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Trumwill has an excellent post on his mixed feelings toward parental consent laws:
The thing is, if I had a daughter that was pregnant and intended to have an abortion, I don’t think that I would want to be notified. A part of me thinks that if I could convince her not to, I would want that opportunity. I would want to be able to tell her that we would work with her so that she could go to college and establish herself. We’d (informally or formally) adopt the kid as our own if that would change her mind or help her place the child for adoption with an agency. I would want her to know that while I may be disappointed in what led up to the pregnancy that I understand that things happen and how we respond to the consequences of our mistakes says as much about us as the mistakes themselves.
The other part of me, however, fears that it would tear our family apart if she declined to go along. If the law were notification, it would be excruciating to try to talk her into having the baby and not being able to do so. She would know how vehemently I disapprove of her decision and I would know that she did something that I have strong moral objections to. It gets more difficult with parental consent laws because I would have a lot of difficulty consenting to it. If her mental health were obviously on the line, I would probably not drag her to court over the issue and so would consent. But such things are extremely difficult to judge. She may overestimate the mental health effects of having the baby or I might underestimate it. If I did not provide consent and she got a judicial bypass (most of which are granted, from what I understand), it could cause a permanent cut that’s never entirely sewn up.
In this case, I have to wonder if ignorance is bliss.
Trumwill's written enough that I feel comfortable making the generalization that his views on extramarital sex are more latitudinarian than my own. And for myself, my opposition to abortion is strong enough that I would seize at the opportunity to dissuade my daughter from aborting a child.
But the risks to the relationship that Trumwill identifies are very real. The scenario he describes, wherein my anti-abortion counseling is ignored, would engage mental modules that go beyond the narrow issue of abortion. I can specifically name two of those modules: first, my authority, and God's, over her behavior; second, her loyalty to her family and to the moral tradition in which she was raised. In this context, my daughter's abortion would have do premeditated violence to both authority and loyality. While in the abstract I could forgive abortion, I would have a much harder time forgiving this violence. Indeed, the context would make it difficult for her to genuinely seek that forgiveness.
I can imagine having a conversation with my daughters that goes something like this:
- First, don't have sex outside of marriage. God says so, and I say so.
- Second, if you choose to ignore this instruction, take whatever precautions.
- Third, if you choose to ignore that advice, please don't get an abortion. Come to your parents. Yes, we will be disappointed and upset. But we will also work with you on the alternatives.
- Finally, if you ignore all the above: never, ever tell me about it.
It occurred to me that this is not dissimilar to my attitude toward apostasy. As a Calvinist, I really don't have any stake in anyone's religion, or lack thereof: I did not choose my faith, nor you your unbelief, but God is sovereign over all. So I daily pray for the souls of my children and seek to nurture them in every way I know how; but, if in spite of this, they wander away, then I can only submit to God's perfect justice.
Think of this as "narrow-sense" religion, or "elite" religion as Razib once called it.
But there is also a broader sense in which religious faith is a measure of in-group loyalty: to family, community, and nation. And should my children, in the manner of some, become anti-Christian, and attempt to rub my nose in their new-found hostility, then there will be no refuge for them in a counter-claim that, really, they still want a relationship with me, for they will have rejected more than than just God.
3 comments:
What I find interesting about your response is the threat to your authority. I think I assume that, to some extent, some of my authority will already be ceded by the time they're old enough to get pregnant. That there will be some things that they believe and I believe are beyond my right to control.
We would likely disagree as to what those things are, but I would likely attribute an abortion to a disagreement on that terrain. As part of a larger struggle rather than an outrageous breach.
Notably, I don't have God and the Fifth Commandment on my side on the issue and that might well shake up my calculations on the authority issue.
Though I wouldn't frame it quite that way, the loyalty thing I think would still be there for me as well.
I appreciate that as they get older, children obtain greater freedom, and that freedom will include the opportunity to make decisions I would not have made for them. And I would agree that, in adolescence, a child progressively takes ownership of her own religious and moral sentiments.
However, I would offer pushback on this: you appear to characterize a pregnant girl's efforts to obtain an abortion as driven primarily by a dispassionate consideration of its ethical standing. I would submit to you that, on the contrary, such a decision is driven primarily by the fear and shame at her circumstances, and that even a girl who believes abortion wrong can be subject to them.
you appear to characterize a pregnant girl's efforts to obtain an abortion as driven primarily by a dispassionate consideration of its ethical standing
I didn't mean to. One of the reasons I'm not completely against parental notification/consent is that I don't want girls to get an abortion to avoid telling their parents. However, I think that they would see it as the right thing to do and one of those areas over which they have authority. Therein lying the conflict.
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