Do you remember the
Fugitive Slave Act? It criminalized not only slaves who'd escaped to non-slave
states, but also anyone who helped them flee. That law has troubling echoes in
a new law, passed by the Republican Senate and House, that will make it illegal
to transport a girl from a state requiring parental consent to get an abortion
in another one.
The Fugitive Slave
Act forced individuals who did not believe in slavery to collaborate in
maintaining it. In states that had banned slavery, it compelled law enforcement
officials to return escaped slaves to their masters, and coerced ordinary
citizens into supporting this process. It isolated slaves from outside
assistance, by threatening to imprison anyone who would help them escape.
Isolation is also
the goal of the benignly named Child Custody Protection Act, which will become
law if the House and Senate work out their differences. It targets girls who
already feel they cannot talk to their parents without risking disaster. It
leaves them on their own, because those who might have tried to help them will
face jail if they do. Whether a sister, an aunt, a grandmother, counselor, or
friend, anyone could be imprisoned for intervening to help. Meanwhile, the same
Senators who backed it voted down an amendment that would have increased
support for programs offering contraception and sex education -- including
abstinence education. Minors are also excluded from the FDA's recent ruling
allowing non-prescription sales of the "Plan B" morning-after pill,
so the goal seems to be less to prevent teen pregnancies than to punish them.
The House version
goes further still, allowing parents to sue doctors who perform these
out-of-state abortions. Both bills let the states with the harshest
anti-abortion laws (and the least social support for women with children)
control the actions of citizens in states with fewer restraints. They trample
core federalist traditions, letting states with the most draconian laws impose
their will on others. They even raise the prospect of similar federal or state
laws prohibiting adult women from traveling to overcome state abortion
bans-like a bill now pending in the Ohio House that bans abortion without exception,
while making it illegal to transport or help women of any age to receive
abortions in other states. This would seem to violate numerous judicial
decisions affirming the right to travel and prohibiting one state from
unilaterally extending its laws to another. But with Bush's recent court
appointments, all sorts of longstanding precedents risk being subordinated to a
hard-right ideology.
The proponents of
parental notification have their reasons: Even minor medical procedures require
parental notification; parents should be involved in the most consequential
decisions of their children's lives; who wouldn't want to talk with their
daughter about a choice this consequential? And people who see abortion as
murder view the new prohibitions as a way to reduce the toll and protect young
women from a morally destructive act. They see themselves as the new
abolitionists.
But all of these
arguments abstract the actual lives of the young girls who are pregnant. We're
not talking about idealized families where trust and harmony prevails. We're
talking about situations where trust has broken down to the point where a girl
fears to tell her parents that she's pregnant. The reason could be incest,
physical violence, or pervasive verbal abuse. It could be a tone of unremitting
judgment that makes a girl fear condemnation no matter what choice she makes.
It could simply be the certainty that her parents will force her to have a
child while she is still unready.
Even where families
are close, life can be complicated. I once met a woman who'd gotten pregnant
and had an abortion at age 15. Like many teenagers who consider themselves
invulnerable, she just hadn't thought it would happen. Her father had recently
died and her mother was still distraught from the loss. Given her mother's
situation, the girl felt she couldn't tell her about the choice she was making,
and didn't until two years later when a condom failed and she had another
abortion. The second time felt harder, but she told her mother this time, who
supported her decision. She later felt ready to have her two daughters --
"the girls God intended me to have."
Even though parents
would often prefer that they wait, a majority of American teenagers will have
had intercourse by their senior year of high school, and many when they're
considerably younger. Because some will be clueless, others careless, and
others just unlucky, more than a few will get pregnant, particularly where
birth control and sex education are less accessible. Of the third of all U.S
women who have abortions by age 45, 27 percent are Catholic (Catholics are 22
percent of the population) and 13 percent evangelical Protestants (who are 39
percent of the population). The communities most resistant to abortion are
themselves not exempt from the choice. Although highly traditionalist parents
often end up supporting their own daughters' abortions when no other good
choices exist, young women from these communities aren't foolish to fear anger
and ostracism.
The Fugitive Slave
Act sought to isolate slaves through legal threats against their would-be
emancipators, including those who'd help them once they'd reached so-called
"free states." Escaped slaves were not even allowed to argue their
story in court. The Child Custody Protection Act would erect similar walls
around the lives of the young women it targets, silencing their voices and
overriding their choices. In the name of honoring the primal community of the
family, the act would isolate young women from all other possible supportive
communities who might advise or help them to not have a child before they were
ready. More than anything the law is about control. Not the reasonable control
by which we as parents stop our children from touching a hot stove or running
into the street, but a more insidious control by which we would force them to
bear children when they're unwilling. A new generation of young women will have
to live in the cage of this imposed choice for the rest of their lives. Their
children will bear the burden of resentment. This new law now extends that cage
throughout the country, and, by making criminals of those who would help, will
require the rest of us to participate in maintaining it.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of "The
Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of
Fear," winner of the 2005 Nautilus Award for best social change book. His
previous books include "Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a
Cynical Time." See www.paulloeb.org.