Noooooo!!! Not again!
Feminist Daily News reports today that, "A proposed ballot initiative seeking a California constitutional amendment requiring parental notification and a 48-hour waiting period before a minor can obtain an abortion was filed yesterday at the California Attorney General's Office."
This will be the fourth effort to pass a parental notification law in California in recent years. In 2005, voters struck down Parental Notification initiative, Prop 73; in 2006, Prop 85 was soundly defeated; and most recently, in 2008, voters showed their unwavering support for young women, by voting NO on Prop 4.
Yet somehow, anti-abortion forces haven't gotten the message. How much clearer can we make it? Californians do not want young women under age 18 to be forced to notify a parent and wait 48 hours before obtaining an abortion.
Parental notification and consent laws put the health and lives of young women in danger. In other states with parental notification laws, young women have put their lives at risk by seeking illegal, back-alley abortions.
Parental notification laws are often promoted as efforts to "protect teen safety" or "stop child predators", but these laws are nothing short of attacks on a woman's right to choose. The proponents of parental involvement laws are the same folks who are opposed to comprehensive sex ed - which reduces unintended pregnancy among young people, and thus, the need for abortion. Clearly, any attempts to act concerned about the health and lives of young women are just for show.
As someone who has been heavily involved in working to defeat the last two parental notification initiatives in California, I must say, I am not excited at the prospect of devoting our valuable time and resources to a 2010 ballot initiative, when we could be doing things to positively affect the health and lives of women.
On the bright side, the proposed amendment must undergo review by the Attorney General, and still must obtain 700,000 signatures before it can become an official ballot initiative in 2010.
2 comments:
So when can we start calling the Attorney General to tell him not to be an ass and sign off on this proposal?
This ballot initiative is really annoying. Every election people keep shelling out money to defeat or promote this bill, no wonder California ran out of money. Apart from that, when I was canvassing to repeal proposition 8, what I heard from a lot of people was, "We already voted on it, let it die." And yet we're voting on this for the fourth time. When it comes to endangering the lives of teenage girls, its okay to take it back to the ballot, but when its about restoring the constitutional rights of LGBTQ couples to marry, that's something that "we voted on already, just let it be!" hypocrisy is very frustrating.
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