Abortion Law Covers A Range Of Tragedy

One of the hardest cases to make in all of contemporary political argument is the case against parental notification of minor daughters who seek abortions. It seems to make so much sense for both the parents and the teens. Of course, any of us would want to know if our young daughters needed an abortion, and of course, our daughters need our counsel and support.

Because adolescence is such a difficult and dangerous time of life, it is not unusual for communication between parents and teens to be at varying degrees of low ebb, especially on any aspect of life involving sex.

Although it is doubtful that any law can help reestablish good communication within a family - talk about something that “can’t be legislated” - still, surely an abortion is something any parent would want to know about. As the anti-abortionists often point out, your minor daughter can’t have her appendix out without your permission; obviously, you should know whether she needs an abortion. Abortion may be “minor surgery,” or even soon possible by taking a few pills, but it still involves emotional trauma.

So why not put the law on the side of parental notification? Normally, we make law for the average run of folks, from speed limits to dog-leash laws. But some laws must be carefully crafted to cover the rare exception, and parental notification is one of them. One size does not fit all.

As anyone who has ever been one can tell you, teenage girls are somewhat given to overdramatization. “Oh, I couldn’t tell my parents - they’d just KILL me,” runs a fairly common form of overdramatization. Except, of course, when they do.

It does happen, you know. And not just in cases of incest - when the child is pregnant by her own father. I doubt anyone who ever read that sad little piece in an Arizona newspaper a few years ago has ever forgotten it. The daughter of very strict parents had spent the night out with her boyfriend. To punish her, they took her out into the desert with her beloved pet dog, gave her a gun and told her to shoot the dog. Of course, she killed herself instead.

A freak story, surely? No. Anyone who works with suicidal teens, a phrase that can sometimes seem redundant, knows how hideously unhappy teenagers can make themselves over what are fairly normal vicissitudes of life. At an age when bad hair and zits are tragedies, really tough stuff like parental divorce and ruined romances and pregnancy are Mount Everests of trouble.

And the saddest part is that the girls who are least likely to be able to handle telling their parents are the “good girls.” The honor-roll students who are the apple of their parents’ eyes; Daddy’s pride and joy; Mom’s surrogate for all the success she never had in school - those are the girls who all too often would rather kill themselves than disappoint their parents so terribly. I know there are many anti-abortionists who believe that no 14-year-old girl is mature enough to make a decision to have an abortion on her own. These are the same people who seem to believe that a 14-year-old is mature enough to be a mother. I don’t agree, but that’s just my opinion.

So this is a case in which the law needs to be carefully written for the exceptional case - not just the cases of incest, of unknown frequency, but the more common cases in which, for one reason or another, teenage girls have a hard time communicating with their own parents. The law must be broadened to include almost any responsible adult who is close the girl: an aunt, a godmother, a teacher, a minister, a social worker - anyone the girl trusts. Even then, there will be tragedies.

I believe that a woman, even a very young woman, should be able to make her own decisions about her own body. But I also know this issue is perilous for politicians. The arguments against parental notification cannot be made in 30-second sound bites. The anti-abortionists are wellorganized and vote disproportionately to their presence in the population. And teenage girls don’t vote at all.

In Texas, a proposed parental notification bill originally provided for no exceptions. As the bill now stands, a girl may petition a court for an exception to the notification requirement. To sit in on those hearings where girls ask for such exemptions is to understand how sad and screwed up many families are. I can’t tell my parents because: I don’t know where they are, I don’t know who my father is, my mother is on crack, my father is the father, I haven’t been in touch with them for three years, my parents are opposed to abortion, my father will kill me.

More worrisome, perhaps, are the girls who never come to court, the girls for whom the whole structure - the whole idea of the official surroundings of a courtroom - is too scary, too public, too distant, too part of the grown-up world for them to even contemplate. So they do what girls always did before They go to the back alleys.

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