Brain Fertilizer

Dawn Eden has a quote from NARAL's Pro Choice America blog by Jessica Valenti:

They also are hoping to push at least two bills through the next Congress...One would make it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines to circumvent state laws requiring parental consent for abortion.

Sigh. When will the f---ed up logic ever stop? How is a minor not old enough to make the decision to have an abortion, but old enough to have a baby? Please.

This statement is wrong on so many levels, I hardly know where to start.

1) Obviously, physical and mental/emotional growth happen at different rates. She most certainly is old enough to physically give birth to a baby, but there are several options regarding having the baby, including adoption.

2) The statement is a deliberately false dichotomy. The minor would not have the baby without advice and support from her parents, but the law the writer is attempting to block specifically excludes parents from advising and supporting or even providing any input into the decision whether or not to abort.

3) Since there are approximately 30 million women who have had abortions to date, it is at least conceivable (pun not originally intended, but I'm running with it) that a parent's objection to abortion might be due to actual experience. Therefore, this attempt to end-run around parental involvement/advice represents a truly evil attempt to "get 'em on-board" while they are young and easily-influenced. How do you get someone to commit to a depraved ideology? Separate them from those who care about them and pressure them into doing something they would otherwise consider morally repugnant. Then they are forced by shame into defending the evil ideology.

It would be extremely interesting to cross-index post-abortion women's pro-choice/pro-life views to their age when they had an abortion...

4) The original question is wrong in the first place: the choice of having the baby or aborting is actually a choice of "bad" and "worse", respectively. The real crisis point was at the point the girl decided to engage in intercourse. Ms. Valenti would be serving our society much better if she worked as hard to convince girls to wait for marriage to have sex* as she does to convince pregnant girls to have an abortion.

*yes, not all sex is consensual. But how many pregnancies actually occur from rape? Would anyone urge the death penalty for parking tickets just because some people still murder? Or would you deal with those issues separately? It is dishonest and harmful to encourage kids to have sex because they can always deal with unwanted pregnancies through abortion, and then to defend abortion-on-demand on the basis of extremely small number of women who get pregnant from a rape.