I haven't said a lot about the part of my job involving parental notifications. It's not that I don't have a lot to say, but the intricacies of keeping my online life separate from my professional life get the most volatile here, and I play it extremely safe.

In light of Alaska passing a parental notification law, I thought I'd note a few brief things.

This is based on my personal experience. These are not statistics. My state doesn't keep statistics, because of the fear that the judges who are following the law and their job descriptions will be outed as following the law and their job descriptions, and they will be forced out of office and/or receive death threats because they are following the law and their job descriptions (THE NAZIS DID TOO!!!1!!).

So, in my personal experience, here is who comes in to get a bypass for parental notification, presented in order of Happens Most Often to Happens Least Often (but still happens):

Anecdotally, this accounts for about 9 out of every 10 girls we see. Usually, dad is alive, and he is out there somewhere, but she either doesn't know where he is or hasn't spoken to him since she was three, and doesn't want to call up the stranger who abandoned her, reveal deeply intimate personal details, and then beg him to sign the piece of paper that says she can get medical attention. The girl finds it deeply humiliating that just by virtue of having fucked her mom once, this dude who doesn't give a shit about her now has veto power over her life, so she may not even bother trying to call her absent dad and explain to him that she's still a real live person and she even has sex now, so let's hear what you awkwardly or crudely think about that, dad, because you've apparently earned an opinion by virtue of having a functional dick 16-odd years ago.

Subset A: Mom and the girl know where dad is, but he's been served with a restraining order.

Subset B: Mom and the girl know where dad is, but he's an active drug addict and they're afraid of approaching him or having him involved in their lives in any way.

Subset C: Mom and the girl know where dad is, and contact him, and explain the situation, and send him the piece of paper he has to sign. He doesn't send it back. They call and remind him. He says he'll get right on it. He doesn't send it back. They call and remind him. He stops taking their calls. The abortion will now cost twice as much, and if they wait any longer, they may miss the legal deadline. This dad could be attempting to block the abortion, but it's just as likely that the kind of father who absents himself from his child's entire life is just utterly self-centered and irresponsible, and doesn't really give a shit what happens to her.

Bonus: Sometimes, DMIA isn't even on the birth certificate - he's been MIA since the get-go. That means he's not legally a parent. The girl does not legally have a father that she can notify. Because the law is so vague about how to define a parent, the clinic usually won't accept those circumstances as legal enough, because all it takes is one legal loophole for them to get shut down . So, if she can't get DMIA to officially agree that he has been notified, they cover their ass and send her to get a bypass.

The judge is also covering hir ass, however, and judges tend to perform the minimum intervention required or allowed by law, because (short answer brushing over A LOT of context and details) judges don't want to make a ruling that is so out of line with the current law that it gets overturned on appeal. The law says a girl must notify her parents. The girl legally only has one parent. The judge may not grant her a bypass, because legally she doesn't need one. So now she has to find a clinic that is willing to take a huge legal risk on her, because you never know when DMIA will decide to MRA.

Here is my suggestion on DMIA*: Since we've established, via parental notification and consent laws, that the state has a vested and apparently legally legitimate interest in mandatorily enforcing parent-child communication, let's have this go the other way. Let's pass a law that says a parent must communicate with their child once a month to maintain the right to parent. This communication must be legally documented, via a written statement that must be notarized. The notarization will require both a legal ID and a birth certificate. If a parent fails to document their monthly communication with their child, their parenting rights are automatically terminated. A parent can attempt to bypass the communication law by seeing a judge and explaining their circumstances, if a judge is available anywhere in the state to hear the plea. If the judge denies their bypass, they can appeal, but there are no lawyers in the state that is trained and/or will involve themselves in such a case, because of the publicity.

If the girl doesn't have a death certificate, she has to get a bypass. Her living parent may have lost the death certificate. Or they may have never gotten one, because the deceased parent hadn't been a part of the family for quite some time and it didn't seem important to get the death certificate of your divorced partner who hasn't seen their kid since the kid was three. To acquire a death certificate would take more weeks than the girl can wait and still acquire a legal or affordable abortion.

