The Oregonian is doing a great series on Measure 43, their state’s parental notification statute. They take a different tack than the traditional news article on abortion, which inevitably involves an interview from a Planned Parenthood representative and an interview with an anti-choice leader. The Oregonian instead talks to the very people who this measure would most affect: Women and girls.
The articles aren’t perfect, but they offer a good balance of perspective. And I’m happy to finally see a publication listening to women.
Suzie McHarness, 50, of Southeast Portland, knows exactly what she would do differently, had it been possible. “If I had had an abortion, my life would have been very different,” she says. That’s why she opposes Measure 43.
Instead, McHarness says, she became pregnant at 15 and was forced to deal with an angry, abusive mother and shame from her mother’s friends from church.
As the morning sun streams into her kitchen window and catches the tears pooling in her eyes, McHarness says she was raped at a party by a friend of a friend.
“I was devastated,” she says.
She was afraid to tell her mother, so she waited until she couldn’t wait any longer.
Abortion wasn’t an option. It was 1972, before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal. Plus, McHarness says, “my mother never would have agreed to that.”
The baby was a boy, born with a facial defect. McHarness says she moved out of her mother’s house. She dropped out of high school and struggled to raise her son on her own. He needed a series of surgeries, and McHarness remembers hitchhiking to the hospital to be with him.
McHarness decided when her son was 14 months old that their life was “horrible” and “unfair to him”; she gave him up for adoption.
The two were reunited 16 years later and are working on a relationship. McHarness keeps her son’s picture on the wall beside her computer. She volunteers at least twice a month at a Planned Parenthood clinic, helping women and teens prepare for abortion and staying with them during the procedure.
Parental notification laws sound like common sense. After all, who doesn’t want to know if their child is having a medical procedure? A kid has to have permission to get aspirin from the school nurse — why should abortion be any different?
Unfortunately, abortion is different. In my ideal world, abortion would be considered a medical procedure just like any other, and women wouldn’t face harassment, shame and abuse for seeking it out. But they do. And the reality is that a small minority of girls will face physical and/or emotional abuse if their parents find out that they’re pregnant; they may be berated, shamed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, sent away, or financially isolated. The vast majority of minors tell their parents when they terminate a pregnancy. There is no question that for the majority of girls, parental notification laws are redundant.
But in making those laws, we can’t forget about the minority for whom they pose siginificant threats. For most girls the notification laws won’t matter, because they’ll inform their parents anyway; the girls who aren’t informing their parents are usually doing so for a very good reason.
These laws inevitably include a judical bypass, but let’s think realistically about how well a teenager is going to be able to navigate the justice system in her area. You don’t have to have a driver’s license to get pregnant — what should she do if she doesn’t drive and the court is miles away from her home? I know that when I was 16, my parents kept pretty close tabs on me — if I were to disappear for an entire afternoon to appear in court, they’d grill me as to where I went. And let’s also keep in mind that most teenagers are required to be in school all day — when is she going to find the time to make a court appearance? It’s the very teenagers who are coming from abusive homes who are the ones who will lack the support and the means to seek out a judicial bypass.
Supporters of parental notification/consent laws argue that minor girls are not mature enough to decide whether or not to have an abortion. Sounds logical, right? But if they’re not mature enough to decide whether or not to have an abortion, how can we possibly think that they’re mature enough to have a baby, be a mother, or give their child up for adoption?
Karen Elliott, 60, has spent more than 30 years as a public health nurse counseling Marion County teens facing unwanted pregnancies. It’s not unusual, she says, to have a teen declare: “My parents are going to kill me.”
And yet, Elliott adds, often the mother is there for the next visit. “She’s not happy, necessarily, but she’s there to support.”
But not everyone is so lucky, and that’s one of the reasons Elliott opposes Measure 43.
She’s counseled many girls who come from abusive homes, as well as girls who sleep on friends’ sofas because they have no home.
Elliott recalls a family with four daughters, an abusive stepfather and a man living in a backyard trailer who acted out scenes from his porn videos with the sisters. Elliott says she reported the situation to law enforcement after one of the girls confided in her. She worries that the girl might have kept the family secret if she’d known a law had required Elliott to tell the girl’s mother.
