March 06, 2006

Everyone is talking about Crash vs Brokeback

However given the current consideration of legislation in West Virginia:

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.

snip

A separate analysis, considered whether the existence or absence of a law could be used to predict whether abortions went up or down. It could not. The six states studied are in the South and West: Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. (A seventh state, Oklahoma, also passed a parental notification law in this period, but did not gather abortion data before 2000.)

Supporters of the laws say they promote better decision-making and reduce teenage abortions; opponents say they chip away at abortion rights and endanger young lives by exposing them to potentially violent reaction from some parents.

Why is our legislature wasting time on unecessary laws that affect so few young women, and don't live up to the claims of the laws proponents?

Posted by binky at March 6, 2006 12:29 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Reproductive Autonomy | West Virginia


Comments

A state legislature spending its time on matters that are "hot" but affect virtually no one, as opposed to, say, finding a permanent fix to Medicaid'd lack of funding - who would have ever expected that to happen?

Is this really all that surprising? I find it rather unlikely that many of the proponents of these laws honestly expect to see the number of abortions decline. They've always struck me as being much more about 1) reinforcing the power of parents and 2) making any abortions, even if just a handful, illegal.

Posted by: Armand at March 6, 2006 08:57 AM | PERMALINK

Yeah, but silly me, being part of the reality based community and all that, I feel compelled to point out that the selling points aren't true in an effort to peel back the veneer to reveal what lies beneath.

Posted by: binky at March 6, 2006 10:26 AM | PERMALINK
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