This girl comes in with her living parent and often her boyfriend. Her living parent is often fucking pissed. Because their partner died, they're no longer legally allowed to make medical decisions for their child; they must beg a stranger for this privilege. If the death was fresh, or significantly painful (and how many aren't?) then this turns into a big grief trigger-fest for all who knew the dead parent and must now ruminate on how the death limits their ability to legally live their lives.

Legal notification doesn't mean the same thing it means in daily life. A girl can't just be like, "Mom, Dad, guess what." A clinic can't just call a parent up and say, "You got notified! Booyah!" A clinic needs to show that they have followed the law. Unless a state has specifically laid out what "notification" means, and how a clinic can show that they've fulfilled this requirement (mine hasn't), the clinic has to guess. And they're going to err on the side of caution, since a vaguely defined law is sort of like a vaguely made threat: perform action X perfectly or you will be severely punished, and no, I will not tell you what action X is, nor what I mean by perfect, but I will be standing over here sinisterly stroking this gun.

So, notification often means a signed piece of paper, perhaps notarized. Which effectively turns "parental notification" into "parental consent," because parents can and do refuse to sign. Two parents can be standing in a clinic next to a girl, and the clinic can be announcing over the loudspeaker that their daughter is seeking an abortion (or, if they're deaf, showing them a slideshow with bright red Comic Sans font and ALL CAPS), but legally, they have not been notified of shit.

So, a girl may have notified her parents. The clinic may have notified the parents. The parents know. They have been told. But they refuse to legally admit they know, so even though the parents have been notified, and the ostensible reasoning behind this law has been fulfilled (we must enforce communication between parents and minors), this girl still has to ask a judge to allow her to not tell her parents, who have been told.

The reasons why the parents refuse to legally admit they've been notified vary. Often, they're anti-choice, and they consider admitting they've been notified tantamount to endorsing or causing an abortion. But just as often, they're attempting to punish the girl or punish each other for some unrelated reason. Say mom is willing to sign, but dad is pissed that mom is "always" taking sides against him, so he won't sign. Say dad is willing to sign, but mom wants a different custody arrangement, and thinks she might use this as a bargaining chip. Say both parents are willing to sign, but only if the girl tells them who impregnated her. Say both parents refuse to sign, because the girl's grades are failing and she's smoking and they just can't control her, so they're going to prove to her that she needs her parents and had better stop pissing them off.

When this girl comes in, she's usually not angry at her parents. She's more resigned. She can't afford anger. She has to keep living there. This girl comes in with a friend, a pro-choice relative, and/or her boyfriend.

A parental notification law requires parents, and it requires notification. If neither of those items are defined by the parental notification law (which begs the question of how one could be so concerned about parents and notification if one cannot be arsed to explain what either one is), the clinic has to guess at what will stand up in court as a "parent" and what will stand up in court as "notification."

So, in (purposeful) absence of any legal direction, what does a clinic decide constitutes a parent? Usually, a driver's license and a birth certificate. Some parents don't have those. The processing time to get one is longer than the girl can wait. Some parents do have them, but, perhaps because they are Opposed Parents, they refuse to produce them. Or, perhaps they are simply abusive, irresponsible, lazy, or uninterested in their daughter's welfare.

Fun story: my father refused to produce my birth certificate or Social Security card when I needed to get my driver's permit. He swore to me that I had it. I had never seen either. He told me to find it. I asked if I could look in his room, and he said he would kick me out of the house if I did that. When I told him I couldn't find them anywhere else in the house, he angrily told me, "Then call the Social Security Office and order one! How stupid are you?" Because of this - and because of the immense difficulty of acquiring a driver's license if you don't have parents who will teach you to drive or lend you a car to practice on - I didn't get my license until I was 24.

