Two judges on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals obstinately insist on keeping parents in the dark about the health of their children. As a matter of law, they are surely wrong, but what’s worse is how wrong they are as a matter of decency and human ethics.
At issue is a provision in Indiana law that requires that parents usually be notified when their child seeks an abortion. The law does not require parents to consent, but only that parents be informed when a judge has granted a minor’s abortion request without said consent. Even then, the law lets judges bypass the notification requirement if the notification is not in the child’s “best interests.”
Despite Judge Michael Kanne’s well-argued dissent, judges David Hamilton and Ilana Rovner late last week kept in place a preliminary injunction blocking that particular provision of law. In this case of Planned Parenthood v. Box II, Hamilton and Rover applied an amorphous “balancing test” to determine whether the “burdens a law imposes on abortion access” outweigh the “benefits” secured by parental notice. They ruled that the burdens of parental notice outweigh the benefits.
Kanne argued instead that according to Supreme Court precedent, the court’s role isn’t to try some Solomonic balancing, but merely to determine if the law imposes a “substantial obstacle” against an abortion. He quite reasonably argued that if the minor can secure the abortion regardless of parental consent, and that even then, a judge can bypass the simple notification-without-consent rule, then any “obstacle” to the abortion is far less than “substantial.”
Let’s allow others (here and here) to explain why Kanne had the far more compelling legal argument. What is even more infuriating than the proto-sophistry of the two judges’ decision is the moral purblindness demonstrated by anyone objecting to parental notification (other than in extreme circumstances). There is extraordinarily good reason why, outside of the abortion context, governments not only encourage but, in fact, insist that parents have supervisory rights for key decisions affecting the health and well-being of minor children.
In Indiana, as in most states, children cannot secure any surgeries or other major medical treatment without parental notice and consent. They can’t get tattoos without parental consent. On the flip side, if they commit certain legal infractions, the law holds the parents actually responsible for the children’s behavior.
The reasons are obvious. Science confirms that most children are neither cognitively nor emotionally mature enough for major decisions, especially life-altering ones. Commonsense and moral reasoning should insist that parental guidance is an essential feature not just of family life but of a sound civic order. In most contexts, to even deign to explain this is to insult the listener.
What is bizarre, bordering on monstrous, is for people to treat abortion, of all things, as the exception to this rule. The Planned Parenthood Left desperately tries to treat abortion as a matter of no moral weight whatsoever and also as a relatively minor “procedure” rather than a significantly invasive, sometimes dangerous surgery. This outlook is, to put it bluntly, sick.
Abortion terminates a living organism — a human organism. And all of science and psychology agrees that after no more than a few weeks of pregnancy, hormonal changes in almost all mothers produce oft-deep emotional ties that even adults, much less minors, can be ill-equipped to deal with. Allowing a child to make decisions on matters so fraught with consequence without even letting parents know what the child is doing and experiencing is, in essence, child abuse.
Even the most rabidly “pro-choice” person should be able to understand these moral realities. It isn’t just the parents who have rights here; it is to the child’s benefit, indeed it is the child’s right, to have the state ensure that parents aren’t excluded from this process.
