Welcome to Gaia! ::

I would like to begin by stating that this is not a pro-choice or pro-life sided issue. Notice the fact that it still allows for abortions.

This proposition was on the California voting ballot yesterday.

These are the results of the election.
No 3,574,013: 54%
Yes 3,033,015: 46%

The idea behind this proposition was to require minors to have their parents contacted before going through with an abortion. There is no medical procedure, besides a minor getting an abortion, that doesn’t require parental consent. A minor has to go as far as to get consent before taking aspirin at the nurses office. Why is abortion an exception to the rule?

The propaganda that the anti-notification advocates used was that there are those minors that have abusive parents that would badly punish the minor if they became pregnant. What they failed to mentioned, which was total bias on their part, was that the Parental Notification for Abortion proposition accounted for such conditions. If a minor has an abuse parent, one could contest the notification to a judge. This logic that “my parents will hurt me” could be applied to countless other situations. A minor steals from a convenient store; the parents are notified. A minor drinks underage; the parents are notified. A minor runs away from the cops; the parents are notified. Every one of those circumstances the parents could get excessively angry at the child and could abuse them. Why isn’t their any way for them to contest the notification of the parents in those situations? Because a minor is the responsibility of the parent. We aren’t fixing the fact there are abuse parents by giving them a means to hide their actions. Just like with every other instance, a parent should be notified. However, if the parent is abusive, they should be reported to the police, not because they have to be notified that the child did something wrong, but the fact that the parent is abusive.

FYI, I have pro-choice friends who are for this proposition and pro-choice friends who are against it.

The propaganda that the campaign ad used against this proposition was EXTREMELY biased. They also said in the voter’s book that this law would be a first step towards overturning Roe v. Wade. I started laughing. How is it an anti-abortion measure? It is an adherence to the law proposition.

I thought this would be a fun topic in here because I know people will have strong mixed views xd Also because when I woke up to find that it didn't pass, I was angry domokun

Please emotion driven statements out of this thread rolleyes i.e. "You don't understand!!"

(First of all, why do you have minor italicized all the time? Oh well.)

I'm torn on this issue.

I know for sure that I do not support parental consent to get an abortion. If parents cannot force sex on their daughter, and they cannot force their daughter to donate bone marrow, then they certainly can't force upon her any other bodily integrity violation.

Minors are the responsibility of the parents, but their responsibilities do not include the option to take away human rights.

Now, I'm actually torn on notification. It would be nice if the parents knew what was going on in such a major medical procedure (especially if something goes wrong.) On the other hand requiring notification makes it very easy for the parents to stop the girl from getting an abortion. And while a law could easily allow for a judge-sanctioned exception, but I have heard of judges that would not allow any exceptions set before them (You can't always be impartial.) Also, what of parents who gave no indication of abuse beforehand?

I don't like your analogy of teenager committing a crime vs. teen having an abortion. Wanting that new pair of Nikes is one thing, wanting to be rid of a pregnancy is another.

'Cos they're all crimes?

The privacy aspect of a parental notification law makes me cringe a bit. On the one hand, the parents should probably know that their children are having unprotected sex. Because pregnancy and abortion are not the worst consequences possible.

On the other, even a minor should be able to decide these matters on their own. And the overt purpose of a parental notification law is so that the parents can prevent the eventual abortion, making it very much a pro-life issue. Myself, I would rather the minor be the only one able to decide whether it goes on or not. Not the minor's mother, father, lover, doctor or priest.

Sorry, this is a peeve of mine. How do you know that the child in question is having unprotected sex just because she got pregnant?

I personally feel that while it would be nice, it'd get too convoluted.

Besides, by the bodily domain logic that upholds pro-choice paradigm in the first place, the child should have a right to their body regardless of the parent's views.

Yet according to statistics I've read, 54% of aborting women used oral contraception and ~46% used condoms. (Overlap there because some doubled up) Also a minority of aborting women are teenagers, I believe it was 16-19%.

But this is getting off-topic.

Except that the parents, like you, are likely to feel somewhat more strongly towards their child for "murdering their grandchild" than for swiping a candy bar. And will react accordingly.

I note that you cleverly left out the statistic that 70% of minors who abort already tell their parents regardless of the law. Of the remainders, the majority have a very good reason not to tell their parents. It's one of those self-moderating things. While I agree that a parent should know what's going on in their daughter's life, if parent-child relations are so ******** up already that the kid can't even turn to her folks when she has to get an incredibly painful, invasive, and expensive procedure done, then they have no right to know in the first place.

The statistics have already shown that this bill will not decrease the number of abortions but WILL markedly increased level of child abuse.

Somehow, those statistics don't jibe. Although the percentage of people who are having sex but don't intend to have children does overlap with both groups. (That is, people who use contraception, and people who have unwanted pregnancies to abort.)

Thing is, an intact condom is really, really effective.

'Fact, Mayo Clinic gives the rate of pregnancy with properly used condoms as 3%, and improperly used condoms at 14%. Which gives us a good 90%+ of folks who are happily pregnancy-free, assuming that more people use them properly than improperly.

I think the pill hovers in the 80% range.

So if almost 60% of the people going in for abortions were using birth control, then a disproprortionately large amount of the people who then become pregnant must go for abortions. Since they're, what, 30% at most of the people using it?