I still do not know what bug my dad had up his ass here, but it doesn't matter - the fact is, some parents are bug-asses for their own fucked-up reasons. If the bug-asses have access to all the ID papers that proclaim their daughter legally exists, you can see how this is an issue for their daughter.

This girl comes in with both her parents (if they're not parents who are deliberately being assholes, but just don't have the docs), or the one who can afford to miss work, and her boyfriend.

Subset A: The girl whose parents are undocumented immigrants. This girl does not come in with her parents. Her parents are afraid that somebody will report them to ICE. This is not an idle fear. Sometimes we have to sneak the girls around in a Family Circus-like route to avoid certain individuals.

If a girl has been raped, she doesn't legally have to fulfill the parental notification requirement, but only if she files a police report. So, we see the girls who don't file.

Why don't they file? There are as many reasons for not filing as there are raped girls; all their lives and circumstances are very, very individual, and even the few general reasons I can give don't cover it. Maybe they don't want their parents to find out. Maybe they don't want to be harassed at school, because when their rapist gets taken away in handcuffs, everybody will damn sure know who tattled. Maybe they don't want to talk to the police (perhaps they also have a record, or have had bad experiences with the police, and don't necessarily consider them helpful). Maybe processing the trauma of the rape to the point where she can admit what happened and start to deal with it takes a long time, likely longer than the window of time she has available for an affordable abortion, so the abortion comes first and the police report comes after. Maybe she thinks she won't be believed, and doesn't know how to assert herself with the police enough that she ensures a police report is filed. Maybe the person who raped them is a close family friend, or a family member, and they suspect that a report will get them put into foster care (they're correct).

If she is very unlucky, she will get a by-the-book judge who dismisses her case, telling her to go file a report - she's been raped, ergo, no need for a bypass. So, sometimes the girls won't say "rape." They will describe a rape, but they won't call it that. In these cases (in all rape cases, actually), we notify the clinic if they didn't already know. The clinic will preserve the fetal tissue in the off chance that the girl decides in the future to file a report; now she has some evidence of what happened to her.

This girl comes in alone, and you have to ask her to repeat herself several times, because she is very quiet.

Sometimes a girl comes in for a bypass, and in her mind, she is just Ruin My Relationship. But once she describes how she came to be pregnant, and why she doesn't want to tell, it becomes apparent to us that she was raped but doesn't realize it.

This girl has usually been raped by a much older man. She won't report it as rape because she thinks they're dating and he loves her and it's not a big deal anyway, it's not like he hit her or anything. She doesn't want to tell her parents because she thinks they will report him for statutory rape. She may not want him arrested because she loves him and wants to be with him. She may not want him arrested because she's scared of him. She may not want him arrested because his house is the only house she can go to when she needs to escape her abusive parents, and she suspects that when she's 18 she's going to have to live with him to survive.

This girl doesn't report what happened to her as rape (and thus, doesn't file and doesn't get the exemption) because she truly believes what happened to her was appropriate and right, and that this is what she can expect from sex.

Subset A: Pimped. She gives the barest amount of information possible. She has obviously been thoroughly prepped about what she can and cannot say. She lies about everything. She will not disclose to you. You are a stranger. You will arrest her. She is right - we will take her into protective custody if we can.

They might beat her. They might throw her out. They might rape her (someone in her family might be the father). They might make her life unlivable. They might take her out of school. This girl wants us to believe she is Ruin My Relationship or DMIA, (if DMIA, she tells us her mom knows but couldn't make it today). She rarely discloses her abuse. We may pick up hints of it, enough to figure the truth, but not enough to report.

She may know she's from an abusive family. She may not. She may simply be used to not talking about it, because it's so shameful. She may not know there's anything to talk about, assumes that everybody lives this way.

She will not disclose to us, and she has not disclosed to the clinic, because we are complete strangers. The clinic doesn't have access to her medical records, which could possibly help them discover the history of abuse. The clinic is not her usual doctor, or usual clinic. This girl does not disclose because abortions are performed as something separate and segregated from other routine medical care, and at a time during which this girl may have the guts to tell somebody what is happening to her, she is surrounded by complete strangers, and called a whore and a murderer whenever she tries to access those strangers.

