change, we would already have “died” sometime in the late 19th century, if not before then.

  6. I’ve lived in LA for 22 years, and the Mexifornia/Spanofornia/Missionofornia/Pacific-Rimifornia/everyotherkind ofexpatriotimagineabilofornia is the best part.

  7. Okay everybody, take a deep breath and exhale slowly. Then read my post again carefully, twice if you have to, and ask yourself if what I was really trying to say was bigoted against Mexican immigrants, or rather joyful and excited about all the good that the Mexican immigrants will do for the future of California.

    You’re all hysterical.

    And they call me crazy.

    🙂

    And I am fully aware of the history of the region. It appears the ACLU doesn’t, however:

    http://tinyurl.com/7dn49

    Meet the beautiful Mexican Lady that will bring an end to abortion in America:

    http://tinyurl.com/9dbk3

  8. Riiiiiight. California is dying and will be replaced by Mexifornia, but I’m not a bigot.

  9. What’s funny is that I think he may honestly not understand why it’s offensive to imply that Mexicans are killing California. After all, he hates California, so Mexican Californians should be flattered by the idea that they’re lethal outsiders.

  10. What’s funny is that I think he may honestly not understand why it’s offensive to imply that Mexicans are killing California.

    But I’m not implying at all that Mexicans are killing California. Did they teach you reading comprehension in school, or only sex education and how to put condoms on bananas?

    Let’s try this again:

    Californians are dying, not because Mexicans are killing them, but because Californians are killing themselves (through contraception, abortion, pornography, fornication, adultery etc.). In their place, Mexicans immigrants are coming which are bringing new life to California. They bring with them good Christian family values and the culture of life that will replace the culture of death that is now California. They also bring Our Lady (http://tinyurl.com/9dbk3) with them, who will do to our civilization what she did to the Aztec civilization 500 years ago.

    Gloria in excelsis Deo!

    Why is it necessary for you to believe that everyone who doesn’t agree with your radical feminist agenda must be a racist bigot, when it isn’t so? Are you projecting something?

  11. BillyHW has a peculiar talent for totally derailing comment threads. I suggest that there be a community response to this sort of thing. If someone totally lacks respect for the community and persists in baiting us, perhaps we should ignore him.

  12. No, she’s not.

    Why is it necessary for you to believe that everyone who doesn’t agree with your racist, sexist, backwoods, anti-science, anti-enlightenment, anti-art, anti-freedom, anti-sex, pro-“life” idiology is just uneducated and “doesn’t get it” because it’s too “nuanced?”

  13. “No, she’s not” (above) refers to Billy’s question about whether Sally is projecting anything. But it occurs to me I was mistaken. Liberals are always making the mistake of projecting rationality and coherence onto the people they’re talking to. It’s actually what makes conversation bearable, to say nothing of possible. Unfortunately, talking to some people (Billy) is like picking a fight with the automated response lady at the phone company.

  14. It only makes sense to say that “California is dying” if you think that California means “the white people who live in California.” (And even then it’s a goofy overstatement.) What you are doing is implying, whether you realized it or not, that Latinos are not real Californians. And that’s offensive.

    Incidentally, I don’t think that Latinos are going to change California’s culture in quite the way you think they will. Most Latino voters favor keeping abortion legal. Most who would prefer to outlaw abortion don’t see it as a pressing political issue. And of course Latina women are much more likely than white women to have abortions. That’s because they’re less likely than white women to be economically stable, less likely to have health insurance, less likely, in general, to feel they can raise an unplanned child. My sense is that most Latinos think addressing the causes of that insecurity is a much higher priority than outlawing abortion.

  15. What you are doing is implying, whether you realized it or not, that Latinos are not real Californians. And that’s offensive.

    Actually, I meant it as a compliment.

    😉

  17. Okay, I’ll admit it. I just read the post and the old puritanical New Englander in me is coming out!

    Any 13 year old girl who gets pregnant does not have a great relationship with her parents. No, it’s worse than that: Her parents have not done their job. They have abdicated their right to “consent” after the fact. There, I said it.

    This post is yet another reminder of why the government needs to stay the hell out of reproductive health care. Millionaire bureaucrats have no business butting into lives they will never understand; they haven’t the faintest idea how real people live. Period.

  18. In L’s case, the parents definitely did not do their job. It makes me very angry to imagine what might have happened had there been a “consent” law at the time. People who abandoned their responsibilities as parents could have made a decision on their daughter’s behalf, after 13 years of making terrible decisions for her. And in this case, I do think that if they’d been better parents, she wouldn’t have ended up pregnant at 13 (or raped at 16!). I don’t know that that’s always the case, but the guys funding this law seem to have no concern for the realities many teenage girls face. Their concern is with restricting abortion because they have an ideological opposition to it. Ideology and compassion sometimes don’t coexist. They claim compassion for the “unborn” while ignoring what life is like for the living.

  20. Any 13 year old girl who gets pregnant does not have a great relationship with her parents. No, it’s worse than that: Her parents have not done their job.

    Right. Because if you’re a parent and do your job, your daughter will never be raped, never have anyone drop a roofie into her drink, and your daughter will use contraception faithfully 100% of the time and it will never, ever fail.

  21. Well, rather, I think that if they had a good relationship with their parents, the 13-year-old would be talking to them in the first place, rather than, you know, having to be forced to.

    I rather like the “if you need to give consent, you are legally and finacially responsible for the potential child thing”. If she’s too young for an abortion, she’s too young to be a mother.

