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Girls on the Stand

Jill

A guest-post by Scott Lemieux.

stand

For those interested in reproductive freedom, I can’t recommend Helena Silverstein’s new book Girls on the Stand strongly enough. I’ve written about Silverstein’s work before, and it’s very important. While many pro-choicers are able to talk eloquently about the importance of reproductive freedom, and its importance to women’s equality, there is much less discussion of how abortion regulation actually works. This is particularly important when it comes to regulations, like parental notification and consent statutes, that are carefully constructed by the forced pregnancy lobby to appeal to otherwise pro-choice voters.

I will have a longer essay on the book soon at my other home at The American Prospect online. But to give you a flavor of Silverstein’s work, let me quote from her 2004 article “Religious Establishment in Hearings to Waive Parental Consent for Abortion,” which details the extent to which judges force young women — contrary to several provisions of the Constitution — undergo religious counseling before obtaining a judicial bypass:

Other judges argue that to be well-informed a minor must receive counseling not only from those who work at abortion clinics, but also from those who oppose abortion. Interviews with those involved in the waiver process reveal that at least four judges in three Alabama counties condition waiver grants on the receipt of pro-life counseling from a crisis pregnancy center called Sav-A-Life. In these counties, Sav-A-Life counseling has become a routine component of the judicial waiver process. As a judge in one of these counties explained, to determine whether a minor satisfies the criteria for obtaining a waiver of consent, there are several factors involved, there are agencies that need to be involved to counsel with and talk with this person. They used to be called Sav-A-Life, maybe it’s the same now. She has to talk to them about what her options are. There is a hearing that has to be conducted; the burden is on her to prove that she has considered medical, emotional, psychological issues …

A second judge explained that he, along with one of his fellow judges, “will want [the minors] to have been to Sav-A-Life, to see what there is to help them make the right decision.” Asked whether proof of a minor being well-informed depends on such a visit, this judge replied, “I would say yes, but normally rather than simply deny, when that’s happened in the past I’ve said go to Sav-A-Life, and the girl did go to Sav-A-Life, and I granted the waiver. But they know we’re going to ask that so they’ve been to Sav-A-Life before the hearing.”

And what is this Save-A-Life organization? You can probably guess:

The largest crisis pregnancy organization in Alabama, Sav-A-Life, Inc., was established in 1980. Providing “positive alternatives to young women facing unplanned pregnancies,” this non-profit organization offers free pregnancy tests and guidance on how to pursue alternatives to abortion. 145 Like other crisis pregnancy centers (“CPCs”), branch offices of Sav-A-Life frequently offer assistance with such things as maternity clothing, baby clothing, toys, diapers, formula, and other child-rearing accessories.

Sav-A-Life’s mission is unambiguously religious. A self-described “non-denominational, Christ-centered ministry,” Sav-A-Life’s mission, according to the most recent version of the organization’s Web site, “is to establish and equip Pregnancy Centers in order that communities will be reached for Christ and that abortion will be made unnecessary and undesirable in their region.” Sav-A-Life aims to accomplish this through “a commitment to evangelism and Biblical Truth.”

What’s scary is that judges abusing their power to force minors to undergo ideological and religious counseling is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the grossly arbitrary implementation of abortion regulations, and the effects on young women are frequently awful. Silverstein demonstrates this through both case studies and systematic data, and the conclusions are chilling. People interested in women’s rights should definitely read it — the more people who know how these laws actually work the better.

26 thoughts on Girls on the Stand

  1. Thanks for this.

    Helena Silverstein was a professor of mine in college–she was great. She must have been working on the research for this while I was there because I remember a talk she gave about research in which she and a student called courthouses throughout PA to see what a young woman would face if she tried to get a judicial bypass. Unsurprisingly, much of the time the people answering these calls had no idea what a judicial bypass was or how to help the caller. And of course, some were outright hostile when the caller revealed she was seeking an abortion.