This girl comes in alone, though sometimes with a fiercely protective friend (the friend knows it's an abusive family, even if the girl doesn't).

"I can't tell my parents because it will ruin my relationship with them." That's all they'll say.

We generally assume there is more explanation than that, but can't always get at it. Kids haven't had the time, experience, or sometimes necessary brain development to fully describe certain difficult concepts, including their relationship with their parents. I mean, how many adults can really accurately describe the complex ins and outs of these relationships?

"It would ruin our relationship" may mean "my dad is bipolar and he can't handle this." It may mean "my parents think they are hiding the fact that their relationship is falling apart, but I can tell, and I don't want to put more on them." It could mean, "They'll let me live in their house and they'll let me eat their food but they will stop speaking to me until I am in my 30s, because that's what they did to my sister." It might mean, "They'll take away my college funds if they find out." It might mean, "My parents have always stated that they think abortion is evil and wrong and the women who get them are selfish and whores and I have no way of knowing that they would change their minds and their tunes once they knew it was me they were talking about." It's hard to tease those details out of a sullen teenager having a bad day, especially if these are details she herself hasn't fully processed.

There is usually a much bigger story to Ruin My Relationship, but nobody gets to hear it, because we are all strangers to her, and she knows that her ability to adequately present herself to us is what stands between getting medical care or having a baby. She's often afraid that her reasons aren't good enough, that if she tells us about how hard it is at home, somebody will say, "Well, toughen up, that's no reason not to talk to your parents," and she will have to face whatever there is at home for her alone. So she gives a simple line and sticks to it, because she doesn't know how to argue that she is good enough to have the right to access necessary medical care.

This is some kind of tricky shit and could be any kind of wild formation of unseen circumstances. Two examples:

A girl who has had her legal custody transferred to another person, but her parents' legal rights have not been terminated. So her parents are still her parents, even if she doesn't live with them, even if there is a court order that they cannot contact her. She cannot acquire notification from parents she isn't allowed to contact.

A girl who was adopted privately or internationally and her adoptive parents, in a fit of naC/ve and ignorant privilege, never finalized her citizenship or custody, so they're not legally her parents. No, really. Parents do this.

I'm writing these as if they're discrete categories. They're not. They mix and match. Try a girl:

Here is a list of the girls who don't come in to get a bypass for parental notification:

Girl 3 isn't real. She may look like Girl 3 when she comes into a clinic, but once a counselor sits down with her, a story comes out. The story is either one of the categories above, or it is, "Okay, I can tell my parents, I was just hoping not to" or "I was hoping to do it later" or "I was hoping to do it after finals because I am just too stressed to deal with that right now."

The girl who just whimsically doesn't want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and "Gosh! I didn't realize my baby has fingernails WHAT." (Fun fact: After these billboards went up, my bear and I incorporated them into our daily language. I’ll have the chicken WHAT. Did you know? I feel fat today WHAT.) That girl haunts the dreams of anti-choicers, much like zombies and naked unprepared math tests haunt mine. These things are fears that have a basis in a very real and persistent anxiety - the newly dead are creepy; being naked unexpectedly is vulnerable; failing math in high school is scary; uncontrolled stupid females are dangerous - but they do not have a basis in a very real nor very persistent actual thing in the world. There are no zombies. There are no unprepared naked math tests. There are no pregnant women who are driving to get ice cream one day and then are like, oh, hey, there's an abortion clinic, I'll just pop right in.

The expectation that this woman exists reminds me of the opening of my favorite Chick tract that I can’t be arsed to find. A dude sits down on a park bench next to another dude. Dude 1 says, "What a beautiful day!" Dude 2 agrees. Dude 1 says, "Thank Jesus Christ for such a glorious day!" Dude 2 says, "Jesus Christ? What's that?" Dude 1 is all, "I'm glad you asked!" So convenient that Dude 2 has been living under a rock for the last 2000 years, never heard of this "Jesus" thing. Otherwise, Dude 1 would have no reasonable transition into Bible study!

