It’s just not as simple as “bodily autonomy”. Do you think a 13-year old should be able to whatever they want with their bodies and parents shouldn’t be able to say anything?

Lets say we assume that you’re right and people under some age don’t have a right to bodily autonomy. In that situation a legal guardian is not in control of the person’s body, they are merely the people with decision making power under a very specific set of circumstances. The power to control the body of the underage person is essentially the power to decide what is “for their own good” in medical situations. Furthermore, this power tends to default to the least risky action or the nonaction. A parent cannot give consent for their 8 year old to have sex, though they might consent to their 8 year old getting their tonsils removed. Why the difference?

Well, its because society has decided that 8 year olds shouldn’t have sex because they lack the emotional or intellectual resources to manage a sexual relationship and at a certain point there are physical risks as well, therefore any such relationship would be harmful and is verboten. And thats where you run into a problem with pregnancy. Pregnancy comes with risks but it carries no material gains. Keeping a pregnancy isn’t like getting an appendix removed or getting a heart transplant. Under very few (read: no) circumstances is being pregnant medically necessary. Moreover, being pregnant comes with quite a few medical risks, risks which increase as age decreases. In order to allow parents to force a minor child’s pregnancy to come to term you have to create an exception in the law in which the parents are allowed to use the minor child’s body in such a way as to provide gain to another (the fetus). That looks a hell of a lot more like pimping out your kid than it does like telling them they can’t have a smoke or get that wicked tattoo of a dragon on their face.

To maintain the status quo (of parents being medical guardians who must make decisions based on well-being) one would have to make parents get their children abortions in all or most cases. In order to maintain parental authority, one would have to allow for a situation in which parents use the body of the child they have authority over for someone else’s gain at significant risk to the child.

The third option is to give the pregnant person the right to make their own damned decisions. Given that in most states if you’re old enough to get pregnant but not old enough to vote you’re probably old enough to be tried as an adult, I don’t really see the legal disconnect.

Of course, this is your site so I guess you can continue that if you want.

I support abortion on demand, at any stage of the gestation. I support the young women who didn’t know what to do, or how to get out of it, and in shock and fear, ran from a dying fetus hastily shoved in a blanket under a tree.

The majority of women who need an abortion don’t live anywhere near where they could get one. So I support telling the truth about Palin’s stance on birth-control and sex-ed. It’s seems to me like the only people you’re really harming when you propagate lies is the young women you say you’re defending.

Palin said she’s going to compromise to ‘advising’. While I’m not for that either, what I see here is a concerned parent, who we can work with. That’s a lot better than Obama, who doesn’t seem to think women can make a decision on their own. Oh yes, he’ll allow abortion, but the women should talk about it with their doctor and pastor/priest/church.

And unlike one of the previous posters, I don’t have to tell anyone else’s story.

When it came to my Preacher’s Kid friend in high school whose parents would’ve thrown her out if they knew she was pregnant (and she was pretty damn sure of that, because a few years before she had told her parents about her uncle molesting her and they blamed her for being molested). This PK sold her Discman (hey, it was 1993, the Discman was big), sold her scientific calculator and told her parents it was stolen, sold a bunch of crap, begged her friends for money, and if we hadn’t all managed to gather round and raise the money, she was prepared to take her house’s electronics to the pawn shop and fake a burglary. She didn’t want to do any of this stuff, but it beat the alternative. The reason she didn’t have to was because I emptied out my savings account to cover the shortfall. She did eventually pay me back, by the way.

Oh, and last I heard, PK (who’s now 33, not 16) hadn’t spoken to her parents in 8 years. They flipped out when she started dating a South Asian guy who wasn’t even nominally Christian, and refused to attend the wedding. THey’ve never met their little brown grandkids and don’t want to. But they still socialize with the uncle who molested PK, and were furious when PK told all the extended family members with little girls at home never ever to leave them unsupervised with this pervert. See, because PK told the whole family she was molested so they’d know WHY to keep thier kids away from him. According to PK’s parents, though, she made it up for attention, and to use it as an excuse for her filthy whoring around before marriage. They also think their niece is lying about HER child molestation by this same guy (PK going public to the whole family helped her cousin to eventually do the same).

These are the kind of parents girls are terrified of telling, not the responsible ones who love their kids and take good care of them. My mother was passionately anti-abortion, but she always told my sister and me that if we got pregnant and decided to have an abortion, to let her know ahead of time. She said she wouldn’t try to change our minds, she just wanted to be able to support us, because we shouldn’t go through that alone. Neither my sister nor I got pregnant in high school, but I would’ve definitely told my way anti-abortion mom if I had. She made it crystal-clear that these were HER beliefs, and if I was absolutely sure I wanted an abortion, she’d come with me to hold my hand, because I was her baby.

Suppose you knew an underage girl who had become pregnant. Suppose she was reluctant to tell her parents because she knew they would pressure her into having an abortion and she didn’t want one. Would you be so quick to demand that the parents be informed?