    I can’t wait to read the book!

  2. Curious, is there an organization like Sav-a-Life that counsels potential gun owners on the murderous nature of guns? I mean, we’re talking about the sanctity of life! Oh wait, the ability to kill people to protect personal property is a Second Amendment right, but removing a fetus to ensure the sovereignty over your very being is murder. Silly me.

    On a serious note: this article is an eye-opener. So is that FRONTLINE episode, The Last Abortion Clinic (see it online at the PBS website). We desperately need to reframe abortion as a basic human right and tie the right to exercise personal sovereignty to other issues (street harassment, rape, etc.) and the overall omnipresent dehumanization and demonization of femaleness itself (the widespread use of anti-female slurs as common foul language, for ex.)

  3. And I suppose that since they find it so important that a young woman is sufficiently well-informed, they are also requiring all pregnant minors to receive counseling on abortion before they’re allowed to carry to term, correct?

    *crickets*

  4. I was granted my judicial bypass by a pregnant judge. My legal aid attorney had to steady me as we walked into the conference room, as the fear made my knees weak. The setting was more like a deposition, just me, my attorney, another attorney, the judge and a stenographer. It is enough that young girls must go through this, without additional emotional burdens.

    I dislike parental notification laws. They only hurt young women that need to hide that decision from their parents. I hope that my daughter knows that I love and support her, and that she need not fear reprisal from me for the choices she makes with her life. Yet, no parent can know the future, and if she found herelf needing to end an unwanted pregnancy, and felt she couldn’t come to me for help, I’d still want her to get an abortion with the least emotional and physical traumas possible.

  5. Revolting.
    This reminds me of the terrible “12 step” programs that addicts are forced to go through. All they are is religious indoctrination pure and simple and whats truly terrible is…
    They don’t work =(

    This is worse imho. I also dislike parental consent requirements. If a girl feels she needs to keep her pregnancy secret from her parents then there is probably a pretty good reason.
    Nobody should be forced to undergo counselling unless they are a demonstrable risk to others (obviously not the case here) and religious indoctrination of this sort should be banned outright.

  6. I did my first judicial bypass hearing on Friday. While the county in which I live at least allows the pregnant minor and her counsel a private entrance/exit from the courthouse, that is, sadly, the only compromise they are granted.

    Unfortunately, their equal protection rights are routinely trampled on by judges who are “morally opposed” to abortion. They sit there pretending to listen to the young womens’ circumstances, all the while having already made up their minds. It simply infuritates me. I just want to climb up on the bench and grab them by the throat, screaming at them about who they think they are. Make no mistake about it; these same judges who are “morally opposed”, i.e., “pro-life”, are the same judges who will sentence a criminal defendant to death, with absolutely no reference to their personal morals. Their “morals” are all about punishing women and girls, not about protecting “life”. So much for being personally detached, and leaving their personal beliefs at the door of the courthouse.

    Parental consent laws and their ilk are just another way to chip away at women’s abortion rights. Make no mistake: bodily autonomy and sovereignty ARE AR WOMAN’S INALIENABLE RIGHT. Until we start framing women’s reproductive rights in this fashion, we are going to continue to lose more of our rights to control our own bodies and reproductive rights.

  7. Another cruel consequence of parental consent laws is that I imagine the restriction falls the most heavily on poor women and/or rural women who have fewer resources, education, etc. to obtain a judicial bypass. For example, what if a young woman under such circumstances can’t get a bypass because she doesn’t know who to ask in her small Baptist town on how to go about it? Or doesn’t own a computer & can’t learn there either?

    Even in urban areas where there are theoretically more resources for women, minors would seemingly be less prepared than an adult to have the courage & knowledge on how to go through the courts. Not that ANYONE should have to have permission from a judge for private medical treatment, but putting that burden on a group less likely to be able to jump that hurdle seems especially awful — but of course that’s the point.

