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U.S. Senate Supports Child Abuse and Incest

Deciding that it was more important to preserve a glob of jelly than protect girls in abusive and/or incestuous relationships, the Senate passed legislation Tuesday to make aiding an under-age girl in escaping parental notification laws by crossing state lines a federal crime.

Clearly the fact that 90% of teen girls are getting knocked up and then going for dilation and evacuation indicates an impending national disaster that must be addressed by federal legislation. And one must also consider those girl-gangs who get pregnant and hold on to the fetus long enough to crush the baby's skull with a late-term partial-birth abortion as part of a gang initiation ritual.

What? There is no such crisis? Inconceivable.

With booming oil prices and a potential energy crisis, failed foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, education reform and funding disasters, environmental concerns, potentially unconstitutional domestic spying, and constant budget woes, Senate Republicans have used their considerable brain power to pick out the most important issue facing this country, have they not?

Those champions of small-government (Hi, Newt, you still out there?) obviously have their priorities straight (they like straight), and no one could accuse them of pandering to fundie-nutjobs and bible-thumping reactionaries in an election year, could they?

Abortion Definition
source

I think we should thank these wealthy white males for their support of reproductive rights and access not only to quality health care for women, but also to affordable birth control and comprehensive sex education in the schools.

Everyone knows that sex education leads teens to have sex, correct? And of course sex is bad, so teens having sex is bad (simple logic here, no?). What they do not know will not tempt them, and thus if we do not tell them about sex, they will not have sex. Well, unless we put aside this poorly reasoned head-in-the-sand approach and on the one hand consider that knowledge is better than ignorance and informed decisions are better than blind acceptance of dogma, and on the other hand there is at least some evidence that sex education can get minors to postpone sexual activity:

Sex education may get adolescents to delay sex
NEW YORK (Reuters)—After participating in a two-week sexual education program designed and implemented by an academic medical center, more middle-school students said they would hold off on having sex for the first time, Texas researchers report.
[ s o u r c e ]

Yet I realize that I have not yet made my case for the above-mentioned U.S. Senators supporting child abuse and incest. For that I need the example of Spring Adams:

The tragic story of 13-year-old Spring Adams in Idaho illustrates how CCPA could jeopardize young women's safety. Spring was shot to death by her father after he learned she was planning to terminate a pregnancy caused by his incest. If CCPA passes, trusted, caring and responsible adults would be faced with the threat of prosecution for responding to a young woman like Spring who approaches them because she fears involving her parent in her request for an abortion.
[ s o u r c e ]

Were pregnancy and abortion like a drug, I could almost support parental notification laws: the child (we say child, but we are talking about teen girls here, girls or young women whose bodies, at least, are capable of reproduction, even if they might not have the intellectual or emotional maturity to warrant the term adult) would have a physiological or psychological addiction that required external intervention to diagnose and treat, but I have not seen anyone making this claim. Parental notifications laws are quaint ideals—ideally a girl should be able to tell her parents that she has been having sex or has been raped or abused, and is pregnant, and such an ideal is dependent upon a safe and secure home environment and proper upbringing: good lines of communication between parent and child, trust, love, a lack of fear or terror. That is to say, ideally such laws are unnecessary for in the case of pregnancy and the possible need of an abortion the girl in question would go to a parent of her own free will. What we care about are the non-ideal situations, and in such situations, parental involvement can be a bad thing, for we are dealing with bad parents—negligent, abusive, irresponsible, those that would be of no help were the girl to go to them and seek assent. Or, we have cases like that of Spring Adams.

Abortion Myths
abortion myths

There are those who argue that parental notification laws are reasonable and logical extensions of parental rights; parents are involved in the medical treatment of their children in other cases and must provide consent, and reproductive health, under which abortions fall, is just a sub-category. The problem with this logic is, however, obvious: we have potential feedback loops and conflicts of interest here that are rare in other areas of medical treatment, and furthermore, abortion foes only paint abortion as medical treatment in this instance when it suits their rhetorical needs, and elsewhere it is equated with murder, not reproductive health.

The only people this new law helps are psychopathic rapists, so I must conclude that the U.S. Senate supports child abuse and incest.

Who are these supporters of abuse and incest?

This is obviously only a short list.

Other materials:

—July 25 2006

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