Posts Tagged ‘privacy’

A 15-year-old girl in Seattle suddenly finds herself at the center of a controversy after choosing to have an abortion. The girl, who visited a high school school-based health clinic and was referred to a clinic who ultimately performed the abortion, is being held up by the anti-choice movement as an example of the “insidious” pro-choice movement’s willingness to manipulate impressionable young women into ending their pregnancies (I’m paraphrasing here).

To make matters worse, the person doing the most shouting and complaining is the girl’s mother. Incredibly, she’s the one who started all of this, speaking to members of the press about the situation and even, it seems, publicizing the story on her MySpace page.

As you might imagine, the anti-choicers have run with the story, utilizing headlines like “Secret Abortion on Seattle Teenager Draws Pro-Life Condemnation, Outrage” and saying that “what the school did was unconscionable.”

Except that the school didn’t really do anything. The staff who work at the school’s health center made a referral. That’s all. Washington state has no parental notification laws, so neither the clinic nor the girl herself were legally obligated to tell anyone of the decision. And of course the abortion was “secret,” even though I’m not altogether fond of using that word in this situation. Privacy laws for medical records exist for a reason.

More than anything else, I’m somewhat outraged that the girl’s mother has decided to use her daughter’s abortion as a springboard for a media campaign. The girl in question obviously wanted to keep her procedure as private as possible. That’s no longer the case. In one of the above linked articles, a student who goes to the same school as the girl remarked that everyone was now trying to guess the identity of the girl. This is nothing but conjecture, but if she felt isolated before, I can only imagine how she feels now. And I would bet that her relationship with her mom will never be the same. And for what? To play politics with this girl’s choice? That’s a new low, even for the anti-choicers.