When Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, is asked what motivated her to get into her line of work, she always tells the same story. Several years ago she worked for a summer art program for youth, and she overheard a pregnant 14-year-old offering $10 to anyone willing to kick her in the stomach. The teen already had one child and couldn’t afford an abortion. “She lives at home, and she’s saying she doesn’t have access to birth control,” Hernandez says. “Her parents don’t believe in birth control. They also don’t believe in abortion. And they told her that if she gets pregnant again, they’ll kick her and her baby out of the house.”
There’s no consensus on whether parental notification laws reduce the incidence of teen abortions. A study published in 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine tracked abortion rates in Texas before 2000, when the state’s parental notification law went into effect, and after. The research showed that after the law went into effect abortion rates dropped 11 to 20 percent more among 15- to 17-year-olds than among 18-year olds, but the rate of second-trimester abortions increased by a third among minors who were 17 and a half or slightly older at the time of conception—possibly because they waited until they turned 18 to avoid parental notification. An analysis by the New York Times of data gathered from six states (Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) that enacted parental notification laws between 1995 and 2004—released the same week as the NEJM study—”found no evidence that the laws had a significant impact on the number of minors who got pregnant, or, once pregnant, the number who had abortions.”
—Columbia Law School professor Carol Sanger
Questions range from the condescending (“Do you understand the difference between a truth and a falsehood?”) to the old-fashioned (“Have you informed the father of your pregnancy? Did he offer to marry you?”) to the terrifying (asking whether the woman has been told of the risks to her of hemorrhaging, infection, uterine perforation, bowel injury, or death—despite the fact that childbirth is 14 times more likely than an abortion to result in the mother’s death, according to a 2012 study published in Obstetrics and Gynecology).
Historically, abortion laws in Illinois have been the most liberal in the midwest, making the state what Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel for the Thomas More Society, refers to as “a dumping ground for abortions.”
According to Breen, however, parental notification protects the parent as well as the minor. “This is such a basic, basic thing,” he says. “The prospect of a 14-year-old going in for an abortion without the involvement of a parent is something that should frighten every Illinoisan. Laws like this give comfort to Illinois parents.”