  8. interesting post, scott, but I have to say, the introduction was condescending. to say that there is not much focus on how abortion regulation really works from the people talking about and defending reproductive choice is ignorant. There is a crapload of discussion about how the details of these policies affect women, and how even though they apease many voters, that is because many voters don’t see how it plays out on the ground. you didn’t need to start off by saying, gee we aren’t talking about this, here’s a book on it, to introduce what sounds like an excellent book. we are talking about this already.

  9. So what is with muslim or jewish or agnostic girls? Are they forced to listen to some born-again d***head, too?

  10. Saros:

    Revolting.
    This reminds me of the terrible “12 step” programs that addicts are forced to go through. All they are is religious indoctrination pure and simple and whats truly terrible is…
    They don’t work =(

    Hey, now.
    I know a lot of good folks in 12-Step programs who aren’t forced to go in the least and who have found a lot of help there. I know a lot of them with years and years of sobriety. Maybe these programs don’t work for everyone–maybe they didn’t work for you or a loved one, and I’m sorry if that’s so–but they do a lot of good for a lot of people. And maybe some meetings do the indoctrination thing–I don’t know. I know that in these parts, that isn’t the case.

    The rest of this whole conversation is interesting, and I don’t mean to derail, but I couldn’t just let that one go.

    Now, as to this, from SoE:

    So what is with muslim or jewish or agnostic girls? Are they forced to listen to some born-again d***head, too?

    In my experience, yes.

  11. Sylvie–you’re right; obviously, this is more about pro-choice discourse at the elite level, rather than the kind of activists more likely to be reading Feministe. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t a lot of great work being done about how abortion regulations affect women in the ground.

  12. I consider myself pretty fucking elite, and I’ve been discussing parental notification/consent for the last 7 or so years. I wrote a paper on it in grad school AND went to Planned Parenthood twice a week during law school to phone random people and ask them to vote against parental notification laws. (In California, we had parental notification propositions defeated twice.) I think it’s bullshit to pretend that activists aren’t elites and elites aren’t activists. Unless of course, by “elite” you could mean politician instead of those of us with elite educations and elite vocations. But even politicians know what is going on, but they compromise. Welcome to politics.

  13. To reply to little light
    The reason I state that 12 step programs do not work is not from personal experience in any way. I would not make such a broad sweeping comment on such a flimsy basis.
    12 step programs have a “non remission” rate. That is they permanently “Cure” someone of their addiction x% of the time. (I forget what it is exactly) Many people revert shortly (within a few months) after finishing the course.
    Do you know what the “non remission” rate for people who do not attend the programs is? Its exactly the same. Funny no?
    Also how can you say that the twelve step program can be non indoctrinating?
    Just look at the steps for crying out loud!

    We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable

    Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

    Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God

    Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

    Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

    Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character

    Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

    Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all

    Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others

    Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it

    Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out

    Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

    *Cough cough* Yeah not indoctrinating at all.

    Anyway sorry bout spouting off but this is a topic that really pisses me off. Forcing people to undergo these “treatments” is equivalent to government sponsored religious indoctrination.

    NYT article on this. I have a link to a few other statistical reviews but can’t seem to locate them.

  15. Of course, parental notification laws are about restricting access to abortion and only impact young women. There is no comparable law requiring parental notification when seeking treatment for STDs for example.
    These politicians and judges are nostalgic for Tobacco Road so they can feel superior to the women with missing teeth and a handful of stairstep children living in a ghetto apartment or tar paper shack. They also know that learning about and implementing a bypass option further narrows the window for obtaining a first trimester abortion.
    For the lurkers out there, parental notification has never been about concern for the pregnant teen, but about punishing the slut.

  16. I am personally rabidly prochoice. Adults should have access to freely available abortions at any time pre-delivery.

    But these are minors, not adults. And while they’re in a bad position (if they’re pregnant and don’t want to be) the whole concept of minority is that minors are less able to make competent decisions on their own. Similarly, minors are more able to be coerced. That’s part of the reason that they can disclaim contracts, for example.

