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-- By AngelineAndersen - 16 Feb 2012
No One Knows, Does Anyone Care? Conclusions from an Attempt to Study Parental Consent and Notification Laws from a Functionalist Approach | |
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< | I am aware that some amount of self-referential legal discourse is inherent in an established legal system. However, I find it problematic when this type of discourse overshadows real-world concerns. I therefore attempted a functionalist study of laws mandating parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortions. I chose to study abortion rights because I find it disturbing that legal decisions surrounding such an important - one-third of women will have at least one abortion by age 45 - and controversial issue are rarely discussed in terms of how they affect people, and are instead often framed in legal or moral terms. I chose to examine parental consent and notification laws, because, as the states vary in their use of these laws, I thought it might be easier to determine their real-world effects through a comparative approach. My research did not produce a clear picture of the effects of parental consent and notification laws, but it did yield two other conclusions: 1) my education has not equipped me to do this type of research and 2) our government, for whom this research should be most important, does not care to conduct it. | >
> | I am aware that some amount of self-referential legal discourse is inherent in an established legal system. However, I find it problematic when this type of discourse overshadows real-world concerns. I therefore attempted a functionalist study of laws mandating parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortions. I chose to study abortion rights because I find it disturbing that legal decisions surrounding such an important - one-third of women will have at least one abortion by age 45 - and controversial issue are rarely discussed in terms of how they affect people, and are instead often framed in purely legal or moral terms. I chose to examine parental consent and notification laws because, as the states vary in their use of these laws, I thought it might be easier to determine their real-world effects through a comparative approach. My research did not produce a clear picture of the effects of parental consent and notification laws, but it did yield two other conclusions: 1) my education has not equipped me to do this type of research and 2) our government, for whom this research should be most important, does not care to conduct it. | | | Problems in Applying the Functionalist Approach | |
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< | The two primary difficulties that I had finding the effects of parental consent and notification laws were 1) finding data that spoke to these effects and 2) interpreting this data once I found it. | >
> | The two primary difficulties that I had in finding the effects of parental consent and notification laws were 1) finding data that spoke to these effects and 2) interpreting this data once I found it. | | | First, it was difficult to find relevant data because I have learned to research through Google. Using Google to find statistics on abortion forces one to wade through a wide variety of utterly worthless rants before arriving at anything useful. | | | Educational Shortcomings Evidenced | |
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< | I want my education to teach me how forms of oppression work so that I can push back against them. My struggle to research one small issue brought me to a disappointing conclusion: After five years of higher education, I lack not only substantive knowledge in this area, but also the skills to effectively seek it out. I do, however, retain hope for my educational future: If my classes here fail to teach me what I need to learn, and I am unable to convince the administration to accommodate my needs, I will still be able to seek out the lawyers who are already doing the work that I want to do, and ply them with coffee and free labor until they agree to help me. | >
> | I want my education to teach me how forms of oppression work so that I can push back against them. My struggle to research one small issue brought me to a disappointing conclusion: After five years of higher education, I lack not only substantive knowledge in this area, but also the skills to effectively seek it out. I do, however, retain hope for my educational future: If my classes here fail to teach me what I need to learn, and I am unable to convince the administration to accommodate my needs, I will still be able to seek out lawyers who are already doing the work that I want to do, and ply them with coffee and free labor until they agree to help me begin to develop my practice. | | | Governmental Shortcomings Evidenced | |
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< | I am aware that human beings are emotional creatures, and that it is impossible to have a scientific, rational, and depoliticized discussion of abortion regulations. However, I do think it is possible, and necessary, to increase our understanding of the effects of these regulations and to have that inform our discussions. I would like to see an increased national interest in studying abortion regulations from an economic, sociological, and psychological perspective, and I would like to see our governmental officials forced to consider these studies. Our government’s failure to do this is evidenced by the relative dearth of information about the actual effects of abortion regulation, and by the lack of attempt to acquire more.
What we get instead is our nation’s decision makers grounding their discussions surrounding abortion in unsupported assertions. These assertions range from conclusory and offensive (the paternalistic language from the Casey court implying that the state is better equipped to decide what is best for a woman’s emotional and psychological well-being than the woman herself) to outright fabricated and genuinely frightening (Senator John Kyl’s statement that abortion services are “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does”). I do not wish to delve too deeply into speculation about what, if not actual information, is guiding these debates, although any such speculation I would make would not reflect favorably on our government’s alleged commitment to the respectful treatment of women. But regardless of what I think may be going on in the heads of government officials, regulating abortion, or for that matter anything, with a willful ignorance of real world consequences is seriously problematic: is there any set of criteria that would allow for a meaningful evaluation of a regulation without knowing what it does? The answer to this question does not inspire confidence in the decision-making process of our nation’s most powerful officials. In fact, it frightens me so much that I cannot allow myself to think about it for too long. | >
> | I am aware that human beings are emotional creatures, and that at this point, it is probably impossible to have a scientific, rational, and depoliticized discussion of abortion regulations. However, I do think it is possible, and necessary, to increase our understanding of the effects of these regulations, and to have that understanding inform our discussions. I would like to see an increased national interest in studying abortion regulations from an economic, sociological, and psychological perspective, and I would like to see our governmental officials forced to consider these studies. Our government’s failure to do this is evidenced by the relative dearth of information about the actual effects of abortion regulation, and by the lack of attempt to acquire more.
What we get instead is our nation’s decision makers grounding their discussions surrounding abortion in unsupported assertions. These assertions range from conclusory and offensive (the paternalistic language from the Casey court implying that the state is better equipped to decide what is best for a woman’s emotional and psychological well-being than the woman herself) to outright fabricated and genuinely frightening (Senator John Kyl’s statement that abortion services are “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does”). I do not wish to delve too deeply into speculation about what, if not actual information, is guiding these debates, although any such speculation that I would make would not reflect favorably on our government’s alleged commitment to the respectful treatment of women. But regardless of what I think may be going on in the heads of government officials, regulating abortion, or for that matter anything, with a willful ignorance of real world consequences is seriously problematic: is there any set of criteria that would allow for a meaningful evaluation of a regulation without knowing what it does? The answer to this question does not inspire confidence in the decision-making process of our nation’s most powerful officials. In fact, it frightens me so much that I cannot allow myself to think about it for too long. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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