  22. Shorter Billy: I hate Mexicans, but since I think they keep women barefoot and pregnant, I give my grudging respect for their machismo.

    The problem, Billy is that Mexicans are not a monolithic group of people that all have the same beliefs and motivations anymore than Americans.

  24. Hell , I thought contraception prevented abortions.

    Little did I know that every time I used a diaphram another Californian died.

    If I clap my hands and beleive real hard will they come back to life?

  25. He’s using the language of eugenics: white women are “killing” the race by using contraception. This is always contrasted to various kinds of non-white (or inferiorly white) women, who are not using contraception and therefore having bigger families. The idea is that because of the gap in birth rates, white people will eventually be outnumbered. (GASP!!) In the early 20th century, when this discourse was invented, WASP women’s use of contraception was termed “race suicide,” and eugenicists heaped invective on them for refusing to spend their adult lives with one in the cradle and one on the way. Oddly enough, when WASPs actually did become outnumbered, the apocolypse failed to occur.

    Billy is kind of dumb, so he may not even be aware of this sordid history. But even if you put a positive gloss on a racist discourse, it’s still squicky.

  26. “Right. Because if you’re a parent and do your job, your daughter will never be raped, never have anyone drop a roofie into her drink, and your daughter will use contraception faithfully 100% of the time and it will never, ever fail.”

    Yes, I was so clearly writing about rape victims, above. You’re freaking brilliant!

  27. No, see, the problem with your assertions was that you weren’t taking rape and coercion into account. That was how my underage friend got pregnant, and why she had an abortion without telling her parents.

    You can be a great parent and still not manage to produce a perfect kid. My parents did a wonderful job, and they still didn’t see bulimia coming. They supervised my activities and those of my siblings. they made sure to talk to us about sex and contraception. they knew all our friends, asked what we were doing, checked up on us, enforced curfews. There was still no way they could be everywhere, and they did not know when we started screwing around. being teenagers, we had a limited ability to understand the consequences of screwing around, no matter how carefully they were explained to us.

    You can point fingers if you want, but sometimes eighth graders do stupid things, regardless of how much time their parents spend teaching them and supervising them.

  28. This morning I read in the local paper that a boy who’d been in a skateboarding accident Friday died last night. He wasn’t hit by a car; he just lost control of the skateboard and wiped out. He wasn’t wearing a helmet (does any skateboarder?) and his head injuries were severe enough to kill him.

    I feel awful for his family, for his parents and grandparents. It’s not something you ever get over. Maybe he could have survived the accident if he’d been more careful, or if he’d been wearing a helmet. But you know what? I’m not going to tell his parents that if they’d been better, this never would have happened. I’m not going to speculate about whether the boy wouldn’t have been so careless if he’d been skateboarding in Missouri rather than in oh-so-suicidal Northern California.

    Maybe he was careless. Maybe his parents were inattentive. I don’t know. I don’t need to know. Not in order to feel sorry for his family, to be sad at a young life cut short, to acknowledge that grief is real and bitter no matter how it’s incurred.

    And you know what? I feel similarly about the 13 year-old – or the 42 year-old – who’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be. I want her to be able to talk about it with someone who cares, and if she chooses abortion, to be able to get one early in the pregnancy, at a price she can afford, without being scolded or vilified, and, I hope, to have caring people around her who understand the concept of misfortune, accident or inadvertance.

    Sometimes a person is careless, sometimes just unlucky. Sometimes a person is victimized. The details are important, but the underlying obligation is the same: to offer care, comfort, assistance, and the opportunity to heal.

  29. Just a few thoughts

    Why be caring and concered when its so much easier to villify and ostracize.
    You have to stop pointing fingers to offer someone comfort and assistance.
    You need to empathise instead of blame to hold out a helping hand.
    And you definantly need to quit being “right” all the time in order to work towards solutions.

  30. “Californians are killing themselves (through contraception, abortion, pornography, fornication, adultery etc.)”

    Killing themselves with pornography? How does that happen exactly?

  31. Duh. You overdose on erotoxins and your heart stops. I learned that in tenth grade.

    It’s becoming more and more common now that more people have high-speed connections. Back when dial-up was the norm, it was much harder to transmit a lethal dose of smut over the necessary time-frame.

  32. Ah much clearer now. I suppose that’s how they’re killing themselves with adultery and fornication as well.

  33. No, those deaths are due to bolts of lightning from Heaven.

    Didn’t you pay any attention in health class?

  35. piny,

    Damn girl, (or boy) you make some great arguments. To be honest, I assumed people on this site would “get” I wasn’t talking about rape when I said that parents with a pregnant 13 year old forfeit their right to know.

    I still think there are many circumstances in which a child in this predicament should be able to obtain an abortion, without having to include delinquent parents in this decision. However, I agree with you that sometimes parents just aren’t equipped, for whatever reasons and kids sometimes get themselves into poor predicaments, regardless. Again, you make some damn good points.

    Thanks.

  36. Killing themselves with pornography? How does that happen exactly?

    Well, after viewing pornography, men masturbate, killing millions of innocent spermatozoa-Americans. This, naturally, is not an issue for women, because everyone knows that they don’t like sex anyway, so they don’t masturbate or view pornography. But male masturbation eliminates millions of potential lives, thereby killing the future residents of California. Ditto for women who use contraception — it prevents the fertilization of their eggs, meaning that they expell their unfertilized egg at the end of their menstrual cycle, again snuffing out an innocent potential life. Apparently this happens disproportionately in California. Plus, the Mexicans are coming. Be very afraid.

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