Parental Notice and Consent Requirements: Neither Pro-choice nor Pro-life

JB

Parental notice and consent laws, which are quite popular, are premised on an idea of choice, but the relevant actor is the family instead of the individual woman. The family decides whether the woman will get an abortion. That sort of paternalism is unacceptable for adults, but many Americans embrace it for minor children, on the grounds that parents are asked to consent for other significant surgeries their children undergo.

Abortion rights groups are worried that parents will prevent children from having abortions they would otherwise choose (just as pro-life groups are hoping this will be the case) but the statistics from the Times suggest that the cumulative effect of the laws is not very great; indeed, the story reports, some parents urge their children to have abortions.

Thus even if parental notification and consent laws cause some minors not to have abortions, they may also cause some minors to have abortions when their parents would prefer it. In one sense, that's not what either pro-choice or pro-life people wanted. Pro-life people wanted to reduce the total number of abortions, while pro-choice people want the decision to be made by the individual woman and not forced on her by her family.

Parental notification and consent laws, however, are only one arrow in the quiver of pro-life groups. Bans on partial birth abortion, which the Supreme Court will revisit later this year, are another. However, these laws affect only a very small number of women each year, and the lack of a health exception in the Federal law may actually prevent almost no abortions; if the partial birth abortion procedure is safer in some small number of cases, banning it would simply make a small number of late term abortions that would happen anyway less safe. Thus, like parental notification and consent laws, these laws may have largely symbolic effects.

It would be well worth doing surveys that compare the effect of parental notification and consent laws with TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws that impose fairly burdensome licensing and inspection obligations on abortion clinics, and with waiting periods laws that require women to make multiple trips to obtain abortions (which can be especially burdensome for women in rural areas). It is possible that these laws have the greatest impact on reducing the number of abortions by constricting opportunities for poor women and women in rural areas. If so, they may do comparatively little to hinder women in large urban areas or women who are comparatively affluent however. Once again, the effect on the overall number of abortions may not be as great as pro-life advocates have hoped; the effect of TRAP laws and waiting period laws may be mostly to make access to abortions difficult for the poorest women and for those with the fewest resources to raise children on their own.

Finally, it is worth considering that the reform that has done more to reduce the total number of abortions in the years since abortion was legalized in the United States is better access to and education about contraception. If pro-life forces are particularly interested in reducing the total number of abortions, they might join with pro-choice groups to promote the use of contraception and prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place. Abstinence programs aimed at teenagers can be a part of a larger effort at reducing total unwanted pregnancies, but by themselves they are unlikely to do the job.

Increased focus on making contraception widely available, especially to young people, educating them in how to use contraception, and emphasizing the importance of using it is probably the single most effective reform that the pro-life movement might make to reduce the total number of abortions in the United States.

Such a program might be acceptable to significant parts of the pro-life movement, but it may be unpalatable to others, either because they have moral and religious qualms about contraception, or because promoting contraceptive use does nothing to stem sexual activity by unmarried people or encourage greater chastity among women. That is to say, for important segments of the pro-life movement, the fight over abortion is not just a fight about reducing abortions, but is connected to a larger struggle about proper behavior, particularly the sexual behavior of women. For these parts of the pro-life movement, the discovery that parental notification and consent laws are not significantly reducing the number of teenage abortions may be doubly upsetting, for it also suggests that these laws are not significantly affecting the sexual behavior of teenagers.