Feminists For Choice

Hot on the heels of Arizona’s recent passage of anti-choice legislation, a federal appeals court upheld Illinois’s parental consent law. According to the Huffington Post:

Anti-abortion activists applauded the appeals court’s decision as a long-overdue victory, while opponents of the law, which went unenforced during years of legal wrangling, said the measure was guaranteed to usher in dangerous problems.

“It’s about time the law was approved,” said Thomas Brejcha, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, which fought to have the measure enforced. “It’s ridiculous that it took this long to get a decision.”

Lorie A. Chaiten of the American Civil Liberties Union, which battled to keep the law from going into effect, said the law “creates unnecessary, dangerous hurdles to accessing essential health care for young women facing an unintended pregnancy in the state of Illinois.”

The appeals court described the measure as “a permissible attempt to help a young woman make an informed choice about whether to have an abortion.” It does not require teens to get their parents’ consent, only to notify them beforehand.

A provision of the law allows girls to bypass that by notifying a judge instead, a procedure that the ACLU argued would not be workable in practice.

The appeals court’s three-judge panel brushed aside that claim.

“We acknowledge that there might be practical problems with the procedure at issue here – it may be intimidating for a minor to navigate the process of presenting her case to a judge, for instance,” said the 35-page opinion written by Judge Richard D. Cudahy for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“But we fail to see a better alternative,” it said. “Abortion, no matter how it is confronted, may present intimidating choices to the minor woman who faces it.”

The alternative is to not have parental consent laws. Teenagers are aware enough to know if telling their parents of a pregnancy would pose a risk. Some teens are at risk of being abused by their parents if they tell them they’re pregnant. Some might become homeless because their parents have disowned them. And the research shows that teens who have a good relationship with their parent(s) are already likely to tell them about the pregnancy and include them in the decision making process about seeking abortion anyway. Parental consent laws do nothing to involve engaged parents in the process – they simply put at-risk teens in at a higher risk of being abused or neglected as a result. These laws are not about the health and welfare of teenage girls – they’re simply about controlling women and keeping them in their place.