Two Cents: Who is Affected?

All of this talk about girls having to come clean to their parents got me thinking... If I were certain that I didn't want to share something as life altering as a pregnancy with my parents, I don't think that a new law would change that. The most obvious way around this situation is, of course, to obtain an abortion in another state, a state with no age-oriented limitations on abortion. This is presumably what brings about the statistic that Blaise quoted, that with "the enactment of a parental notification statute in 1993, the ratio of teenage to adult abortions decreased 13%; however, this was offset by a 32% increase out-of-state." Certainly this suggests that the enactment of such laws does not achieve either of their proposed aims: to reduce the number of under-age abortions, and to involve parents in the abortion process of minors. So, if passed, who would this law truly affect?

Statistics show that teens account for nineteen percent of all abortions obtained in the United States. To emphasize how likely an outcome abortion is in the instance of teen pregnancy, consider that eight abortions are given for every live birth by a girl under the age of fifteen and four are given for every ten live births to girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, according to one abortion demographic study. Fifty-seven percent of women who obtain abortions are below the federal income standard. This could be due to the young median age of such women, or to the fact that the majority of these women are unmarried, or to some other fact entirely. Whatever the case, teenagers are no exception to this rule. The majority of teens hardly have the resources to afford abortion, much less to leave the state in order to do so or to avoid parental detection along the way. With Proposition 73 instituted, it would be the poorer and the younger and the less resourceful teens who would be left with no option other than to involve their parents. This does not scare me because I do not believe that parents should be involved. It scares me because once the parents are involved, it is much more likely that abortion will no longer be an option for these girls, and that an undesired pregnancy will be carried to term.

"Freakonomics" is a book that proposes a surprising but well supported explanation for the extreme and unexpected drop in crime rate across the United States during the 1990's. The book cites the legality and availabliity of abortion as the cause for this sudden improvement. With abortion as an option for women, many fewer unwanted children were born, and therefore many fewer children were born into adverse family circumstance. Basically, an entire generation of children prone to criminal activity simply never existed. It was unmarried, under privileged, teenage women like the women who would encounter the effects of Proposition 73, who are proven to produce the adverse households that tend to breed criminals. It is impossible to say if Proposition 73 has the potential to un-do the positive effects of Roe v. Wade on society. I, for one, think that it is too risky of an experiment to find out for sure.