Do you remember the Fugitive Slave Act? It criminalized not only slaves
who'd escaped to non-slave states, but also anyone who helped them flee.
That law has troubling echoes in a new law, passed by the Republican Senate
and House, that will make it illegal to transport a girl from a state
requiring parental consent to get an abortion in another one.
The Fugitive Slave Act forced individuals who did not believe in slavery to
collaborate in maintaining it. In states that had banned slavery, it
compelled law enforcement officials to return escaped slaves to their
masters, and coerced ordinary citizens into supporting this process. It
isolated slaves from outside assistance, by threatening to imprison anyone
who would help them escape.
Isolation is also the goal of the benignly named Child Custody Protection
Act, which will become law if the House and Senate work out their
differences. It targets girls who already feel they cannot talk to their
parents without risking disaster. It leaves them on their own, because those
who might have tried to help them will face jail if they do. Whether a
sister, an aunt, a grandmother, counselor, or friend, anyone could be
imprisoned for intervening to help. Meanwhile, the same Senators who backed
it voted down an amendment that would have increased support for programs
offering contraception and sex education--including abstinence education.
Minors are also excluded from the FDA's recent ruling allowing
non-prescription sales of the "Plan B" morning-after pill, so the goal seems
to be less to prevent teen pregnancies than to punish them.
The House version goes further still, allowing parents to sue doctors who
perform these out-of-state abortions. Both bills let the states with the
harshest anti-abortion laws (and the least social support for women with
children) control the actions of citizens in states with fewer restraints.
They trample core federalist traditions, letting states with the most
draconian laws impose their will on others. They even raise the prospect of
similar federal or state laws prohibiting adult women from traveling to
overcome state abortion bans-like a bill now pending in the Ohio House that
bans abortion without exception, while making it illegal to transport or
help women of any age to receive abortions in other states. This would seem
to violate numerous judicial decisions affirming the right to travel and
prohibiting one state from unilaterally extending its laws to another. But
with Bush's recent court appointments, all sorts of longstanding precedents
risk being subordinated to a hard-right ideology.
The proponents of parental notification have their reasons: Even minor
medical procedures require parental notification; parents should be involved
in the most consequential decisions of their children's lives; who wouldn't
want to talk with their daughter about a choice this consequential? And
people who see abortion as murder view the new prohibitions as a way to
reduce the toll and protect young women from a morally destructive act. They
see themselves as the new abolitionists.
But all of these arguments abstract the actual lives of the young girls who
are pregnant. We're not talking about idealized families where trust and
harmony prevails. We're talking about situations where trust has broken down
to the point where a girl fears to tell her parents that she's pregnant. The
reason could be incest, physical violence, or pervasive verbal abuse. It
could be a tone of unremitting judgment that makes a girl fear condemnation
no matter what choice she makes. It could simply be the certainty that her
parents will force her to have a child while she is still unready.
Even where families are close, life can be complicated. I once met a woman
who'd gotten pregnant and had an abortion at age 15. Like many teenagers who
consider themselves invulnerable, she just hadn't thought it would happen.
Her father had recently died and her mother was still distraught from the
loss. Given her mother's situation, the girl felt she couldn't tell her
about the choice she was making, and didn't until two years later when a
condom failed and she had another abortion. The second time felt harder, but
she told her mother this time, who supported her decision. She later felt
ready to have her two daughters--"the girls God intended me to have."
Even though parents would often prefer that they wait, a majority of
American teenagers will have had intercourse by their senior year of high
school, and many when they're considerably younger. Because some will be
clueless, others careless, and others just unlucky, more than a few will get
pregnant, particularly where birth control and sex education are less
accessible. Of the third of all U.S women who have abortions by age 45, 27
percent are Catholic (Catholics are 22 percent of the population) and 13
percent evangelical Protestants (who are 39 percent of the population). The
communities most resistant to abortion are themselves not exempt from the
choice. Although highly traditionalist parents often end up supporting their
own daughters' abortions when no other good choices exist, young women from
these communities aren't foolish to fear anger and ostracism.
The Fugitive Slave Act sought to isolate slaves through legal threats
against their would-be emancipators, including those who'd help them once
they'd reached so-called "free states." Escaped slaves were not even allowed
to argue their story in court. The Child Custody Protection Act would erect
similar walls around the lives of the young women it targets, silencing
their voices and overriding their choices. In the name of honoring the
primal community of the family, the act would isolate young women from all
other possible supportive communities who might advise or help them to not
have a child before they were ready. More than anything the law is about
control. Not the reasonable control by which we as parents stop our children
from touching a hot stove or running into the street, but a more insidious
control by which we would force them to bear children when they're
unwilling. A new generation of young women will have to live in the cage of
this imposed choice for the rest of their lives. Their children will bear
the burden of resentment. This new law now extends that cage throughout the
country, and, by making criminals of those who would help, will require the
rest of us to participate in maintaining it.
---
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the 2005 Nautilus Award
for the best book on social change, and Soul of a Citizen See
www.paulloeb.org. To get his articles roughly once a month, email
sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles
