In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Irreconcilable Differences

Jill

John Neffiger has a fantastic post up on HuffPo about the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban, and abortion politics in general. And he does a pretty great job of boiling complex issues down to the basics:

The conflict over abortion has no bottom — no matter how deep you dig, there’s no place both sides can come together and recognize one another’s humanity. In part, that’s because of the biology: in an unwanted pregnancy, the woman’s interest is for the fetus to cease to exist entirely, while the fetus’ presumed interest is for the woman to endure weeks of sickness and unwelcome bodily transformation, followed by many hours of incredible pain… followed by years of hard work, emotional strain, expense, and responsibility. As long as you have people eager to speak on behalf of a fetus as if it was a whole person, those are some seriously irreconcilable differences.

You might think that both sides could at least agree on preventing unwanted pregnancies. But that’s where things get weird. It turns out the hard-core anti-choice folks don’t actually care so much about preventing fetal suffering: Despite all the studies proving that improving birth control access and teaching adolescents about sex reduces unwanted pregnancies, serious “Pro-lifers” oppose these ideas, and vigorously.

So what are they after? Apparently, the heart of the matter for hard-core anti-choice folks is that sex should only be for making babies. That means it’s only for married people, and kids have no business knowing about it. That part of their vision has some appeal in our dizzyingly hypersexualized culture, as unrealistic as it is. But the other corollary is that all pregnancies should be carried to term, either as a blessed gift to a happy family… or as divine punishment for a loose woman.


Exactly. Then he takes on parental consent laws — and beautifully:

From a broad public-policy view, parental choice laws make no particular sense. As a general rule, children should not be having children because they are not prepared to raise children. Do we really want laws that make it more difficult to keep children from having children? If abortion is allowed for anyone, doesn’t it make the most sense for unhappily pregnant teens? And since a teen generally does not need her parents’ consent to have a kid, why exactly should she need their consent not to?

But this debate does not happen in the realm of logic. Parental consent laws appeal to parents’ primal fear that their kids are having sex and getting in trouble and they’re the last to know. Debates on the issue typically invoke the image of a solid middle-class family with a rebellious teen girl who falls in with a bad crowd and needs to be set straight. And that’s about where the thinking stops.

Sometimes that’s the reality of teen pregnancy: a loving, understanding family, and a kid who either made some stupid decisions or had birth control fail them. And in some of those cases, a parental consent law might be just the thing to nudge the reluctant teen to have a much-needed heart-to-heart with her parents.

Of course most teens in that rosy scenario will turn to a trusted parent anyway. But what happens when the scenario is less rosy? Tolstoy said every happy family is the same but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way: that makes for a lot of heavy issues for this law to get mixed up in. What if the parents are abusive? What if they choose to punish their daughter for her misbehavior by withholding consent, and maybe throwing her out of the house? Or what if they just would have preferred not to know?

Then there’s the scenario nearest to the hearts of anti-choice advocates: what if the parents are anti-choice? Should they be able to force their daughter to give birth? Imagine the decision resting with a pregnant teen’s father. He has never voluntarily endured anything as painful as childbirth (unless he’s undergone elite military training to resist torture, or maybe starred in a Jackass movie). Should he have the right to force that on his daughter, when she wants to have an abortion and get on with her life?

“Pro-lifers” would say yes — her life, after all, isn’t of much concern. Neither is her baby’s — once it actually is a baby, anyway.

And then there’s his conclusion:

What we do know is this debate will be won or lost on whether people empathize with the developing fetus or the pregnant woman (or girl). And as long as it’s all about the fetus, as long as women’s stories are still not being heard, women (and the women and men who love them) lose.

And to top it all off, he even gives me a shout-out. Can’t beat that. Go read his whole piece.

Now, can Mr. Neffiger please replace William Saletan at Slate?

24 thoughts on Irreconcilable Differences

  1. “And since a teen generally does not need her parents’ consent to have a kid, why exactly should she need their consent not to?”

    Because you’re authorising a medical intervention?

    Personally, I’m not in the “parental consent not required camp” as an article of faith. I think some pro-choicers are. I also don’t see why abortion should be treated any differently from any other medical condition. Which puts me in a different camp to pro-lifers who obviously target just abortion for this law.

