Obnoxious Bitch
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Proposition 85: Vote NO, Californians!
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The issue of teen pregnancy is one that I am, and always have been, quite passionate about. It started all the way back in 1970, when a relative of mine got pregnant at 15, and delivered her son just after she turned 16. I was only 8 at the time, but the incident and its consequences were burned into my memory. My relative was kicked out of high school, and lost not only her freedom to simply be a teenager, but it seemed to me that the friends she’d had previously were suddenly no longer allowed to hang out with her. I don’t know if that was because their parents didn’t want them associating with the “bad girl” or if they stopped coming around of their own volition, but either way my relative’s life was irreversibly altered and she went from being a carefree teenager enjoying high school to a teenaged mother and a social pariah in the smallish town we lived in. I swore that would NEVER happen to me, and the memory of that incident played a large part in my not having sex until after I was out of high school. To this day, I consider it my moral duty to impress upon the teenagers within my sphere of influence that engaging in sex at such a young age is best avoided altogether, and that having a baby before finishing high school is a sure way to sabotage any decent future a girl, or her baby, might hope to have.
Not only have I been a teenager, I am the mother of one (and we actually TALK), which naturally puts me in the role of “pseudo-mom” to her friends. And although I’m fairly confident that the parents of her closest friends are similarly honest and enjoy good relationships with their girls, I can’t imagine how awful it would be to see one of these kids (whom I’ve known all their lives) have to go through the process of getting a waiver if she for whatever reason couldn’t, or didn’t want to, tell her parents she wanted to have an abortion. I cannot imagine that I, the very person with whom the parents have for years entrusted their child’s safety and well-being, would become a criminal for answering a plea for help (even if it’s nothing more than a ride) from one of these girls who are as dear to me as my own daughter.
Proposition 85 is nothing more than shit law intended to chip away at the right of women to decide whether and when they will become mothers, cloaked in the rhetoric of “keeping children safe.” It does nothing of the kind, and in fact endangers those girls whose families are already so fucked up that they feel they can’t talk to their parents about a pregnancy. What really keeps kids safe is their having adults they can count on and confide in. In an ideal world their parents would fulfill that role, but here in the REAL world that’s not an option for many kids… so they have to be able to find other adults they can trust to advise them and act in their best interests in parental fashion, and the State should butt the fuck OUT!
I’m hopeful that Californians will once again reject this latest Parental Notification law, just like they did last year’s version, Prop. 73. In the unlikely event Prop. 85 does pass, however, I suppose I’ll end up either spending some time on the phone and in court, or perhaps even doing time should I be called upon to skirt the law in an emergency situation.
* sigh *
(posted in response to CityMama’s call to action)
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