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Thanks, Abby!

piny

As a couple of commenters pointed out in the other thread, my state also (narrowly) rejected restrictions on abortion, namely a parental-notification law:

Similar to a measure on the fall 2005 ballot, Proposition 85 would have required physicians to notify a parent or guardian when an unmarried girl younger than 18 sought an abortion and would have imposed a 48-hour waiting period before the procedure could be performed.

The law would not have required a parent or guardian to consent to the abortion.

This caught my eye:

“We know about 75 percent of Californians support the idea,” said spokesman Albin Rhomberg.

I wonder if this statistic is compromised by the ambivalence that characterizes so many moderate perspectives on abortion, which tend to boil down to, “It’s wrong, and some women (like those serial aborters I keep hearing about) shouldn’t do it, but some women (like my daughter, or myself) should be allowed to terminate pregnancies for the right reasons.” The parental-notification/consent equivalent would sound like, “Of course parents should know, and my daughter would tell me, but of course there are some girls out there who just can’t tell their parents.” Maybe people are figuring out that legislation cannot effectively carry ambivalence. Maybe they’re looking at the ramifications of the law without wishful thinking. I can hope.

9 thoughts on Thanks, Abby!

  1. I was pleasantly surprised– after the way that the last abortion ban almost passed despite the huge no on everything vote, I thought we were in trouble. Maybe the arguments against the restrictions are finally taking root?

  3. I wonder if this statistic is compromised by the ambivalence that characterizes so many moderate perspectives on abortion

    Nope.

    That statistic is more likely, like 69.183 % of statistics are in general, to be made up on the spot 😉

  4. Why do people think that notification is different from consent? “oh, yes, I don’t have to consent to your abortion, honey, but since there is a 24-hour notification, I’ll just be able to lock you in your room until you give birth. I’ll let you out for school and doctor visits only.”

  5. Just an observation from workin the No on 85 phonebanks at Planned Parenthood the night before the election. Most of the people I spoke with were definitely voting no and understood what the prop was about.

    What was upsetting were the few women that I spoke with who honestly did not believe that teens faced an real risks in telling their parents. One woman said “well, yes, it will be a difficult conversation and her parents are going to be upset, but they aren’t going to hurt her.”

    I almost fell off my chair.

  6. One woman said “well, yes, it will be a difficult conversation and her parents are going to be upset, but they aren’t going to hurt her.”

    I’ve heard other people say that too. It makes me wonder what planet I’m on and how I got here….

  7. Dunno how off-topic this manages to be, but the word “unmarried” pops out at me here.

    Sounds quite a bit like “husband-as-guardian” sort of thing. Oh, if you don’t have a husband to look after you, you have to ask your parents for permission.

    *hiss*

    Also, didn’t one of the birth-control Supreme Court cases (not Griswold v Conneticut, I think, but the one after it) say it was illegal to discriminate by marital status in the law?

  8. Whenever a parental notification law is coming up for a vote, or I hear about the issue in the news, I think “well, if nothing else, it’ll be good for the field of linguistics.”

    See, I took an anthro & linguistics class a few years ago, and we looked at a bunch of case studies of feral and isolated children who’d never aquired a primary language. Since, of course, it’s illegal and inhumane to lock a child away just to see what happens when no one teaches it to talk, scientists who study language aquisition only rarely get a chance to study linguistically deprived children.

    Out of the half-dozen or so 20th-century cases we looked at, all but one occurred when the parents of a young, pregnant girl locked the resulting child away to avoid shaming the family. Sometimes they locked the mother up, too– in one case, the mother was deaf and developed a private sign language with her daughter, which is probably the only reason the daughter was able to learn to speak when she and her mother were finally rescued.

    All of this happened, of course, pre-Roe. Nowadays, when a teenaged girl finds out she’s pregnant, she can get an abortion without her parents finding out, and probably won’t be locked in the cellar for it, even if they’re the cellar-locking types. But hey, parental notification laws aren’t *all* bad, right? If nothing else, we’ll probably learn a lot about language.

  9. Oregon’s parental notification didn’t pass either. Every once in a while, the voting public is smarter than you think!

    nona — can you give any links or book titles? I’d be fascinated.

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