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.
