Stitches in the Vagina

Posted on February 12, 2005 in California Watch Privacy Sexuality

The Santa Margarita Trader Joe’s was becoming just too stimulating: all those rows and rows of luminous products begging me to buy just one more and put it in the cart. So I left Lynn in the check-in aisle and went outside to call a friend or two on my cell phone.

Right at the door, hiding herself behind the red, white and blue, sat a woman collecting signatures. “Parents’ Right to Know” read the sign. I paused to get the substance of the initiative petition. The first line alone convinced me that I didn’t want this on the ballot: it revealed itself as a stealth anti-teenage abortion measure. “The initiative requires that a physician notify a parent or guardian of a minor daughter at least 48 hours before performing an abortion upon her” says one right wing website approvingly.

Yes, let’s give rapist fathers and brothers advance notice of their daughters’ plans to cleanse their wombs of incest-produced fetuses. I am not a fan of abortion by any stretch, but as I grow older, I feel that there need to be a few checks on what a parent can and cannot get away with. The promoters of this plan liken abortion to getting a flu shot or having a tooth pulled . Yet another flyer tells a horror story about an eighteen year old who died after an abortion. One face out of tens or hundreds of thousands who had abortions without being harmed does not make for a crisis, but we tend to register faces more effectively than we do statistics. Ask AHnold who did ever so nice a job of confusing the issues on last autumn’s measure which would have eliminated nonviolent crimes from three strikes law provisions.

Why do parents need the 48 hour notification period? Perhaps so they can find their daughter and spirit her away to another state where they can lock her in a home and force her to have the baby? So the State can turn snitch? Studies show again and again that making kids pay the price for their youthful indiscretion isn’t a terribly good birth control method. What works is effective sex education. I don’t like abortion all that much either, but I like handing away the right to privacy even less. Had these parents not tried to keep their kids in a fanciful ignorance like that which existed in the Victorian Era, we might see a decline in the teenaged pregnancy rate. I don’t want California turning into another Bulge Belt state like Kansas. If our children are old enough to bear children, they have the right to know the details and the full implications of their choices.

I refused to sign this proposed amendment to the California Constitution. Debating only encourages them. Before you know it, they will demand that women be virgins at marriage. The underground market for stitches in the vagina — like that which exists in some middle-eastern countries — will mean boomtime for some doctors.