    There are plenty of other medical interventions I would expect to be informed of if my children were to undergo them. I would not want my child to have cosmetic surgery without my consent. And I would wish to be told and involved if they were undergoing another form of treatment. So I think there is a case for some form of parental consent, in the same manner as it is exercised for other conditions.

    Obviously, there is a point where the child becomes independent and can make choices for themselves. Religious parents should not be able to withhold consent for blood tranfusions, for example. It’s a delicate area, with even uncontroversial areas of medicine. But I think the idea that no parental consent is required is nonsense for the same reason as it’d be nonsense if applied to any other medical condition or interventional.

  2. the fetus’ presumed interest is for the woman to endure weeks of sickness and unwelcome bodily transformation, followed by many hours of incredible pain… followed by years of hard work, emotional strain, expense, and responsibility.

    To hear the pro-lifers talk, abortion is a potentially traumatic experience yet pregnancy and delivery are a walk in the park*. Don’t these people get that if you’re trying to squeeze a pomelo through a hole the size of a lime, it’s much easier to do so if you don’t have to worry about destroying the pomelo? These people must be seriously ignorant of basic physics if they think abortion is more traumatic than pregnancy and delivery — I wouldn’t trust them to deliver a valuable package without breaking it.

    And if they do realize what forced-birth entails, how come they don’t place similar requirements on the rest of us? If a pregnant woman can be made to give a de facto continuous blood transfusion by force of law, why isn’t the pro-life movement pushing to mandate blood donation? A fetus will die if the mother-to-be doesn’t continuously supply it with blood-born nutrients. Many people die for lack of blood and organ donations. So why not mandate the latter if you are willing to make abortion illegal?

    I think many pro-lifers think they think a fetus is a human and has a right to life — but they sure don’t pragmatically act like a fetus has the same rights (and only the same rights) as any other person. I don’t have a right to your blood even if my life depends on it — so why should a fetus have that right?

    * This is why Jewish “pro-lifers” don’t make sense to me. Anybody who isn’t aware of what a pain in the neck (er, cervix … pardon the Latin pun) childbirth is obviously does not have a Jewish mother (“27 hours of labor … 27 hours … and for this you are running off to join the circus and marry a shiksa/shaygetz?”) — so unless I see that certificate of conversion, I’m not believing they are Jewish 😉

  3. nik — what if your husband or boyfriend was the one who knocked your daughter up? Should she still be required by law to ask his permission to have an abortion?

  4. I also don’t see why abortion should be treated any differently from any other medical condition. – nik

    I agree with this statement — it’s a fundamental statement of the pro-choice position.

    So why is opposition to parental consent so big among us pro-choicers? Some of it is pragmatic — do you really wanna require parental consent when a girl might have good reason for not wanting to talk with her parents? Some of it is simply boils back down to the old slogan “if you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” — a pregnant child has to make adult decisions, so why not treat her like an adult.

    Personally, to some degree, if a kid is seeking medical treatment, IMHO s/he should not necessarily require parental consent in general. While parents should have the ability to limit the receiving of treatment that may be unsafe (e.g. experimental treatment) or even controlling the access of kids (who depend on their parents) to medical treatments such that only treatments the parents believe in and which they believe to be in the best interests of the kid are received, if a kid manages to run away from home to seek some form of medical treatment — and understands fully the risks, etc., of the treatment — I’d be hard pressed to say parental consent should be required.

    But then again, I think we as a society tend to mollycoddle kids too much anyway …

  5. also don’t see why abortion should be treated any differently from any other medical condition.

    Minors are considered capable of making medical decisions relating to pregnancy, and do not have to get permission from or notify their parents.

    All decisions, that is, except for terminating the pregnancy.

    So, yes, it would be nice if abortion were treated the same as any other medical condition, such as pregnancy.

  6. This is going to be an unpopular stance, but depending on the age of the child, I’m not actually “pro-choice.” If my thirteen-year-old daughter were pregnant, I would damn well want to know, and depending on her particular maturity level I might not feel comfortable giving her the “choice.” In that case, I would be out-and-out “pro-abortion.” Such a young girl’s body is not ready for pregnancy and birth, and she would be too young to raise a child. It would either have to be adopted, or it would be up to me to raise it.

