How state anti-choice laws let judges humiliate vulnerable teens

Boy, that <100% though.

Sucks to be those kids though, huh?!

5 Likes

Right? Fuck that “10%”.

Also, I love how vague he is about that statistic. Birth Control success or failure is dependent on a lot of factors, including the type of birth control, the individual woman herself, drugs she may be taking, etc etc etc.

3 Likes

Even if the teen in question has the resources to travel to another state consider where Florida is, geographically. Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi aren’t likely to be any friendlier.

2 Likes

[quote=“MadLibrarian, post:16, topic:42902, full:true”]
Obvious troll is obvious.

There are any number of reasons why a minor might be pregnant and want an abortion, including but not limited to rape, birth control failure (yes it happens) and incest. Add in parents who might not be supportive of the minor in trouble, let alone needing an abortion, and you have a recipe for disaster. Although why I am explaining this to someone who probably has heard it already from many sources is questionable.[/quote]
Not a troll at all. However, that is quite an effective way to attack somebody who disagrees with you. Good job.

However, let’s talk about rape. Are you suggesting that the parents do not need to KNOW if their child is raped? Are you really going to go there? Sorry, but the parents definitely have a right to be involved there.

Incest, the parents also definitely need to be involved. Especially if it involves an adult (molestation, for example), then the BOTH parents need to be involved, as well as the police.

As as far as not being supportive in the event of a child in trouble, OK. Let’s assume this is a good reason not to get the parents involved. How far does that extend? Should parents not be informed if the child is arrested, or abused? How about dropping out of school or being admitted to the hospital for a gunshot wound? The same logic should apply there, right?

Finally, need I point out that the behaviors that can lead to pregnancy are also the ones that can lead to such nice things as HPV, HIV, and hepatitis (all gifts that keep on giving)?

I am a parent of five children, four of them girls. I would like to be informed what my underage children are doing.

2 Likes

Education about proper use… I imagine that in FLA birth control education consists of holding a penny between your knees and praying for strength.

7 Likes

Perhaps Planned Parenthood needs to rent a suite on one of the Casino Cruises…

3 Likes

Uh, Incest … maybe one parent already too involved and other parent maybe already has a clue but isn’t rocking the marital boat?

7 Likes

What if they already are?

So the kid goes to the judge and tells him she was raped, and she’s told to go home? Its God’s will? Is this what you’re defending? Or are you defending the hypothetical judge who does the right thing and gets the kid some help, whatever that is.

I don’t see anybody making that claim, mainly because its not relevant to the story.
If there are some cases where its necessary to not involve the parents, its does not mean that society must collapse and that parents must never be involved or notified.
Nobody minds that a teenager gets told they need their parents permissions, but it seems that plenty of these cases are being dismissed without any real consideration.

Its a shame that kids can’t talk to their parents, for whatever reason, but you’ve got to recognize that if kids don’t feel they can do that and they also can’t be trusted to make decisions on their own, the parents have failed their child, in subtle but meaningful ways. Its the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night and I’m still a few years away from dealing with a teen.

8 Likes

The incest issue is a very important one. To those who wish to dismiss it, I wish that they might talk to a friend of mine who survived years of abuse at the hands of her father. She is deeply, deeply scarred and mentally ill from it, and it is not easy to hear what she went through - I can’t really listen to much of any of the details, it is so awful. To me, if there is one act of kindness you could show even if you deeply felt that abortion was wrong, it would be to make sure that any girl who was going through this horror would not have to bear a child that is the product of rape from her own father.

10 Likes

Totally agree with mid-to-late teens, but when you find kids (male and female) acting out sexually at 10, 11 or 12, it’s generally not because they legitimately feel a hormonal itch…it’s because they’ve been exposed to some sort of sexual abuse/trauma.

2 Likes

Not to mention bringing another child into that household.

5 Likes

Okay - well what about when the male parent is the one doing the raping and impregnating ? Do you think they would be an appropriate protector/guardian of their child who they…raped ? Do you suppose that they would give an honest account to a judge about how their daughter came to be pregnant ?

Just because you feel you are a good parent does not mean that other parents are.

HPV, HiV, hepatitis and Herpes are all sexually transmitted diseases. All of these are a virus. A virus does not discriminate and is not some wrath from god that smotes the immoral. Lots of people contracted a herpes infection from a) being born to a mother who is positive for herpes or b) being innocently kissed by a family member like a grandmother with a cold sore.

4 Likes

Oh, I know shudder. How anyone can convince themselves that there is anything holy about letting that situation continue is beyond me. No, whatever you can do to get someone out of that is your ticket to heaven.

