Do You Know What Your Kids Are Up To?

You may think that you have an open and honest relationship with your children. You may think that of course they’d know that they could always tell you anything, no matter how bad. And you may even be right. But, in this day and age, they may be out arranging for an abortion behind your back.

"In 1985, the summer after my freshman year in high school, my 16-year-old sister told me she was pregnant. Andrea, a National Merit Scholar, knew two things: She wanted an abortion and she didn’t want to tell mom and dad.

"’I’ll help you,’ I said, honored that she’d turned to me.

"Andrea wasn’t worried that my parents would throw her out or beat her. She, like many minors who become pregnant, was more concerned about preserving her relationship with her family.

"’I remember feeling like I can’t add this to the official roster of things I’ve done,’ Andrea told me recently. ‘I was too young emotionally to have sex, but physically I wasn’t. Any conversation I would have had with mom and dad would have ended with them telling me not to do it.’ She didn’t want them to know anything about what felt to her like ‘a big mistake.’"

From the point of view of a teenager, it might seem reasonable to help your sister hide an embarrassing "mistake" from your parents, but surely the adults to whom this duo turned would encourage them to tell Mom and Dad anyway, particularly since the pregnant girl knew her parents would not hurt her and even more particularly since there was a parental notification law in place requiring that both parents consent to this young woman’s abortion.

If you were naive enough to think that, you thought wrong.

"Andrea had $60 saved from her job at Burger King. I helped her raise the additional $200 she needed by borrowing it from an acquaintance at school. Although North Dakota had had an abortion clinic since 1980, there was also a law, in place since 1981, stipulating that both parents consent to a minor’s abortion. Andrea went through the process of getting a judicial bypass. The clinic steered her though an interview with an amenable judge, I got her the money just in time and Andrea got her abortion. Although the experience was difficult for her, we were rather proud that we’d gone through it alone."

GET THE STORY.

Two young girls, one sixteen and the other probably fourteen or fifteen, managed to go to court and obtain a "judicial bypass" around their state’s parental consent laws, all without their parents ever being the wiser… at the time. Once Mom and Dad found out, they were rightly "heartsick and frustrated." The author of this essay professes "understanding" for their pain, yet still piously pronounces that parents should only know that their minor daughter is undergoing a major medical procedure — setting aside the fact that the major medical procedure in question also kills their grandchild — if their daughter "willingly" wants to tell them.

Words fail to capture just how mind-bogglingly stupid our society has become. But then, as Mark Shea has so pithily put it, sin makes you stupid.