Where I'm coming down is, IF it's a dichotomy between protecting the rights of the girl raped by her step-father and protecting the rights of the loving mother? I pick the girl.
Wild monkey love or tender Sarah McLachlan love?
Xander ,'Him'
Natter 37: Oddly Enough, We've Had This Conversation Before.
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Jesse - Jul 20, 2005 10:44:00 am PDT #1543 of 10002
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.
ChiKat - Jul 20, 2005 10:44:25 am PDT #1544 of 10002
That man was going to shank me. Over an omelette. Two eggs and a slice of government cheese. Is that what my life is worth?
But if some 30-year-old teacher has gotten a 12-year-old student pregnant, I would say the opposite.
In this case, it's statutory rape and covered under those laws.
Jesse - Jul 20, 2005 10:45:06 am PDT #1545 of 10002
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.
But there are a lot of big and scary things that teenagers go through that they keep secret from their parents,
Like, nearly everything, IME.
Scrappy - Jul 20, 2005 10:46:09 am PDT #1546 of 10002
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
In an ideal world, parental rights would be uppermost, but we don't live in that world. I see it as akin to child abuse reporting laws--the possiblity of harm is so great in the immediate moment that parental rights come second until the child is safe. In an ideal world, where all parents had their childrens' best interests at heart, a kid showing up at school with a bruised arm would not cause authorities to show up at a family's home and grill the parents, but we don't live in that world--and good parents are the ones who suffer a loss of rights.
bon bon - Jul 20, 2005 10:47:57 am PDT #1547 of 10002
It's five thousand for kissing, ten thousand for snuggling... End of list.
I'm not sure a "right to parent" is at issue here-- it seems to be a "right to stop your child's abortion."
Jessica - Jul 20, 2005 10:48:16 am PDT #1548 of 10002
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset
Where I'm coming down is, IF it's a dichotomy between protecting the rights of the girl raped by her step-father and protecting the rights of the loving mother? I pick the girl.
Exactly. There's no contest in my mind.
Lyra Jane - Jul 20, 2005 10:49:47 am PDT #1549 of 10002
Up with the sun
In this case, it's statutory rape and covered under those laws.
But would Planned Parenthood (or whoever) report that to the authorities? I thought that they didn't, and that pro-life activists had been making a big fuss about that fairly recently.
Lyra Jane - Jul 20, 2005 10:53:18 am PDT #1550 of 10002
Up with the sun
IF it's a dichotomy between protecting the rights of the girl raped by her step-father and protecting the rights of the loving mother? I pick the girl.
On the other hand, it could be argued that in protecting the girl, you're also protecting the stepfather.
As I've said, my feelings on this are complicated. In the end, I come down on the side of less regulation of abortion vs. more, but I would hope Planned Parenthood and similar programs would offer more help to girls who were victims of incest or rape than just the abortion.
Fred Pete - Jul 20, 2005 10:54:28 am PDT #1551 of 10002
Ann, that's a ferret.
Also, I think the parental notification law furthers the notion that children are chattel, who have no agency of their own, no control over what goes on in their lives.
The law gives a lot of authority to parents of minor children. I can see Cindy's point that it doesn't make a lot of sense to allow a minor to decide to have an abortion without parental notification but not to make a million other decisions. (Though there's also an argument that, once the child has reached the legal age of consent to have sex, the child is also old enough to consent to an abortion. But I've been fighting a cold for several days, and my sinuses are still plugged up, so I don't have the energy to make it.)
A question for the hivemind -- What would happen if the minor makes an investigation-worthy claim that her parents would hurt/kill her if they found out she'd become pregnant? What are the odds that she'd be sent back to her parents while an investigation went on? Because there's a built-in time limit to reach a decision -- she could only hide the pregnancy for so long.
Jesse - Jul 20, 2005 10:55:17 am PDT #1552 of 10002
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.
On the other hand, it could be argued that in protecting the girl, you're also protecting the stepfather.
Letting the girl have the abortion now does not keep her from going to the police later. Anyway, I don't really think that the person who's been raped and not gone to the police is going to tell Planned Parenthood how they got pregnant.