    The problem is, that too many people use the “if it were my child” argument I just used above, which assumes that everybody is just like them. While in reality, parental consent laws tend to get in the way in really scary situations, like incest or parental abuse.

  7. What so much of this boils down to is ownership of women’s bodies in general, and their fertility specifically. It’s the same mindset as the Purity Ball dads–his daughter’s fertility belongs to him until he transfers ownership to her husband. The fetus, then the child, is punishment for daring to put her body to unapproved uses, while reinforcing the status of women as property meant for propagation.

  8. also don’t see why abortion should be treated any differently from any other medical condition.

    I think the main reason so many pro-choicers are for no parental consent is that it goes hand in hand with the girl’s personal choice itself. If a girl is not informing her parents, perhaps there is a good reason for that.

    Also, I think it should be more the parents’ responsibility than the government’s to create a family situation where a girl would not feel the need to hide an unwanted pregnancy. To make such a disclosure mandated by law would not solve the underlying problem of the “unrosy family scenarios”, I think. It would just force girls who are not ready to be mothers to find some other way to accomplish that end.

  9. Why would you want to be informed if your child were undergoing some other form of medical intervention like cosmetic surgery?
    I’m not asking this question because I think it’s unreasonable. I think it is reasonable.
    I expect the answer for many parents would be that medical intervention is a serious matter, it’s risky, it would have long term consequences.

    Pregnancy and child birth are more dangerous and risky than getting an abortion, most definitely have long term consequences, and are equally serious as having an abortion.

    Why is parental consent required to have an abortion when it’s not required to proceed with a pregnancy and have a baby?

    I’m sure that people supporting parental consent laws are well meaning and they’re thinking in terms of wanting to by involved in major events affecting their kids’ lives.
    Most teenage girls who get pregnant tell their parents (and I’ve seen studies stating that most parents want their daughters to get abortions- more often than the daughters want to get abortions). Those who don’t have a good reason not to.

    If you want your daughter to come to you for help when she’s pregnant, then be the kind of parent whose daughter would come to for help in that situation.

  10. Not meaning to blogwhore here, but there’s a scary court case in Ireland right now that will be decided on Thursday involving a 17-year-old pregnant teenager who the state health service is preventing from leaving the country to obtain an abortion. I blogged about it here.

    I’m feeling hopeful the court will decide in favor of the teenager, but it’s not certain….

  11. nik — what if your husband or boyfriend was the one who knocked your daughter up? Should she still be required by law to ask his permission to have an abortion?

    I don’t mean to be glib, but if I run my own child over while driving I’m going to be consulted on the treatment they get. If I deliberately break my own child’s arm, I’m still going to be consulted on the medical treatment they get. At least until that right gets removed – it’s presumptive. If we take your argument seriously and apply it to other conditions, then we get rid of parental involvement. That’s why I have my doubts.

    I don’t agree with pro-life blanket consent laws which mean you can’t get an abortion until you’re 18 unless your parent signs on the dotted line. I don’t see why parents have more rights regarding abortion than any other medical intervention. But I don’t feel I can go along with the pro-choice “parental consent should not be an issue” line for the same reason. We do actually have parental involvement when other medical conditions arise in children, and these rules are understandably incredibly complicated. I don’t see what the justification is for parents having less rights regarding abortion than other interventions.

  12. This is going to be an unpopular stance, but depending on the age of the child, I’m not actually “pro-choice.” If my thirteen-year-old daughter were pregnant, I would damn well want to know, and depending on her particular maturity level I might not feel comfortable giving her the “choice.”

    I’m sure you would want to know if your young daughter was pregnant, and I think I would also strongly advise (not force!) abortion for a 13 year old. However as far as I know the consent laws would not require anyone to tell you she was pregnant, only that she was seeking an abortion. So in the scenario you describe, this law would not help at all, as you would only have to be informed or consulted if your daughter wanted an abortion, which would be what you wanted her to do anyway.

