Quote:
Originally Posted by aephi alum
It's also worth noting that seven of these ten states require parental consent, and an eighth (Georgia) requires parental notification, for a minor to get an abortion. If I had been unlucky enough to become pregnant at age 15 (unlikely as I wasn't sexually active back then, and if I had been, I would have insisted on a condom), I could have walked into any abortion clinic in New York and said, "I want an abortion." But if I had lived in Mississippi, where the consent of BOTH parents is required, my uber-religious pro-life parents would have prevented me from getting an abortion. I would have had to carry the pregnancy to term and then either place the child for adoption or wave bye-bye to a college education and a career.
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I think differences in culture may influence this decision even more that the law itself. I think if you look at abortion rates by states, you don't see a big spike in the rates of abortion of women right over the age at which they can get abortions without parent consent. To me this suggest that the attitude about abortion (or maybe easy availability of abortion) may be different period, rather than the just the parent notification laws.
And going by personal experience with the couple of pregnant teens I've known, they knew where to get condoms or other forms of birth control, and they knew how people got pregnant. Some even knew from close friends exactly how difficult parenting was. That knowledge didn't information their behavior though. The fun of sex and the "it won't happen to me" thinking (as well as "it might be fun to have a kid" thinking in a couple of cases) override the formal instruction they've been giving.
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