You can tell it’s spring of an election year when states start passing a slew of anti-abortion measures that conservative lawmakers can campaign on during the summer and fall. “I saved teh behbehs!” is practically a national slogan among far-right lawmakers at the state level.
The latest of these measures is a bill broadening the parental consent rules for teens seeking abortions in Missouri. The measure, which passed the Missouri House yesterday, says that teens wanting to terminate a pregnancy must have the consent of both parents. There are about a billion reasons this is unnecessarily harsh, the first being it’s no one’s beeswax if a teen wants to get an abortion. Anyone seeking an abortion should be granted the privacy to share that information — or not — only as they see fit. This is true of all medical care.
The law provides some exceptions to the dual-parent consent, such as if one parent is a registered sex offender or has been convicted of child abuse. But unless the parent’s abuse has been adjudicated, the consent rule stands. This is a major problem, given how infrequently sex abuse and other forms of abuse are reported, much less convicted.
No mention is made of what happens should a teen be estranged from one parent, should a teen be in a single-parent family, if there are geographic distances between a teen and a parent, and did I mention that abortions are nobody’s beeswax? Yeah.
The measure still has to pass the Senate. If it does, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) can try to veto it, but it could still be passed with enough votes to override the veto.