    Of course, as someone already pointed out, the best way to know what’s going on in your daughter’s life is to try to form a good relationship with her, so she feels she can come to you for support and advice when something like this happens. I’m sure that isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but still, if you need a law to force your child to tell you she needs an abortion, something has probably gone badly wrong in your relationship already.

  13. We do actually have parental involvement when other medical conditions arise in children, and these rules are understandably incredibly complicated. I don’t see what the justification is for parents having less rights regarding abortion than other interventions.

    Again, pregnancy is treated as emancipating for a minor, so long as she continues it. So the question is not whether abortion should be treated as any other medical condition, but why terminating a pregnancy is treated differently than continuing one. So if getting pregnant makes you a woman, it should make you a woman for all intents and purposes.

  14. I don’t mean to be glib, but if I run my own child over while driving I’m going to be consulted on the treatment they get. If I deliberately break my own child’s arm, I’m still going to be consulted on the medical treatment they get.

    The difference is that there are not many parents who would deny the appropriate medical care to their child in those cases.

    I don’t see what the justification is for parents having less rights regarding abortion than other interventions.

    Again, I think this is less about parents having a “right” to be involved, and more about parents creating a family situation where the kid would want the parents to be involved. The main difference, as I see it, is that this is a medical intervention where the parents’ wishes and the wishes of the daughter can conflict, and in the cases where they don’t agree, it’s the life and body of the daughter that are immediately concerned with the ultimate decision.

  15. Parental consent laws are an important issue, but I was hoping the editorial would hit a point it only alluded to a bit harder: that all the most radical anti-choice crowd has to offer as an answer to unwanted pregnancy is abstinence, and you know, even if you buy into the idea that sex should be reserved for married couples (which I don’t), then what is there for married couples who don’t want a child at any given moment? My one and only unwanted pregnancy scare happened a year into my marriage. I suppose they could argue that we shouldn’t have gotten married until we were ready to have a child (which I also disagree with), but you know, after I have my baby in two months, we’re going to be right back to another pregnancy meaning financial disaster. So, what? We stop having sex? I kind of doubt the same people who would try to deny us birth control would approve of, shall we say, non-procreative sexual alternatives. So what’s the answer?

    I’m always torn between not wanting to engage on the level of their assumptions and wanting to shake the illogic out of the knee-jerk “abstinence!” response.

  16. Again, I think this is less about parents having a “right” to be involved, and more about parents creating a family situation where the kid would want the parents to be involved.

    That is the ideal, yes, but you can’t legislate based on the ideal. The existence of forced consent is worrisome because it puts those young girls who are in an already precarious situation, in more danger. Yes, I know that if I or my sisters had gotten pregnant when we were younger, we wouldn’t hesitate to talk to our parents about getting an abortion. This law does not affect girls like me. It affects girls who are abused mentally or physically. Girls who have been impregnated by their father or their uncle or their mother’s boyfriend. Girls with strict conservative parents. This law directly harms girls who don’t feel safe going to their guardian, and for that reason should be protected against them not forced to place their vulnerability in their oppressor’s hands.

  17. The difference is that there are not many parents who would deny the appropriate medical care to their child in those cases.

    Exactly. If a large portion of American parents were against splints and casts for religious reasons, then I’d say no parental notification should be needed in treating a broken bone.

    for the woman to endure weeks of sickness and unwelcome bodily transformation, followed by many hours of incredible pain… followed by years of hard work, emotional strain, expense, and responsibility.

    Thank you!! In so many abortion debates people act as if it’s just a question of whether or not the person wants the baby to exist after the pregnancy. Even if someone is willing to put it up for adoption, the pregnancy and birth are basically a nine-month handicap plus an often dangerous physical event (not sure what else to call it) which can permanently change the way the body functions. Even if the baby was guaranteed to just vanish the second it’s out, that wouldn’t solve the problem.

  18. I don’t mean to be glib, but if I run my own child over while driving I’m going to be consulted on the treatment they get. If I deliberately break my own child’s arm, I’m still going to be consulted on the medical treatment they get.

