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parental notification laws
Sep. 6th, 2010 11:38 amHere's a very informative blog post about parental notification laws and why they're such an awful idea. I think a lot of reasonable, mostly-pro-choice people would say "well, the parents have a right to know!" This post explains the problems with that.
What really struck me was how parental notification laws make getting an abortion a whole lot harder than getting any other medical procedure for patients under 18. Any time someone under 18 needs medical treatment, someone over 18 has to sign for them but in other cases, there aren't all these strict requirements for IDs and birth certificates and it has to be two parents, even if one has been absent or dead for years. I was against parental notification to begin with, because abortion shouldn't be treated as something special and different from other medical procedures, but I didn't even realize the extent to which they effectively deny access to a lot of people.
What really struck me was how parental notification laws make getting an abortion a whole lot harder than getting any other medical procedure for patients under 18. Any time someone under 18 needs medical treatment, someone over 18 has to sign for them but in other cases, there aren't all these strict requirements for IDs and birth certificates and it has to be two parents, even if one has been absent or dead for years. I was against parental notification to begin with, because abortion shouldn't be treated as something special and different from other medical procedures, but I didn't even realize the extent to which they effectively deny access to a lot of people.
