I suspect that Kathleen Parker has the numbers on her side and that most parents agree with her about requiring parental notification and/or a prescription for underage girls who want access to Plan B contraception. I understand that argument and the sentiments behind the argument, but the science really should prevail here.
Rather than argue with Ms. Parker about the merits, however, I want to take issue with her discussion of parental autonomy. She thinks the court ruling takes autonomy away from the parents and gives it to the government. But that’s not quite right. It takes power away from the parents and gives it to the daughter. And that really is the whole point.
Her mistake is to think about this in the context of a typical healthy parent-child relationship, but the court ruling is aimed at protecting girls who don’t have a healthy relationship with their parents. We’re talking about girls who, for whatever reason, cannot get permission from their parents to take Plan B. Maybe they were raped by the father or some other relative. Maybe they were raped and fear being blamed for it. Maybe they fear being beaten for having consensual sex. Maybe they know that their parents have religious objections to Plan B. Maybe their parents are on vacation.
If you have a healthy relationship with your parents then you should be able to ask them for permission to take Plan B. In those cases, there is no problem.
The government isn’t telling any girls not to consult their parents. The government is only insisting that girls should be able to make an attempt to avoid an unwanted pregnancy even if their parents want to force her to take her chances.
The only other consideration is the safety of the medication itself.
What about the right of parents to protect their children? A 15-year-old can’t get Tylenol at school without parental permission, but we have no hesitation about children taking a far more serious drug without oversight?
But that’s basically begging the question. If you want to insist that the Plan B pill is a far more serious drug than Tylenol, you’re either ignoring the FDA’s opinion or you’re engaging in semantics. The drug is safe. No one, as far as I know, is suggesting that school nurses hand out Plan B to students without parental notification. And the bottle of Tylenol in your cabinet is a suicide risk that could destroy your daughter’s liver in a few hours, whereas the Plan B pill only needs to be taken once and costs at least thirty-five dollars. Your daughter is not going to overdose on Plan B.
Americans may disagree about what is sexually appropriate for their children. And everyone surely wishes to prevent children from having babies. But public policy should be aimed at involving, rather than marginalizing, parents.
Taken on its face, Ms. Parker would like a government policy of informing parents that their daughters are pregnant since that would aim at involving them. Again, the point of the judge’s ruling and of the Obama administration’s partial compliance with that ruling is not to marginalize parents but to empower their children.
That’s why her conclusion is wrong.
To say that this controversy is strictly political is no argument against debate. Politics is the debate about the role of government in our lives. And the debate about Plan B is fundamentally about whether government or parents have ultimate authority over their children’s well-being.
Making Plan B available to all girls over the counter doesn’t give the government any authority over your daughter. It gives her authority over her fate.
You’ve been great on this issue, Booman. Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
A number that may not be on Ms. Parker’s side is the half million “women” who die from childbirth annually.
Seems like that is a life choice that belongs to any oldster or youngster no matter what.
One might better assume that Kathleen Parker never had to face her parents with any bad news when she was young.
It’s not just begging the question, it’s a canard. The bureaucracy surrounding school nurses administering medicines isn’t about the welfare of the child anyway but about terror of lawsuits. And in this parent’s experience it’s kind of dumb.
Your point about conservatives reading the decision as empowering government when it in fact empowers girls is really important. We are constantly allowing them to read us as somehow “against freedom” when the contrary is the case.
Ann Althouse apparently cannot conceive of a girl under fifteen having consensual sex with someone her own age. Either that, or she thinks all 14 year old boys who have sex with 14 year old girls are rapists.
Yeah, but that’s Althouse. Consistently wrong, inflammatory and misguided. She seems determined to be reprehensible, most definitely motivated by whatever she thinks she could write which will be most certain to piss off liberals.
It’s not safe to presume that the majority of Americans would want to prevent minors from access to Plan B or other reproductive choices. In California, we’ve been made to vote multiple times on Propositions which would have made minors gain parental permission for an abortion. We’ve voted it down every time. Sure, that’s California, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that other States have made other decisions on minors’ access to abortion, but abortion is a measure more controversial than Plan B and contraception, no?
She also have a very low opinion of functional families. In one of those families where the parents are looking out with wisdom and caring for their daughters, surely the daughters will speak with them about Plan B. Right? Because they’re Good Parents and Happy Families. So parental notification doesn’t matter, to them.
I understand the argument. As a parent of a 13-year-old, I sympathize. I can even forgive the President for going with it. But it’s still wrong. Kids do have sex, even when they shouldn’t. And denial doesn’t help any of us.
GOP POV:
We can’t have women be allowed to make choices!
Let alone YOUNG women,
Or, teenage girls.
They might get… ideas!
Ideas that they can do without men!
And then, what happens to all of the paternalistic societies around the globe?
Huh?
Answer us THAT?
Who’s going to get into wars, without use me…
MULLIGAN!!!
We need a do-over on this comment.
As a parent of teenagers and a person who served on a school board for a number of years, let me just say that this is the kind of question that makes me tear my hair out.
From the moment a child can walk, he or she has some semblance of autonomy and the parent’s role is to guide them in how to exercise that autonomy in a way that results in them being happy and healthy and to grow to be responsible adults. At some point in their lives, they are going to be completely autonomous, but really as long as they are still being raised at home, their autonomy is restricted by their parents. And it is a continuum – they get more and more autonomy as they get older and older. It is a constant balancing act between parental authority and the child’s autonomy, with the balance swinging in the child’s favor as they get older. That’s just the nature of the beast.
The big question is what role does the government play in this balancing act? At what point, and with respect to what issues, do we say that parental authority must give way?
The reference to Tylenol in schools is a great one. In NY State, the issue isn’t whether a child can get Tylenol without parental permission. A child can’t bring Tylenol into school and take it on their own without parental permission. If a child is caught taking Tylenol without a note being on file with the school nurse in advance, it’s a disciplinary matter. And it’s not just Tylenol, of course – it’s any medication, with or without a prescription. This is a policy that both enforces parental authority and the school’s authority as well – they damn well want to know what’s going on in their buildings, as well they should.
Whenever a child is caught breaking the rules, whether by school officials on school grounds or by police outside of school grounds, the first thing that happens is that parents are notified. This is an explicit acknowledgment of parental authority being enforced and enhanced by our government. And I don’t know of anyone who thinks this sort of thing ought not occur.
But at the same time, parents cede a great deal of authority over their children’s lives to the government. From the age of 5 we willingly allow the government to supervise, teach, and guide our children in innumerable ways simply by letting them go to public schools. Willingly? Hell, educating your children is mandatory, home schooling is still relatively rare, and if you do home school the state still tests the students to make sure they are being properly educated.
Bottom line, this is a very complicated issue, one which line drawing is extremely difficult. Tb92 makes a good point – kids do have sex, even when they shouldn’t. But isn’t the real point: why are parents notified if their child is caught drinking underage, but not when they are having sex below the age of consent? I’m not quite sure how we square the two.
I tend to agree with the judge’s decision. The public health concerns should be the determining factor. (Not that there aren’t a lot of issues where we let other factors trump public health – just ask Bloomberg about soda pop). But I’m a squishy liberal from pinko NY, and there are a helluva lot of people who feel differently about it. That’s perfectly understandable in my view.
Well many people believe their child should have NO authority over there own fate.
I believe this is a partial legacy that children were concerned legal chattel in the past.