    The difference is that if you do either of these things, you will be declared an unfit parent and have your kid taken away. If you make a decision to treat your kid’s life threatening illness with crackpot woo-woo, you will also have your kid taken away. You have the right to make medical decisions for your kid until you start making the wrong ones and then that right ends. I don’t believe parents have rights to make medical decisions anyway; they have a responsibility to keep their kid as healthy as possible and when they shirk that responsibility by willfully withholding medical care, I fully support removing the parent from the equation. That’s why I don’t support parental consent laws.

  19. Here’s another thing about the “pro-life” people: They always assume parental consent laws will work to lower abortions; that the parents will say no. What about cases when the parents want the girl to have an abortion, and the girl doesn’t want to?

    I knew a girl in high school who was in a bi-racial relationship, and got pregnant. She wanted to have the baby, but her parents freaked. They tried to force her to get an abortion (it didn’t work; she ran away until the baby was born). If “parental rights” are SO important, how do they feel about cases like this?? If a parent can force their daughter to carry a pregnancy to term, doesn’t it also follow that they have the right to force her to abort?

    Of course in a case like that, they don’t agree with parental rights AT ALL. They only want to have rights for parents who agree with them. Which is typical, but still disgusting.

  20. I don’t believe parents have rights to make medical decisions anyway; they have a responsibility to keep their kid as healthy as possible and when they shirk that responsibility by willfully withholding medical care, I fully support removing the parent from the equation.

    Y’know, there’s a difference between parental-consent laws and imposing a duty on parents to provide every medical intervention that you, personally, find appropriate.

  21. Y’know, there’s a difference between parental-consent laws and imposing a duty on parents to provide every medical intervention that you, personally, find appropriate.

    If parental-consent laws were really about keeping parents of all mindsets in the picture, then shouldn’t there be some way for parents to force their daughter to have an abortion if she wants to have the baby? It would be no more cruel than to force her to go through with the pregnancy when she doesn’t want to.

    But that’s not what parental-consent laws are really about – they’re about keeping girls under the thumb of anti-choice parents (that’s the situation in which parental consent would really come into play, right?) as often as possible, regardless of what they want for their own lives and bodies.

  22. Because you’re authorising a medical intervention?

    This is just silly. Pregnancy and childbirth are as invasive and as dangerous as a medical intervention–more so than an abortion. It requires doctors’ visits, testing, changed lifestyles, etc. Plus, it has life-long consequences–the existence of biological offspring–which abortion does not. It’s completely ridiculous to treat abortion as something more invasive, more dangerous and more demanding of parental intervention than abortion. Just the opposite is true.

    Aside from which, pregnancy really isn’t just another medical situation. It turns a person into a mother. Biologically, socially and emotionally, it’s unique. If your thirteen-year-old is too immature to choose abortion, it makes no sense to say that she’s mature enough to cope with the immense transformation that goes with pregnancy. Likewise, if you’ve got a pro-life teenager who doesn’t want to have an abortion, and you give parents the authority to force one on her, then you’re saying that she’s too immature to give birth but she’s NOT too immature to deal with the psychic damage that comes from having a procedure she thinks of as murder.

    Apart from theoretical philosophical concerns, sexual matters really aren’t treated as just another medical procedure when it comes to minors’ rights. Minors, particularly minor girls, have a high risk of suffering parental abuse when they have a sexually-related medical condition. So from a practical public policy perspective, it makes perfect sense to say that most girls who have loving parents will probably tell them about pregnancy (because it’s just easier on the girl in the long run) and the girls who don’t should be able to get their abortions. I really have no sympathy for people who are more concerned with their parental “rights” than with the possibility that a girl with an abusive parent will have to tell that parent about a pregnancy. If you’re that unusual loving parent whose teenage daughter nevertheless doesn’t want to tell you about her pregnancy, well, tough luck. For society as a whole, it’s much better to allow the girl to make her own choice–most of the time they’ll involve their parents, and if not then there’s probably a damn good reason, and cases where neither of these things are true are the exception.

  23. It’s completely ridiculous to treat abortion as something more invasive, more dangerous and more demanding of parental intervention than abortion

    Obviously, that last word should be “pregnancy.”

  24. Pingback: salty sunday « salty femme.

Comments are currently closed.