Rodney Tom’s Senate — in their continuing effort to keep social issues off the table — have passed a parental notification bill though the Senate Law & Justice Committee. I realize this isn’t going to become law any time soon. I don’t know if it would even pass the state Senate, and if it did, it wouldn’t get the time of the day in the House and if it somehow managed to get through that, it would be vetoed. But it’s disturbing that it has gotten as far as it has.
Now don’t get me wrong: In an ideal world, minors who need abortions would talk to their parents, but there are reasons why minors wouldn’t tell their parents. And while the law proposed recognizes that in some cases, it’s cruel in the extreme to force a 15 year old trying to abort her father’s child to talk to a superior court judge before she can go forward. There are pregnant girls who have legit reasons to not want to have that conversation: Maybe they’re afraid that they’ll be disowned, or sent to one of those troubled teen camps, for example. Even if you want to push some bullshit narrative about those flighty children today, they are still the ones who would have to carry the child and live with it. In an ideal world a parent should help their children out in that situation.
But we aren’t in an ideal world, and ultimately it isn’t the parent’s decision. If a parent wants to be notified in that situation, they should spend the previous decade and a half or so proving that they’re worth the conversation, not having the state force it.
[h/t to WA NARAL who would like you to write your senator here]
In the interest of efficiency and transparency, why don’t they just package all of their abortion measures together in one bill, and call it the Abortion Providers and Clients Harassment Act?
I see the Brits, being the lovely people they are, finally got around to pardoning Alan Turing a couple months ago.
He saved their asses in World War 2, and they showed their gratitude by turning him into a criminal and drove him to suicide for being gay.
Next time, if there is one, maybe the world’s mathematical geniuses should just let the bloody limeys go under. Sending them packing from the 13 Colonies was the best piece of work our forebears ever did.
@2 At the rate Cameron and his Tory pals are dismantling their own country, there may well not be a “next time”.
@1 That woudn’t serve their purposes at all. Granted, none of these measures has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming law. The true intent is to “energize the base” by drawing attention to all the old “divide-and-conquer” issues.
You’re forgetting that pregnancies result from family incest. These laws are child-molester protection acts.
Duh. Is “family incest” like a “house home.”
Democrats the “Your Children belong to all of us” party.
Bruce Dammeier also signed onto an earlier bill that would have made it impossible to get a divorce for two years. Living in beautiful downtown Puyallup is like living in the Idaho of Pierce Country.