Absolute Moral Certainty and other fairy tales
I’d like to ask politicians, judges, and preachers one question: “What are you absolutely sure about?” Well-defended certainty takes time and study; a very long list in answer to that question might indicate they have not done their homework. They see an issue, the knee jerks, and the jerk speaks.
Parental notification of teen abortion is one example. It seems so obvious that parents should be notified before their daughters have an abortion. Children under 18 can’t sign binding legal contracts, can’t join the military… I mean, heck – kids can’t even get an aspirin for a headache at school without a phone call to a parent. The parent is still legally responsible for that child.
Imagine the legal, ethical, and medical minefield when daughter has problems and it turns out she had an abortion her parents did not know about! What loving parents envision such an eventuality for their daughters?
And yet… if you make it impossible for a teenaged girl to end a pregnancy, you have to accept that there will be a certain number of them thrown out on the street, some beaten, and some killed. Argue all you want; it will happen. If that’s OK with you, fine. It isn’t Ok with me, and I pay taxes too, so now what?.
Of course, a child can go see a judge in loco parentis. After all, our legal system is famed (or is it flamed) for transparency, efficiency, and user-friendliness, right?
Can we stipulate that in the case of ideal families, no parental notification law is needed? And in the dangerous families, such a law may be fatal. What is the balance of that equation?
Then there’s the assumption that such a law will reduce abortions. Parents, so goes the reasoning, will always be against their daughters having an abortion and so will offer support and other options. Sure, it could happen that way. But does it?
That’s the trouble with moral certainty – it fails to account for situational complexity. The range of possibilities is often far too convoluted for “Do It This Way”. A perfect solution is the mirage in a legislative desert, in pursuit of which a great deal of damage may be done. Sometimes the most difficult thing is to know when not to legislate.
(Blame ***Dave for getting me thinking about this)
Oh, yeah, right, blame the Morally Uncertain Guy. Sheesh.
Very interesting information. I used to think that teens should be able to get an abortion without parental consent because I thought that parental consent would get in the way of the teens choice for the abortion. Now that I am getting older and closer to having a child, it scares me to think that I could theoretically have a girl that could get impregnated and have an abortion without me knowing, and that scares me. But regardless I guess its important to just be involved in your childs life and to let them know that those issues are important to you.
Abortions are just one more reason the FDA should have allowed over the counter purchase of the morning after pill.
The question is based on the premise that a teenage girl under 18 is a child. Maybe we should examine that premise.
Why is a teen past the age of puberty considered a child? Why is an arbitrary age set at 18 to make a child an adult? This is a relatively new concept. In the past when boys became men-and it had nothing to do with age-they were expected to take on the responsibilities of men and were granted the privilages of men. When girls became women they were traeted as women. Only a short 100 years ago most girls were married and bearing children well before the age of 18. On the western frontier it was not uncommon for a 16 year old girl who had completed the eighth grade to be hired as a school marm in a neighboring village.
As I see it the problem is not the question of parental notification or judicial over view it is a law that the ‘do gooders’ passed years ago to protect organized labor. Now we have the law that says the adult is a child and must be treated as a child yet nature and the child knows that the body is one of an adult.
Just another example of Guy’s first rule: When laws are passed to do good or to protect us from ourselves they usually have the opposite effect.
It really is frightening but it isn’t anything a legislature can solve. By the time your child is old enough to have a child, your window of opportunity for moral instruction is only open a half-inch or so.
We work so hard on ‘protecting’ our kids from the hard facts when they’re young and the window is wide open. Then by the time we get it through our thick heads that ready-or-not, they need that information, it’s too late. Turning to the law for help at that point is just sad.
Very good point. Lots of kids are insulated from real consequences early on, only to trip and fall flat on their faces when crossing the 18-year threshhold. Kids can’t grow up because we don’t let them.
Back in Ye ‘Olden Dayse as you mention, kids knew not to hang around behind a horse because the village had buried the kid who did that. Now there are no horses, but lots of things just as dangerous only more abstract.
One thing keeping kids in that unnatural ‘child’ state is the mantle of legal responsibility that rests on their parents and schools. I really don’t know how to disentangle that web without a lot of carnage in the transition.
I’m going to open a whole can of worms with this one, but how about taking it a little further back? Teach the children (boys AND girls) right from wrong, abstinence until marriage, and that parents are a source of help if they do take steps in the wrong direction.
Now, I know this is a far-from-perfect country/world, and many parents won’t be able to live up to the expectations I’ve stated here. But many of us strive to, and I believe that my daughter and son would come to me and my wife with ANY problems they may have. If they go somewhere else, I would expect the person/agency to have enough respect to contact me. I wouldn’t want to hear it that way of course, but the alternative could potentially be much worse.
Very excellent point Guyk, I think the whole, “Your not a Man or Women till your 18” is pretty ridiculus. I think parents need to teach children about sex at a younger age. I am a big fan of parental envolvement and not government envolvement. However I am not a big fan of the abstinence before marriage teaching either. Many studies have shown that abstinence does not work, and actually has the reverse impact. Again I would rather see over the counter sale of the morning after pill. But I do agree with steve, if I were a parent I would want to be contacted as well.
An important point to remember is that you can’t just write laws based on what you would want. In some ways laws need to be written (or not written) with the worst-case scenario in mind. I would want to be notified, but presumably so would the man who will beat his daughter to death in a drunken rage; the law must consider both possibilities and weigh the social impact of each, along with many, many other scenarios.
One could complain that this would render law-making an arduous and nerve-wracking task, and greatly reduce the number of laws that the legislature would create. Given that most laws are a bundle of unintended consequences waiting to happen, that may be a very good thing. Far too many laws offer a quick, ‘feel-good’ reaction to a complex social problem.
Steve, the idea of teaching your kids abstainence is fine, and might work within your family – though my experience with minister’s kids at the strict Christian college I attended suggests that may be more of a gamble than you realize.
Also, let me just note that religion has no monopoly on ‘right and wrong’ and many people frame that problem differently than you do. Under our constitution, laws must encompass a secular purpose. Feel free to examine the record of the many countries which conjoin religious and secular purpose in their laws.
The more the law tries to micromanage situations in people’s lives, the worse it gets. People make mistakes on a ‘retail’ scale; the law makes them ‘wholesale’.