It’s a minority of teens who may be truly afraid or unable to tell their parents, Elliott says. “But I think they deserve to be supported.”
Yes they do. And unfortunately, they too often are not.
“My father was a third-generation Houston police officer — my grandfather, my great-grandfather and my father.
“The first time I remember him abusing my mom, I was 5. I started telling teachers when I was in eighth grade, the year after my mom left. My father punched us, choked us, physically intimidated us.
“My father had told me that he was against abortion and not to get pregnant. He made his feelings on this issue really clear. The first time I had ever seen an OB-GYN was when I had an abortion.
“I went to Planned Parenthood in Houston. I trusted that they would not tell anyone. At this point, I’d turned 18. I was somewhere between six and eight weeks. Pretty early.
“If you pushed me, I might have said I was personally pro-life, maybe publicly pro-choice. . . . But I had no doubt that my father would abuse my child. I had nowhere to seek help. I could not imagine putting another person, especially one I loved, through the hell I was going through.
“They asked me four separate times if was I sure. They asked me if I knew what my options were. . . . I will never forget the woman who held my hand, because she was so kind and supportive.
“I struggled with the decision that I had made. I had done some sort of process writing. It was buried in a drawer under school papers in my room. I went to Seattle to visit my aunt and when I was gone, my father went through my room and found my papers.
“When I came back, he confronted me about the abortion and told me that I’d killed his grandchild. He said I had no right to do it. I ran from him. I could see him getting angrier and angrier. I locked myself in the bathroom with a knife. He kicked in the door and pinned me down on the floor and twisted my arm behind my back and he punched me in the head.
“I was abused, and I was pro-life. It was not having an abortion that changed my position. It was being beaten for it. Having an abortion is a hard decision. It is a difficult decision — maybe the most difficult decision. No woman deserves to be beaten for that.”
Bizarrely, some anti-choicers are interpreting this woman’s story as somehow supporting their political view. Of course, they’re also completely twisting her words — Dawn titles her post, “Teen Sees Coercion, but Planned Parenthood Sees a Choice” when the woman in question is very clear that she made the decision herself, and that Planned Parenthood employees went out of their way to ask her, four times, if she was sure she wanted to terminate her pregnancy. She said yes all four times. She had come to Planned Parenthood because she wanted an abortion. Where, exactly, is the coercion? What should Planned Parenthood have done?
Of course, Dawn isn’t so interested in silly things like facts. We shouldn’t be too surprised. She does have quite a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth, and going to amazing new lows in order to attack Planned Parenthood. In this post, she faults Planned Parenthood for “returning” the 18-year-old to her abusive father, despite the fact that the woman gave no indication that PP knew about her abusive father. The woman also says that she told several teachers, who did nothing. Dawn doesn’t find them quite as abhorrent, though.
And her logical reasoning skills aren’t exactly the strongest:
Would a parental-notification law have changed the outcome of the Oregonian interviewee’s tragic story — that is, if the teen had been underage? I believe it would have. If the teen were required to inform her father of her option to abort, she might instead have looked in the “Abortion Alternatives” section of the yellow pages. Any organization she would find there would be more likely than Planned Parenthood to see the abuse she received for what it was, and give her a real option to escape it. Then she wouldn’t have been left on her own, in her room, to grieve her loss through “process writing,” and to be at the mercy of a monster.
Right. Because I’m sure that her father would have reacted wonderfully to the news that his daughter was pregnant. It should probably also be pointed out that pregnant women are disproportionately targeted for abuse, and that the most common cause of death for pregnant women is murder.
But by all means, do what Dawn says and vote Yes on Measure 43. After all, your desire to force your daughter to tell you if she has an abortion* certainly trumps the rights of some girls to avoid serious physical and emotional abuse.
*Let’s think about this for a second — what kind of parent assumes that their daughter won’t tell them if she’s getting an abortion, and from there conclude that there should be a law requiring her to do so?