Word: parentes
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...Louisiana bill and the court's rulings bring to a head the two fierce battles fought this past year: the pro-life movement's push to deny abortion to all pregnant women, even victims of rape and incest; and the pro-choice movement's effort to strike down parental-involvement laws as back-door ways to restrict abortion that do nothing to improve communication between parent and child...
Better than a parent's control over abortion would be a world in which children too young to understand the power of sex did not engage in it, and one in which those unprepared to be pregnant did not become so. Since long before Juliet met Romeo, adults have been trying to convince adolescents barely able to decide what to wear in the morning that they are not mature enough to manage the complicated and overwhelming feelings that come with a sexual relationship. But for just as long, teenagers have been unpersuaded. Surveys show that at least half the young...
Nonetheless, communication about sex between parents and children is stuck in the Dark Ages. Says one Washington psychiatrist: "Parents and children don't want to know about each other as sexual beings. Sex is the point of separation, the country into which a parent does not travel with a child." That is one reason why school sex-education courses, which put the subject at a clinical remove, have become the norm...
...when sex moves from the private to the open and a teenager is pregnant, children who normally turn to a parent in a time of trouble will usually do so whether or not there is a law requiring it and whether or not they have been talking about sex. In Massachusetts, which requires teens to obtain the permission of both parents or of a judge, about 75% of the girls who have abortions share the decision with their parents. Levels of parental involvement are equally high in neighboring Connecticut and New Hampshire, where such consent is not required...
Teenagers who do not want to talk to their parents often find a way to avoid * it: they go before a judge, or they go out of state; they wait until their condition becomes obvious and have a dangerous, second-trimester abortion; or they have a baby by default. Justice Thurgood Marshall described the dilemma in his dissent in the Minnesota case: "This scheme forces a young woman in an already dire situation to choose between two fundamentally unacceptable alternatives: notifying a possibly dictatorial or even abusive parent or justifying her profoundly personal decision in an intimidating judicial proceeding...