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Monday, March 06, 2006

When push comes to shove, parents don't want their babies having babies
Posted by Jill | 7:38 AM

Parental notification is not the magic bullet that the Christofascists think it is for reducing the number of abortions among minors:

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.

[snip]

Yet the Times analysis of the states that enacted laws from 1995 to 2004 — most of which had low abortion rates to begin with — found no evidence that the laws had a significant impact on the number of minors who got pregnant, or, once pregnant, the number who had abortions.

A separate analysis considered whether the existence or absence of a law could be used to predict whether abortions went up or down. It could not. The six states studied are in the South and West: Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. (A seventh state, Oklahoma, also passed a parental notification law in this period, but did not gather abortion data before 2000.)

But some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

[snip]

Abortion rates have been dropping nationwide since the mid-1980's, most precipitously for teenagers. But in three states — Arizona, Idaho and Tennessee — the percentage of pregnant minors who had abortions rose slightly after the consent laws went into effect.
[snip]

Of the remaining decline in teenage abortion rates in the Times study, Dr. Joyce said that some of it might be attributed to minors going out of state for abortions. The health departments in these states do not track data on such abortions, but in three previous studies of states where such data were available, completed before 1991, two found that any drop in minors' abortions was matched by an increase in minors getting abortions out of state.

[snip]

"I see far more parents trying to pressure their daughters to have one," said Jane Bovard, owner of the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, N.D., a state where a minor needs consent from both parents. "As a parent myself, I can understand. But I say to parents, 'You force her to have this abortion, and I can tell you that within the next six months she's going to be pregnant again.' "

Renee Chelian, director of Northland Family Planning Centers in the Detroit area, said she had had to call the police on parents who wanted their daughters to have abortions, "because they threaten physical violence on the kids."

Ms. Chelian added that the laws might have unseen effects, including driving some teenagers to try to abort their pregnancies on their own.

"Kids talk among themselves," she said. "When we tell them they need to go to court or tell their parents, that's when they tell us there's a Web site" for chemicals or herbal remedies that claims to induce abortions.


It's no surprise to me that parental notification laws often result in parents wanting their daughters to have abortions. Parents can see the impact that a baby will have on their daughter's life; and also the impact of carrying a pregnancy to term and then giving the baby up.

Studies like this underscore the fact that even people in "blue states" cannot rest easy. Once it's shown that girls and women are crossing state lines to have an abortion, we'll start seeing laws against performing abortions on out-of-state residents. And then we'll see a full-court press on contraception. The Christofascists will do whatever it takes to ensure that women are duly punishment for nonchastity. Because they feel that's the only barrier against the impulses they cannot control in themselves.
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