It is like, woman accidentally sits on a penis because she thinks that's where lollipops comes from. Then she finds out she's pregnant and she heard that makes you gassy. So she goes to an abortion clinic and an anti street harasser tells her, "You will have a beautiful baby!" and she is like, "Baby? What's a baby?" and they are like, "There's one in your tummy!" and she is all "WHAT." and they are all, "I'm glad you asked! Let's talk about breast cancer." I mean, it's a good thing that woman was such an ignorant slut, or Anti 1 would have had no reasonable transition into Slut-Shaming!

So, there you go. Girls who can't tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still can't tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole - then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who can't tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.

*Please note that I do not actually advocate a law like this being passed. I do not accept that the government has a legitimate interest in legally enforcing parent-child communication, which is why I do not support parental notification or consent laws. But, if the government does have that interest, I don't see why it shouldn't cut both ways. If there is a distinctly difficult set of obstacles that must be undertaken within a parent-child relationship, those obstacles should be shouldered by the parent, because they are the legal adult. All the circumstances I just listed above would then start happening to parents:

You lose your parental rights because judges in your county don't do these cases, and you can't miss work and get to the next county in time

If it's legitimate to do this to children, then I say it's legitimate to do this to adults.

And once these consequences start piling on tax-paying, voting men, I'm quite sure the circumstances I laid out above would no longer be seen as too-bad-but-so-what, but egregious attacks on fundamental rights. Once we started forcing adult men to endure the consequences of difficult family relationships - or at least force them to endure these consequences as responsibly as we force children — I bet we'd see an immediate end to laws formed on the basis that the state gets to enforce adult-child relationships.

You'd think, wouldn't you? I'd think so, too. But it's not written into the law. Since it's not written into the law, a clinic may find out after doing this that they didn't fulfill the notification requirement. Any reasonable person would think a letter constitutes notification, but if the law doesn't say that's reasonable, then you can't make that assumption. If notification isn't explicitly defined, then almost any method the clinics take can be later defined as not actually constituting notification. That's why they take such large measures -- copies of IDs, copies of birth certificates, and notarized signatures, or just sending them down to get a bypass -- rather than taking reasonable measures, such as a letter. I mean, think of it this way: if your boss told you that you had to do a good job sometime soon or you'd be fired, but then refused to tell you what constituted a "good job" or what "sometime soon" meant, you'd start busting your ass to do every single thing perfectly. Or, alternatively, you'd start gathering up evidence and legal counsel, because it would be obvious that your boss was manufacturing an excuse to fire you. It wouldn't matter if you did a good job by any reasonable person's standards; it's not "reasonable people" who are in a position to fire you. It's the same situation here. The law says, "Notify parents," the clinic says, "How do we notify and what constitutes a parent?" and the law says, "I'm not telling you, but I'll put you in jail if you don't do either perfectly." It's pretty obvious what the law is hoping to accomplish here, and the clinics are generating as much legal support and paperwork as possible. It doesn't matter if they have enough paperwork to satisfy a reasonable person; a reasonable person isn't the one who has the power to shut them down, or the motivation.

From what I've learned speaking to the clinics, they'll send a letter in some circumstances, but it's not preferable, and they'll only do it in circumstances where a bypass is unlikely (due to various legal loopholes), all other options have been exhausted, and they think it's a reasonable risk. The clinics are operating on the realistic assumption that any possible chink is going to be exploited to shut them down, however unreasonable or nonsensical.