I really hate when people are so smug about what other people’s lives are like. Having lived in a very rural area of Alabama, I did see awful poverty and the very limited options people have when that grow up in it - not just the lack of resources, but the lack of care that exists in some homes. It’s not fair to say that because one dad loves his children all fathers are great. All fathers aren’t great, all homes aren’t caring and loving. For some kids, the best thing that can happen is to escape away from their childhood homes as soon as they can, and a baby is a definite problem for someone seeking to lead a better life. I knew many very bright young girls who had no support for their education, and who were treated horribly by the school teachers who knew where they lived and thought they were dirt. If you want to make the world a better place, give those girls a chance to get away from the places that drain them and have a little care for themselves so they have some experience of love to share with their kids when they are ready.

I have known people who had kids really young, in middle school and in high school, and very rarely does that work out well for the mother - only when there is family on both sides that are supportive of the young parents. I think it’s incredible ignorant to believe that this is a situation many young women have available to them.

4 Likes

I remember a controversy a couple years ago over school nurses being able to provide birth control to middle school students (ages 11-15). A bunch of conservatives were up in arms screaming about how parents had a right to be involved in that decision.

My response was that if your 11 year old needs birth control, then the only involvement you should be having with them is during court-supervised counselling sessions. Seriously- How bad to you have to fuck up your child before this is even a concern? I’m just glad there are nurses and so forth that are able to at least provide triage to these kids.

7 Likes

It’s so hard to say why teens behave certain ways. I know teenagers whose parents most all would agree are doing a good job, but I suspect these girls are “sexually active,” and possibly were in middle school. A lot of the parents I know seem to not talk to their kids about sex in real ways and want to deny their daughters’ sexuality altogether and so, from what I overhear and from what my daughter tells me, many girls do not feel their parents would understand at all their feelings about sex. These are super privileged girls, in one of the wealthiest areas of the country, who get a year of health education in high school that covers a lot of sex ed, so I can only imagine what it is like for the kids who are not in good situations at all. I think it’s just best that there be a way for them to get contraception somehow if they need it, for whatever reason.

3 Likes

These girls do recognize that they need help, that’s why they’re seeking abortions in the first place. That doesn’t mean that the parents are necessarily the right people to go to in seek of help. Did you miss the part about how some of them were fleeing meth-cooking parents who had been pimping them out?

Not to mention all the girls who become pregnant through rape, incest, etc. Or the ones who used birth control and got pregnant anyway. “Any child who gets pregnant” my ass.

8 Likes

Over in the UK it’s a simple matter of patient confidentiality. My doctor does not have my permission to discuss anything with my parents, once I can enter on my own, without my consent.

Also, contraception is available for free if you’re a minor. And some charities provide it well into your twenties.

3 Likes

Nuke the site from orbit.

3 Likes

It’s the only was to be sure.

1 Like

There are four adopted children in my immediate family. There is no such thing as an “adoption industry” as far as I know. That phrase implies a single entity, or at least some consistency of motive and/or behavior, such as the “mercenary” behavior you ascribe.

In the United States, adoption is regulated by an inconsistent patchwork of laws and regulations that can vary not only by state, not only by county, not only by township but literally from agency to agency. For example, in my state, the agencies are all state chartered (there is no such thing as a wholly private or wholly public adoption agency here) and their charters are individualized. But none of them have any ability to generate profit, and none of them have financial means to kick back graft to anyone. Their staff are pretty poorly paid; typically, the workers are there because they have social consciences or some other non-financial motives. These agencies are financially audited and are constantly under scrutiny because the politicals who determine who gets a charter are desperately afraid of being implicated in career-destroying 19th century style baby farming scandals.

By contrast, in Maryland I know of at least one case where a social worker was openly soliciting bribes for preferred access to adoptees, because that’s apparently not seen as a problem there (in my state, the agency’s charter would be revoked for that, with headlines in the papers). And in some states there’s no restriction at all on the ability of agencies to turn a profit from foreign adoptions (in-country adoptions are usually regulated separately, although probably not always).

So while it’s certainly possible that in some US states or foreign countries, your statement might have some limited applicability, it’s close to impossible for a giant abortion-denying massively profitable “adoption industry” to exist in the economic and political conditions of the USA today. If you believe otherwise, you are going to need to supply a great deal of irrefutable, independently verifiable evidence to convince me. The idea is implausible, given my own observations, despite all the Catholic propaganda to the contrary.

In my interactions with adoptive parents, adoptees, and social workers I have rarely met anyone in “the system” whose primary concerns were not the children, the birth mothers, and the adoptive families. I have met quite a few workers who were more concerned about one or both of the first two groups and saw the third as only a means to an end! But I have never met anyone who was motivated at all by monetary rewards. Not even once, not in twenty years.

2 Likes