JohnFKennedy
Junior Chimp
Posts: 7,448
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« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2004, 02:33:08 PM » |
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As people seem to be talking more about parental CONSENT for abortion than parental NOTIFICATION, I will step in and debate (mainly for the sake of debating) that parental consent should not be a necessity.
Firstly, let's look at something that Nation raised. A friend of his was thrown out of the house for having an abortion when her parents discovered. If we require parental consent for abortions, and thus require parental notification, this is the sort of thing that will happen. The reason for this is that those children in a stable and supportive family will already discuss issues such as abortion with their parents if such an issue were to arise. So a requirement for consent/notificatiion of parents would not really affect these people.
So, who does it affect? Weill, it affects those children who are in a family that is generally unstable and as such unsupportive of the child. This means that these children will either a) be forced into a confrontation with their parents over the issue of abortion, b) be forced to run away to escape the problems that could arise, c) try to hide the pregancy from their parents and d) perhaps the most dangerous of all, be forced into a backstreet abortion.
If the children cannot rely on their parents for support, if they know they will be abused by their family for either a) getting pregnant or b) wanting an abortion, what are they going to do? They are going to turn to illegal methods of pregnancy termination and this causes serious problems. If children go in for a backstreet abortion they are putting themselves at serious risk because those performing such methods are generally untrained and generally botch the jobs. As this is the case, the whole idea of requiring parental consent or notification leads to more young deaths as children seek alternative ways to terminate a pregnancy, rather than face an unsupportive family. The other possiblity here is that the girl attempts to carry out an abortion herself (there have been cases of such issues arising) which is even more dangerous than a backstreet abortion. All parental consent/notification for abortion does, is cause problems for children that women had before abortion was legalised.
Not only on these potential grounds would parental consent cause more harm to the mother. Parental consent takes time to obtain and the more time it takes, the more dangerous an abortion becomes. The longer a pregnancy lasts, the more dangerous the abortion becomes so by requiring parental consent, we force the mother to wait for an abortion and as such put her into more risk than she would otherwise face.
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Having debated this issue a few times in formal debates (although strangely always on the other side of the table) I have a general idea of the arguments for and against this.
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