Since I don't work in the clinics, I can't give you an example including them, but let me give you on from my side. Most girls who come in to get the bypass are coming in with their mothers. We (and the clinics before they come to us) separate the girls from their mothers for counseling and interviewing, so we can make sure that the girls are here of their own free will and aren't being coerced. After all this, most judges are happy to have the mothers in the courtroom during the hearing, for a few reasons: 1) they assume the girls have been vetted enough to know that the mother isn't being coercive, 2) many of the judges actually believe in the ostensible purpose of the law, which is to enforce communication between parents and children, so they like having evidence that they're doing just that, 3) many of the judges are parents themselves, and feel it's respectful to allow the mother to be with her daughter, especially since she bothered to be with her kid during this process.

We have a few judges who WILL NOT allow parents in the courtroom. These are the judges who have been doing these bypasses from the beginning. The law doesn't state that parents can be in the courtroom. The law doesn't state this, because the law assumes the parents aren't even around -- the law wasn't made with DMIA in mind. The law doesn't say parents can't be in the courtroom, but it doesn't say they can be. These judges are seasoned enough that they know, from experience, that if they deviate from what the law explicitly states in any given way -- even for something as reasonable as allowing a girl to have the support and love of her parent during a very intimidating moment -- it will be found out, and there will be campaigns generated by anti-choicers to have them ousted from their seat and have the law made more restrictive, yanno, for the sake of these poor girls. You'd think this wouldn't be such a big deal, but that "you'd think" relies upon the assumption that this law, and everybody concerned with it, are reasonable people chasing after reasonable goals. Any reasonable person would see that allowing a girl's parent to be with her during a difficult time would be respectful and appropriate and in line with the ostensible goals of a law encouraging parent-minor communication. But the people who are working to shut down abortion in this country aren't reasonable, and they'll exploit any advantage possible.

Back to the clinics. They must have evidence that notification has occurred before the procedure -- a certain number of hours before, actually -- so it's not a matter of sending a letter and then performing the procedure. It must be certified, and they must have paperwork that states that certification has occurred. If other people are living in the house the letter is sent to, somebody else may have signed for it, and the parents can say they never saw it. If the parents know the abortion is occurring -- if they've already been notified, but refused to sign -- they'll be on the lookout for a certified letter, and will refuse to sign for that as well. If the letter isn't certified, they'll claim they never got it. Even if they do sign for it, if the letter-carrier does not request an ID to verify identity, they can claim somebody forged their signature. These are not things reasonable people would do, but the opposition here is anything but reasonable. There are way too many loopholes in sending a certified letter for it to be standard practice for a clinic. These are loopholes that aren't likely to happen a lot, but once is all it takes for a clinic to get shut down and all employees to be jailed. And a clinic won't risk being unable to provide abortions for all the desperate women they see just to provide an abortion for one girl. That's not a position they like being in, but it is a decision they have to daily face.

Additionally, every day that passes increases the price of the procedure, and for many, many women, they don't have a lot of days (or money) to spare. If we're talking about minors, they're taking days off school for this, or their mother has taken days off work to drive them to the clinic (because 87% of counties don't have an abortion clinic). And say we don't have any parental sabotage, but we've got a case of DMIA going on here, and they send the letter to the last known address and DMIA has moved since then. They've got to wait several days to receive notice back from the postal service that DMIA isn't there anymore, and then resend the letter to the new address (if there is one). They may not have that time to spare, especially when a bypass can be achieved in just one afternoon, and the girl can have the procedure performed directly afterwards.

Because of all this legal wrangling, this law actually encourages clinics and girls to seek a bypass instead of notifying their parents. Or, I should say, instead of fulfilling the ill-defined legal requirements for notification, which may be impossible for them to actually fulfill. This generates a pretty huge cost for the judicial system, which is, of course, taxpayer money. So we're paying out the nose for hearings rather than paying for a stamp, because the lawmakers couldn't be bothered to define what notification means.

Wow.

I had no idea how difficult it was to have the procedure done in the USA. Ib

http://www.kensingtonclinic.com/faqs.php

must be an absolute blessing.

