Parental Involvement Laws: Turning The Tide?

I have a guest post up at Feministe about Helena Silverstein’s new book, which amasses and expands on the data she’s collected about how parental involvement laws — and especially the bypass provisions — actually work on the ground. The answer is that they don’t work well even if you support their goals.

So it’s a good thing that a parental consent bill (and consent laws are especially indefensible; it’s one thing for a minor’s constitutional right to be balanced against the state’s interest in protecting children, and quite another for their right to be abolished entirely although the consequences of being forced to carry a pregnancy to term are considerably more dire for a teenager) has failed in Arizona. (Via Ann.) And even better is that, in the wake of Ayotte New Hampshire’s new legislature has repealed its parental notification law, a particularly striking development given that the law became a test case because it didn’t even contain a health exemption. This is good; while these policies are popular, they’re also bad public policy. Hopefully this will become more widely known.