‘Adult Support System’ Knows Best?

Eileen and Stan Roberts of Virginia had a 14-year-old daughter who began to show signs of depression. Fearing the worst, Eileen searched her daughter’s room for evidence of drugs and found instead a questionnaire from a local clinic. This was how the mother learned of the abortion of her grandchild, arranged with the 16-year-old father and paid for with the help of an adult “friend” who also provided transportation. But worse was to come. The Roberts’ daughter needed several weeks of psychiatric hospitalization for treatment of abortion-induced depression. In the midst of this hospitalization, it was discovered that the doctor who had done the abortion had failed to remove the entire pregnancy, and a second operation was necessary to extract placental material left behind. Before this operation, however, the doctor needed written parental consent, not required for the abortion surgery. The total medical bill paid by these parents for complications of a botched legal abortion they didn’t even know their daughter was having was close to $27,000.

The Roberts’ experience pales next to that of the Ravenell family, whose daughter Dawn, 13, went to a New York facility for a legal abortion. Here is her mother’s testimony to a state committee considering a parental notification law: “My husband and I received a phone call from the hospital. . . . I didn’t know that Dawn had received general anesthesia that day from a doctor [at an abortion clinic] who never bothered to ask her the last time she had eaten. . . . I didn’t know that all of the fetus was not removed. Fetal bones that were left would be discovered during an autopsy. I didn’t know that Dawn was left unattended in the recovery room, went into cardiac arrest, slipped into a coma and was sent by ambulance all alone to the hospital. . . . I was notified, but only in time to make funeral arrangements.”

New York has no parental notification law. California has passed such a law, and it allows a judge to waive the requirement for notifying parents. But the California law may never go into effect, because it is vehemently opposed by several organizations, whose members apparently feel that parents have no business being involved in their children’s reproductive decisions except as bill payers. Last week, the California Supreme Court heard arguments from the American Academy of Pediatrics against the law.

Parental consent for abortion is not an issue involving one’s ethical views about abortion, but rather an issue of a parent’s or guardian’s right and responsibility to assist an inexperienced child to make a decision that will affect her whole future. Some parents would give wholehearted support to a 15-year-old who desired termination of her pregnancy; others would not. In any case, parents are likely to secure safe and competent medical help for their children. Yet the pediatricians’ group has positioned itself against parents. A document entitled “The Adolescent’s Right to Confidential Care When Considering Abortion,” written last year by the academy’s committee on adolescence, states that parental inclusion in the decision process “does increase the risk of harm to the adolescent by delaying access to appropriate medical care.” Would the same statement be made if an adolescent needed urgent surgery to remove a cancer? In fact, abortion and reproductive conditions are the only exceptions to parental consent requirements for minors; a dentist can’t even pull a tooth without a parent’s signature. The document also says that most notification requirements “are restricted to traditional definitions of biological parents or legal guardians and fail to address the complexity and diversity of modern family structures and adult support systems relevant to adolescents.” In many cases, the “adult support system” may be the adult male who fathered the teenager’s child and has no desire to be stuck with support payments.

Parental notification laws have either reduced or left unchanged the number of abortions performed on underage girls, even when figures for out-of-state abortions are factored in. For example, an extensive study of the effects of the Minnesota Parental Notification Act showed that pregnancy, abortion and birth rates in adolescents declined without an increase in abortions in adjacent states. A less extensive study on Mississippi’s law also showed a decline in abortions.

All of us, pro-choice and pro-life alike, are happy when abortion rates fall and births occur to mothers who are mature enough to handle the responsibility. A well-crafted parental notification law facilitates this outcome and allows parents to help their children through troubled times, a job they can do better than the state or the boyfriend or the local abortion clinic.