Oddly enough, while you can stroll in and have an abortion at this particular clinic, I do believe there should be SOME measure of control, and I hope there is. I was at the mall with my cousin one day and we were in A Brand Name Cosmetics Store That Starts with S And Ends with Ephora, and we overheard two girls talking. They couldnb

We were horrified, and not on the "I canb

Itb

Especially with all the pressure to be abstinate, "save yourself" and all that jazz and itb

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I'm all with you except for this:

This is just so pumped full of crap I don't even know where to start with you.

First, maybe you should actually define what you mean by "control." Because right now, the only context in which you're using that word is within an anecdote about how you were out and about slut-shaming this one time. And while we're at it, slut-shaming? On this board? Never again, or you're gone.

Second, how will controlling abortion have any effect on stopping unintended pregnancies? Abortion sort of comes after the unintended pregnancy; if your concern is about girls getting way too pregnant way too much, the intervention needs to happen before the pregnancy. If your concern is how many abortions this girl is having, your only alternative is for her to be having babies. If you think that's something you or society should have a right to control, you're not welcome on this site anymore.

Third, maybe you should stop assuming that you know what's going on in people's heads. That girl could be lying. She could be pretending to be nonchalant because she's in a public space and doesn't really feel like having a huge cry about her abortions. She could be pretending to be nonchalant because she's in a peer group that is also nonchalant. She could be nonchalant today because she feels nonchalant about it today; you aren't there during her whole life, you don't get to see the whole range of her emotions on this topic. She could be having multiple abortions because she's been raped multiple times, and expressing nonchalance is a survival mechanism. She could be having multiple abortions because she is being actively barred from using birth control. Assuming she's just whimsically stupid about what an abortion is and what it means doesn't help any of those circumstances; it just piles on more reasons why she doesn't seek out help.

But, fourth, let's get to the meat of this, maybe you should stop assuming the right to make reproductive decisions for others based on whether or not they exhibit the emotional responses you have decided they ought to exhibit, or make the choices you find appropriate and morally correct. That right there is nothing but slut-shaming, and it's misogynist as hell. Freedom to choose can't be based on value judgments, or it's not freedom at all: it's just the privileged maintaining their elitism. Women have the right to reproductive freedom whether they're stupid, ugly, or assholes, and if you're not on board with that, you're really not on board with reproductive rights in any way.

And, fifth, maybe you should also learn a little bit about how abortion clinics actually work before you decide that there isn't any "control" going on. Clinics counsel the hell out of everybody that comes in, and they spend an extra chunk of time on a girl like that, because they have all the same concerns you do (albeit they don't express them by slut-shaming her). Clinics do exert control over who they allow as patients, and on what terms they allow them, because they want all women to safe and free to control their reproductive lives, and that includes figuring out (and trying to help, if possible) what's going on that causes a woman to keep needing an abortion.

But, sixth, at the end of the line, neither you nor a clinic nor the law can stop a woman who keeps acquiring abortions. That is her choice, and there is no feasible or practical way to stop it. Even if multiple abortions for stupid slutty teenagers were made illegal, girls who want them and need them would keep getting them, and no amount of disapproval or legal consequences would stop them. So, if your concern is the potential sketchy life circumstances that lead to a young girl getting multiple abortions, try showing a little concern about that, because concern might help. Advocating for a removal of options after-the-fact makes it sound a whole helluva lot like your agenda is less about bettering the lives of these girls and more about your right to enforce "control" of other people's lives based on your personal level of comfort. That's not a pro-choice sentiment; that shit belongs in the anti camp, and if you want to participate in this board, you leave it there from now on.

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Control wasn't the word I should have used, and I am sorry about that. You DID however, clarify what I was trying to say when I meant "control". There's no way to say the word control without it coming across as wanting to prevent someone from doing something that is their right, and I should have taken more time to choose my words before I posted anything.

Clinics counsel the hell out of everybody that comes in, and they spend an extra chunk of time on a girl like that, because they have all the same concerns you do (albeit they don't express them by slut-shaming her). Clinics do exert control over who they allow as patients, and on what terms they allow them, because they want all women to safe and free to control their reproductive lives, and that includes figuring out (and trying to help, if possible) what's going on that causes a woman to keep needing an abortion.