    That coercion can easily (as we all know) happen from the conservative side. But it can also happen from our side. The court has to watch out for both those things.

    Do I hate prolife groups? yup. And I don’t especially want to throw them a bone. However, the court’s job here is NOT to “do what the girl wanted when she walked in.” Rather, it’s to be sure that she is making an informed, correct, decision. Because she’s a minor, there’s almost an assumption that she ISN’T correctly informed.

    I think it would be great if girls would go to planned parenthood and hear the “other side” if they’re planning on giving birth. But that doesn’t go through the courts, so it’s moot.

    I still detest sav-a-lif, though, mostly because I hate the christian aspect. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to require girls to demonstrate (somehow) that they have been exposed to, and considered, the pros and cons of both having and aborting a fetus.

  17. Last year I read an alarming piece in Time about these “Crisis Pregnancy Centers”.
    It’s upsetting that young women are forced to go to these centers in the first place, but it gets down right bone-chilling once you learn what these centers actually DO to pregnant ladies:

    Unqualified counselors perform premature ultrasounds on 1st trimester women who wish to terminate their pregnancy. They point out the heartbeat and (incorrectly) label other parts of the fetus’s body for the “mother”s’ perusal. All the while cooing “look at your BABY! This is your BABY’s heartbeat!” They never use the word “fetus”, this would diminish the emotional manipulation factor.

    Counselors with no medical training give women incorrect statistics about the heath risks of abortion and contraceptive methods. They told an undercover reporter that if she had an abortion she WOULD become infertile and WOULD get uterine cancer. They even upped the stat on the likelihood of an abortion-related fatality.

    The worst part about this is that the counselors didn’t seem to know any better. They seemed to believe that what they said was true, and that the scare tactics and emotional bullying was totally the right thing to do. Imagine how these practices could affect an emotionally distraught youth who has had limited sex education.

    I’m gonna look for the article online. I’ll return with a link if you’re interested!

  20. But these are minors, not adults. And while they’re in a bad position (if they’re pregnant and don’t want to be) the whole concept of minority is that minors are less able to make competent decisions on their own.

    Nowhere in Roe v. Wade does it separate minor females from adult females for the purposes of obtaining an abortion. If you are pregnant, you have a constitutional right to an abortion. Parental notification/consent laws violate that right. Not only do they violate a female’s constitutional right, they don’t work. My state had a parental notification law 5 years ago, it worked somewhat though our teen birthrate is one of 6 states that has risen in the past few years. Two years ago, the legislature passed a parental consent law. There has been a double digit increase in abandoned babies and self-inflicted injuries in just 2 years and it will continue.

  21. “That coercion can easily (as we all know) happen from the conservative side. But it can also happen from our side. The court has to watch out for both those things.”

    Just out of curiousity, how is a child deciding she shouldn’t have a child a bad decision. I’ve never met any pro-choice woman(though I have seen asshole men) coerce a pregnant woman into having an abortion. We have no vested interest in making women have abortions, whereas the pro-life movement does have a vested interest in preventing women from seeking them.

    “the pros and cons of both having and aborting a fetus.”

    Once again, what are the cons to aborting a fetus? If you act like there are cons to aborting a fetus, I can rest assured your minor daughter(if you had one) would attempt to circumvent parental consent laws.

    And, as I stated before, these minor laws only put more stress into an already stressful situations, and only hurt the people who need the help the most, young women in rural areas and young women from abusive families.

  22. Just out of curiosity, how is a child deciding she shouldn’t have a child a bad decision.

    Can’t say that it is, in a general sense. [shrug] How is a child deciding she SHOULD have a child a bad decision? Both are obviously irreversible, and major. Whether it’s a good or bad decision depends on the circumstances and who is making the judgment.

    Sometimes abortion is the best bet. Sometimes motherhood is. Sometimes adoption is. I don’t think any of those things are per se bad. They all can be, though.

