LIFE ISSUES NO. 2756

PARENTAL NOTIFICATION

Who’s best qualified to counsel a pregnant teen on the physical and psychological consequences of possibly aborting her unborn child?  Would it be (a) the boyfriend who impregnated her? (b) her fifteen-year-old drug-addicted girlfriend? (c) the counselor at the local abortion clinic which stands to make a tidy, taxpayer-funded profit from the procedure? or (d) the people who gave her life and who have cared for and loved her since her birth?

“Oh, definitely not the last,” cry the champions of choice who fret that the Supreme Court has sanctioned parental notification laws.  “Why, that is a flagrant violation of reproductive rights!” the abortion lobby laments.

Fortunately, the public doesn’t share this warped perspective.  Polls have consistently shown that 75% of the public believe that parents should be notified before their daughter under the age of 18 has an abortion—and some polls have run as high as 80%.  Some of these polls have included parental notification, but also parental consent.

But one is struck by the Mad Hatter quality of the current situation.  In most states a teenager needs her parents’ written permission to get an aspirin from the school nurse.  But the same minor child can waltz into an abortion clinic and submit to a potentially hazardous operation without so much as a by-your-leave to Mom and Dad.

The very same forces opposed to parental involvement—Planned Parenthood and its fellow travelers—are the ones who helped to create the teenage pregnancy crisis in the first place.  They did it by instructing pubescent boys and girls that sex of any sort is wholesome and should be indulged in with gusto.  They did it by teaching the mechanics of sex, completely divorced from any morality. 

They did it by offering birth control as the easy answer to the adolescent passions that they have been inciting, knowing full well that, even if the kids used the drugs and devices faithfully, and every single time, they would get pregnant anyway and that then Planned Parenthood and its allies would offer her abortion, again without her parents’ knowledge or consent. 

How can we complain about the decline of the family if we countenance a system in which parents are deliberately kept in the dark about a matter that involves potentially a high risk of harm to their children?

It’s time we think about this!

[01/28/02]