This is what I needed to see. And I'm sorry that it came across as slut-shaming, that was definitely NOT what I wanted anyone to think I was doing.

So, if your concern is the potential sketchy life circumstances that lead to a young girl getting multiple abortions, try showing a little concern about that, because concern might help.

And this is what I meant to say. I AM concerned about what is going on in society today, especially with people's attitudes towards sexual reproduction. ESPECIALLY when young girls are involved because in my mind it's SO IMPORTANT that they're aware of everything that encompasses the subject of human sexuality, and how it effects your life and your physical and mental well being. It worries the hell out of me when I hear about things like this, because I know that it's hard for someone to go through, and it's even more difficult to talk about after the fact. My mother had an abortion when I was 13, and she's never gotten over it. I don't ask questions because there is absolutely no way to bring it up without it hurting.

It feels like I can be concerned all I want, but concern won't necessarily get me anywhere. I can't help anyone just sitting here and thinking about it, but I sure as hell seem to screw things up when I try to say something.

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I come down hard sometimes. Running a blog can put you on a hair-trigger, because any given person can be totally genuine and non-malicious and they just happened to put their foot in their mouth, or, in their next comment, they can reveal themselves to be a massive troll just gearing up to give me a headache for weeks. When I started this blog, I was a lot nicer and let's-chat-about-it, and that would sometimes encourage all the other trolls to come out and bait me because I was going to be so, so patient with them and give them plenty of room to speak. I came down hard on you not just because of you, but as an example to potential troll lurkers -- this is not a soft space, and it's not a space that tolerates a whole helluva lot, especially on this topic.

I know it's unpleasant to get an earful of what I gave you. It's unpleasant giving it, and I feel upset and perturbed every time I do it. But I've learned through long experience that bringing the hammer down early and often is the best way for me to run this board.

Separately, if you find this space too restrictive, you can try the Discussion board. I have no involvement with the board, and it's run by an entirely different set of moderators.

I didn't say it in my initial reply to you -- I wanted to cover some other ground -- but there was something else I saw in your comment that I think is very common to a lot of pro-choice people. I have often seen pro-choice folk publicly state their pro-choice position, only to negotiate pieces of it away in an attempt to make the pro-choice side look less demonized. As in, "I'm pro-choice, but I'm against women who do X with abortion. That's just wrong." The "Woman Who Gets Too Many Abortions And Doesn't Seem To Care" is a common trope to be invoked for X. That trope is so crammed full of sexism -- and depending on the example used, ageism, classism, or racism -- that invoking it undermines the entire position into "I'm pro-choice for the good women who deserve the right to their bodies." And if you read enough experiences of people who work in clinics, you'll find that's actually very much a "pro-lifer" position, as clinics do see plenty of "pro-life" women who have decided that their abortion is the only moral one, and everybody else be damned (literally).

Expressing adamant, firm, and all-inclusive pro-choice sentiments in public can be a difficult line to hold, especially when you're immediately met by a peppering of demonic hypothetical "bad women." I want to throw up my hands and give up about the future of the pro-choice movement when I see pro-choice people actually jump right to the exclusive "Women Who Deserve Abortions" conversation before it's even invoked, because we've all been so trained to get defensive and bargain away other women ASAP (and the bargaining away of non-privileged women's rights has a long, looooong historical context in the pro-choice movement, and it's kept the movement almost exclusively white and middle-class). I wanted to establish this as a place where backing away from the "bad women" isn't necessary and isn't respected, and wanted to publicly state that "bad women" deserve the right to abortions, too. If they don't have their full set of rights, none of the rest of us have them, either -- we're just living on borrowed time until we get defined as "bad", too.

That being said, sorry I had to do that on your back. I know that didn't feel good for you. It didn't feel good for me, either. You came back and made a go of it, and that's respectable. You are welcome here, and you're not a bad person for putting your foot in your mouth.