Today in Terrible Ideas

[Content Note: War on agency; abuse.]

There is proposed legislation in the North Carolina state legislature which would "require teens to obtain notarized, written parental consent in order to access a range of health services, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, birth control prescriptions, pregnancy care, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment." This is a terrible idea supported by terrible people.

HB 693 seeks to amend the state's existing parental consent law — which already prevents teens from getting an abortion without permission from their parents — to extend to a broader range of medical care that lawmakers have deemed potentially inappropriate for minors.

...The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Chris Whitmire (R), claims it will simply help prevent "problems" from being repeated by involving parents in teens' health decisions from the beginning. Other supporters of HB 693 argue that it will help "restore parental rights and lines of communication within families."

But women's health advocates point out that not every teen lives in a family that has healthy lines of communication, and the policy could be disastrous for minors in abusive households. "Here's the bottom line: Everybody wants teenagers to talk to their parents, but public policy is not based on ideal families," Paige Johnson, the vice president of external affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, told the Huffington Post. "What if there's something happening in the home, some kind of abuse going on? If teenagers can't talk to their parents for whatever reason about their pregnancy or their STD or their substance abuse, they need to be able to access professional care."

This is more Perfect World bullshit being peddled by the same relentless nightmares who sell their garbage policies on fairy tales about a golden era that never existed outside of privileged fantasies.

We do not live in a perfect world, in which every parent has hir child's best interests in mind. We live in a world in which sometimes the least safe place for a child is hir own home. So we need to deal with the complexity that accompanies imperfection. And we need to deal with it in a way that doesn't empower abusers and pander to ignorant parents' fears about Big Government Intervention at the expense of vulnerable children tasked by neglect or harm with being their own best advocates.