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Government Can’t Mandate Good Family Communication 

Of course parents want to be involved in their daughters’ lives. Many pregnant teens do confide in a parent. But laws can’t create good family communication—that has to start long before a daughter is pregnant. It’s important to remember that not all teens live in homes where open communication is safe and possible. Many teens fear being forced to have the baby, kicked out of their homes or subjected to violence.

Proposition 4 won’t transform abusive, dysfunctional families into stable, supportive ones. It would create more difficult options for pregnant teenagers at an already difficult time in their life.

Prop 4 is More Dangerous  

Prop 4 is even more dangerous than previous parental notification initiatives in two ways. It would dramatically expand the liability of doctors who care for pregnant teenagers, authorizing lawsuits against them decades after an abortion is performed. This is an outright attempt to harass and threaten doctors who provide abortions.

A deceptive and dangerous alternative was written into Prop 4 for pregnant teens who can’t safely notify their parents or obtain court orders. Authors of the initiative assert that teens in an abusive home could request that notification be sent to another relative over 21 who fits the initiative’s criteria. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. To invoke the alternative, a teen would have to write a history of charges against her parents and provide that document to her doctor. The doctor must then send the teen’s written statement to law enforcement and send the state-scripted abortion notice to a designated substitute relative, together with a letter saying that the parents have been reported to a law enforcement agency. This provides no real protection for the pregnant teen. If law enforcement pursues the report, or the relative calls the parents, the abusive parents will find out about the teenager’s charges, her pregnancy and her abortion.

The Harmful Impact on Teens  

Prop 4’s backers—who oppose legal abortion—simply want to create permanent barriers to counseling and care for pregnant teenagers. Even the most resourceful teenagers would have difficulty navigating through the court process. Sending a scared pregnant teenager to court to discuss the most intimate details of her life with a judge is a stressful, humiliating process that delays teenagers’ access to abortion. (The proportion of second trimester abortions for minors rises in states with parental involvement laws.) And in some states, the court system does not work. Clerks give teenagers inaccurate information or moralist lectures; judges refuse to hear abortion cases or deny petitions for arbitrary or ideological reasons.

Parental involvement laws, such as what Prop 4 seeks to do, put our teenagers at risk.The ACLU of Northern California spent 10 years examining other states’ experience with parental involvement laws in our lawsuit challenging California’s parental consent statute. The California Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that this evidence “overwhelmingly” showed that these laws are dangerous and unconstitutional. Prop 4 attempts to overturn that ruling and engrave those dangers into the California Constitution. 

If Proposition 4 is written into the Constitution, we could only modify it only by yet another initiative.

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