The missing piece of the right-wing puzzle

July 21, 2006

Let’s see, we’ve seen the anti-gay amendment, the pseudo-patriotism proposal, the more-tax-cut-for-millionaires bill, and a multi-pronged approach to undermine the separation of church and state. That covers just about every part of the legislative agenda the GOP’s far-right base wants from Congress in advance of an election — except abortion.

Don’t worry; they’re getting to that.

Senate Republicans are pushing forward with legislation, which lawmakers likely will start debating today, that would protect parents’ right to be involved in their teenage daughter’s abortion decision.

Republican leaders hope to vote on the bill next week…. The last time the emotionally charged issue came before the Senate, in 1998, the bill failed to garner 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, and failed 54-45. […]

This bill would make it a federal crime to knowingly circumvent a state’s parental consent or notification law by taking an underage girl to another, more lenient state to help her obtain an abortion. Violators would face fines and up to one year in prison, unless the abortion was needed to save the girl’s life. The girl couldn’t be prosecuted.

There are a couple of important angles to this — not including the obvious election-year pandering — starting with the fact that these parental-notification laws don’t work in reality the way conservatives want them to.

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

Conservatives seem to believe, and have consistently argued, that parental-notification laws will reduce the number of abortions because parents wouldn’t allow the procedure. The data culled by the NYT showed the opposite: “[S]ome workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them.”

As for the politics of parental-consent laws, Matthew Yglesias explained really well last year why Dems should oppose these proposals and why the reasonable-sounding arguments are wrong.

The main effect of the laws is to intimidate such women out of getting abortions for fear of what their parents (most likely fathers) will do to them if they’re told. Now if you believe abortion is murder, this is a great deal. From within the relevant class of people, a certain number are successfully intimidated out of having abortions. A sub-set of these women probably wind up being subjected to physical abuse by their parents, but a few beatings is a small price to pay for cutting down on the number of baby killers. What’s more, from the crass political perspective, it makes liberals look unreasonable and extreme to propose these laws. And, indeed, it does have that effect. If any Democrat wants to tell me he needs to support parental notification laws to stay electorally viable, I’ll probably believe him.

Still, this stuff sucks. The country does not need more teen mothers, does not need more child abuse, and doesn’t need bus drivers getting thrown in jail for letting pregnant women get on board. To be perfectly frank about it, women under 18 are the last group of people we should be subjecting to intense pressure to carry their pregnancies to term. Arguments that the aggregate impact of these laws will be less teen sex rather than more teen mothers are purely fatuous.

Something for Dems to consider when the vote in the Senate comes up next week.

Matthew Yslesias got most of it. He forgot the Republican’ts base calling all acts of pre-marital sex shameful and the Republican’ts refusing to fund day care and other assistance for young mothers. And it doesn’t help that Republican’ts go around refering to the babies as bastards.

To suggest to a child that she is a shameful hussy if she gets pregnant is THE MAJOR encourgement for teenage abortions. After all, sex doesn’t show, but pregnancy does.

And there is something wrong about the notion that parents get to decide if their child gets an abortion when they seem clueless to the fact that she’s been having sex. After all, if she is a minor, parents can’t legally ‘allow’ her to have sex outside of marriage.

  • For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

    No shit. NONE of the stuff they have done in terms of abortion legislation, sex-ed, abstinance-only, has had a positive effect on the the number of abortions. The only conclusion can come up with is that they care much more about demagoguing the issue than actually solving it.

    It is pure pander and politics absent any actual policy.

  • The party of Ralph “forced abortions” Reed wants to help reduce abortions.

    Credibility problems?

  • Let’s see, we’ve seen the anti-gay amendment, the pseudo-patriotism proposal, the more-tax-cut-for-millionaires bill, and a multi-pronged approach to undermine the separation of church and state.

    What about guns? Repeal the Brady Law maybe? Or how about tax deductions for gun purchases. I mean, we’ve seen the “God & Gays” part of the trifecta…what about Guns?

  • Let’s cut through all this abortion controversy and get down to the ultimate solution: chastity belts for boys and girls. Get married (to a hetero) and you can get yours unlocked. Till then, we can have priests guard the keys — oh wait, that won”t work either!

  • It’s as if they believe that the only way a teenage girl would get an abortion is if she went behind her parent’s backs– as though there aren’t a lot of pro-choice parents out there who take their daughters to the clinic.

    I think they also underestimate the number of anti-abortion parents who are suddenly, briefly pro-choice when their 14-year old daughter comes crying to them.

  • Ugh, I wasn’t finished, sorry for the choppy grammar above.

    Anyways, they seem to be writing this legislation as if they believe that all parents in America are anti-abortion, as if there are no parents in the country who would totally support their daughter’s choice to have an abortion. There are plenty of young women who don’t need parental notification laws to force them to tell their parents, because their parents are the first people they told and are the ones taking them to the Planned Parenthood clinic.

    I don’t think many of them can imagine what it is like to have a respectful, honest relationship with their children.

  • If parents, when informed, are more likely to agree with or even advocate abortions for their teenager daughters, isn’t the argument that these girls will be beaten if the law is passed a weaker argument?

    I’d wager that most pregnant teens tell at least one of their parents, because they need different forms of support, including help paying for the abortion. (Does this law require informing both parents?)

    For the minority in fear, I’d also wager that a father who would beat his daughter for getting pregnant, most likely would beat her for all sorts of other things. I don’t see daugher beatings increasing, one way or the other.

    So, as a pro-choice liberal I ask: why should liberals give conservatives electoral ammunition by opposing what most Americans believe reasonable and for which there is now evidence of minimum harm?

    Are we fighting incrementalism or are we just stubborn?

  • The difference between liberals and conservatives is that when something doesn’t work, liberals want to try something different, while conservatives want to do the same thing with more “will”.

  • Paul –

    Good point but I do think it’s worth it to fight this. Maybe most teenaged girls who are unfortunate enough to get pregnant do tell their parent(s), and those who do make that decision should be applauded. The problem is that you are precluding a young woman from making a decision that dramatically affects her body and her life unless she complies with some arbitrary condition. And I say ‘arbitrary’ because there does not appear to be any stated purpose for requiring this (there are, of course, unstated reasons, which I guess appear to be unfounded based on the NYT). It is such an incredibly complex, difficult, heart-wrenching decision to have to make and to have to make it at such a young age makes it all the more difficult. I would hope that all people who have to do this would have the necessary support network to make the decision that is right for her. But it still has to be her decision and putting conditions on it is just wrong.

    So I think it is fighting incrementalism and is necessary, IMHO.

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