by Penny Phillip

Created on: December 18, 2008   Last Updated: December 20, 2008

As a parent, it seems to me ridiculous that this question even has to be debated. In our society, parents are expected to take responsibility for the acts of their children and to provide them with health care, among other basic needs. If underage children are to be allowed to usurp the rights of parents in any regard, then they (or the adults enabling them) need to be ready to take over full responsibility for themselves.

Even in cases where parental beliefs interfere with giving life-saving medical treatment to a child, there are guidelines determining how and when doctors can overrule the parents. If a child cannot usurp parental authority to choose life-saving medications or procedures for herself, how then can she have that freedom only for abortion, which is not a life-saving procedure?

It seems to me that the basic problem is that this is because abortion, instead of being seen as the optional medical procedure that it is, has been made into a political football. Unlike other medical procedures, the abortion issue has become more about women's rights than about real risks and benefits to a real person. This is the only reasonable explanation I can offer to explain why rational adults would leave such a serious decision up to kids whose mental processes do not involve consideration of the immediate and long-term consequences of their actions. By definition, a pregnant underage child, unless a victim of rape, obviously wasn't exercising those mental processes.

If rape was the cause of the pregnancy, then all the more reason for parental involvement - unless we want to go back to the days when things were just swept under the carpet and the rapist never had to pay the piper. What parent would want their child to endure the aftermath of such a traumatic crime on her own? Not only that, if parental consent is optional for an abortion, then the abuser might well end up being the one facilitating the abortion to cover up his crime. Just how in the world does that very possible scenario further the cause of women's rights?

To get back to the medical considerations, a much ignored and underplayed aspect of abortion in my opinion, just how is an underage child expected to responsibly weigh the pros and cons of having an abortion? Doctors, for and against abortion, would tend to agree that abortion is not the optimal method of birth control. Abortions, even when done under the best of conditions, do carry a potential for complications, both immediate and long-term.

Medical

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