Telling a teenage girl she has no options is emotional abuse and needs to be viewed in that light.
Child Maltreatment 2011 (click here)
Any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation; or an act or failure to act, which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.
Teens must be given the opportunity to carry through with an abortion without guilt and with their self-esteem intact.
The Casey decision is wrong. A teen should be required to have privacy in making decisions about contraception and pregnancy.
They must be educated to their options in preventing pregnancy and have free and open access to contraception if that is their plight.
Not all young women grow up in households prepared to educate them about sex or willing to teach them about sex. The harm comes when a teen is subjected to term pregnancies by obligation of a parent's prejudice.
A child giving birth to a child is dangerous business. Doctors are qualified to help and if sought by a teen, they should.
Pregnancy is a mature decision for people with resources. Girls are not mature nor have the resources to be a parent. It is emotional abuse plain and simple.
March 10, 1991
And she was pregnant.
For months, she ignored the missed periods; her experience with menstruation had been brief, after all. She ignored the nausea and swollen stomach.
"It was, like, real denial until I actually felt something moving inside of me," says Linda Pollard, now a senior at El Modena High School and the mother of a 5-year-old daughter. "I have a big mouth--I like to tell people things. But this was something I couldn't tell anyone, I was so scared."
The statistics are frustrating and frightening. In the past decade, births among young girls have climbed both nationally and locally--although the population of 10- to 14-year-olds, caught in between baby booms, has declined.
Recently released figures show that in 1989 at least 61 girls under age 15 had babies in Orange County--up from 49 girls the previous year and 22 girls in 1979. The increase mirrors the national trend, in which, in 1989, 10,588 girls ages 10 to 14 gave birth....
The Casey decision came in 1992. The incidence of teen pregnancy from that date has risen.
The Casey decision was not a clear majority, but, a plurality.
Except for three opening sections of the O'Connor-Kennedy-Souter opinion, Casey was a divided judgment, as no other sections of any opinion were joined by a majority of justices. However, the plurality decision jointly written by Justices Souter, O'Connor, and Kennedy is recognized as the lead opinion with precedential weight because each of its parts were concurred in by at least two other Justices, albeit different ones for each part.
Casey needs to be revisited with fresh statistics. The new Emergency Contraception will mitigate the statistics now, but, I am fairly confident the impact of Casey was negative to many, many teens.