    But reading your response I’m a bit confused–you seem to be implying (maybe I’m wrong) that abortion is always a good decision, or at least never a bad one. Am I reading you correctly?

    Once again, what are the cons to aborting a fetus? If you act like there are cons to aborting a fetus, I can rest assured your minor daughter(if you had one) would attempt to circumvent parental consent laws.

    Ignoring the personal attack for a moment… are you saying there are absolutely no cons to aborting a fetus? No problems, even possible ones?

    And as for the parenting thing: Helping my daughters understand the pros and cons of their decisions, until they are old enough to make those calls on their own without my help, is my job. Pretty much everything in life has pros and cons, you know.

  23. Hey Jill,

    I actually wrote a journal comment on this that is set to be published in the next issue of the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy. Since it’s not out yet, here’s a link to a previous draft:
    Judicial Recusal and a Minor’s Right to an Abortion

    The most ridiculous thing about these laws, and a giant logical breach the SC has never addressed in their abortion jurisprudence, is that under these notification schemes, the court is merely making a factual determination of whether or not a minor is mature enough to make the decision to have an abortion. And then if she’s not, whether or not an abortion is still in her best interests.

    Well, if a minor isn’t mature enough to make the medical decision to have an abortion, how could it possibly be in her best interests to force her to continue to carry the fetus to term, in which case she’s going to be responsible for making any and all pregnancy-related decisions?

    Of course, this is another flaw in the court’s logic, because whether or not a minor is considered mature enough to make medical decisions is dictated by the fact that she’s already made a medical decision, i.e. whether or not to carry the pregnancy to term.

    The whole thing is infuriating, especially since these sorts of statutes are not only supported by conservatives attempting to control women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy, but are often supported by more liberal politicians because they can be seen as being “pro-family” by legally requiring parents to be involved (save for a time-consuming, difficult, and needless judicial procedure to avoid parental notification).

  24. But these are minors, not adults. And while they’re in a bad position (if they’re pregnant and don’t want to be) the whole concept of minority is that minors are less able to make competent decisions on their own.

    Sailorman, the problem with this is that, if the minor is indeed so mature, how can it possibly be best for her to carry a pregnancy to term and be responsible for a newborn’s life? Also, this argument doesn’t really track very well in the context of a minor’s pregnancy, since in most states she is allowed to make any and all other health decisions regarding herself and the child for the purposes of carrying the pregnancy to term. Oddly enough, this allowance doesn’t include the ability to terminate her pregnancy. Wonder why.

  25. Yes, the argument that the minors are minors and therefore less able to make competent decisions only stands if legislators are willing to apply it equally to the decision to carry a pregnancy to term. But nobody of any conscience or morals whatsoever would force a fifteen-year-old to get an abortion because her parents thought it would be best for her, despite her stated desire to carry to term, even though she is less able to make competent decisions than they. I’ve yet to see a proposal stating that in order to obtain pre-natal care, a minor show that she has been informed about all the risks of pregnancy and childbirth–particularly not by people who have some kind of irrational ax to grind.

  26. “Ignoring the personal attack for a moment… are you saying there are absolutely no cons to aborting a fetus? No problems, even possible ones?”

    Aside from be shamed as a murdering slut(and that is not say you are doing the shaming, no personal attacks from me), no there really aren’t any cons to having an abortion, at least a safe, clean, doctor-performed abortion. It is a medical procedure no more serious than having your tonsils removed(I’ve had both, and I spent more time recovering from the tonsilectomy than my D&C). There are no physical or psychological side effects.

    The only adverse affects a woman suffers after an abortion are the ones where she feels remorse about her decision, b/c in our culture dirty sluts are supposed to feel bad about their decisions. If the dirty slut in question chose to keep the baby, there would be a crowd of people guilt-tripping her over that decision too. But these cons are not a result of the procedure itself, but by people who really should leave such decisions with those that have to live with them.

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