Thursday, March 24, 2005

The Culture of Death-March Continues... Mother arrested for attempting to interfere with 14-year old daughter's abortion

According to an exclusive from the Illinois Leader, a mother was arrested on March 17th as she attempted to interfere with her own 14-year old daughter's abortion. According to the story, the pregnant girl's boyfriend's mother took the girl out of school, posing as the girl's grandmother. When the biological mother went to the clinic to intervene, the clinic staff called the authorities and had the mother arrested:

She took a seat near the main desk and said, “I was told I could not prove my daughter was there so I began calling her name. A medical tech at the clinic told me, ‘It’s your daughter’s rights, it’s her body. You have no rights.’”

After continuing to call out her daughter’s name and telling her “don’t do it,” authorities were called and the mother was arrested.

The 14-year old told her mother she could hear her but when she asked employees to give her mother a message, they came back to the room and told her that her mother had left.

In the school district at which I work, a child cannot receive a Tylenol without a parent's consent. Even though it's the child's body, and the child's headache, the child cannot give her own consent to take an over-the-counter medicine, even though the medicine produces little or no side effects. By rights, hospitals require parental consent to treat a child, even in emergency medical situations

Minors and Consent: Legal Perspectives

In the U.S., state legislation requiring parental consent for medical treatment reflects the conception that minors (those under the age of 18) are incapable of understanding and making decisions about medical treatment (Melton, 1983). The state recognizes that the legal age of majority (age 18) is arbitrary and that there are minors who are competent and others, of legal age, who are not (AMA, 1992); however, legislation is designed to protect minors from the consequences of poor decisions.

But many states still...
authorize minors to consent to contraceptive services, testing and treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, prenatal care and delivery services, treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, and outpatient mental health care. With the exception of abortion, lawmakers have generally resisted attempts to impose a parental consent or notification requirement on minors' access to reproductive health care and other sensitive services.
So, a child under the age of 18 doesn't have the decision-making capacity to know whether or not it is in her best interest to take a Tylenol, while at the same time the same girl should be trusted to act in her best interest on issues with long-term consequences such as sexual activity, contraceptive use, and abortion? According to the adherents of the Culture of Death, that is exactly the case. Because you see, my friends, the actual best interest of the child, the child's actual capacity to make a decision in her own best interest, as well as the parents' authority to determine it, all run a distant last to furthering their agenda to devalue life at all costs, or at best to determine life's value based on the currencies of convenience and functionality. As I have said before, the culture of death needs blood sacrifices to further its unholy cause.