Abortions for Minors and Parental Consent and Notification Laws: A (More) Functionalist Approach

Laws and legal decisions regulating and regarding abortion are generally discussed in a highly politicized manner: abortion is “murder”, or it is “choice”, a woman has a “right” to decide to have an abortion, or a fertilized egg has a “right” to life. We also see these legal decisions discussed in legal terms: how a proposed statute enacts with the precedent of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or how a legal decision might be inconsistent with Roe v. Wade. What we don’t find often is a discussion of what these legal decisions actually do, and the effect that they have on real people’s real lives. However, as almost one-third of women will have at least one abortion by age 45, any law or regulation that affects abortion seems likely to have real-life effects on a large number of people. A functionalist approach would ask us to consider these effects when debating these legal forces. I thought an interesting place to begin to apply this functionalist approach to abortion law might be with regards to the laws surrounding minors’ access to abortions: as the states vary in terms of whether and how much parental consent or notification they require, I thought it might be easier to decipher what effects these policies really have on people.

Problems in Applying the Functionalist Approach

The two primary difficulties that I had in trying to find out 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.

It was difficult to find relevant data because the searches I did kept turning up mountains of information that at first glanced seemed to be impartial and relevant studies, but then in actual reading turned into highly politicized rants about right and wrong. Often these sources would not describe what a parental consent or notification law does at all, and rather discuss the author’s personal feelings about abortion in general. I had skimmed through about ten of these sources by the time I found an actual study on the effects of parental consent and notification laws.

When I did arrive at some seemingly less-biased studies on the effects of parental consent and notification laws, I ran into some additional problems. First, I’ve never researched anything like this, so I didn’t entirely trust myself to determine which were reliable sources. I decided to look primarily at the National Institute of Health’s studies because they are a large, long-running, and internationally recognized organization.

After finding a handful of studies that related to my topic through the NIH, I realized that I also lacked experience reading this type of study. In trying to understand how these studies were conducted, I had to do additional research to find out what poisson and logisitic regression models were. I was able to figure it out, at least well enough to understand the studies I was looking at, but I was made aware that others who have studied statistics or sociology are probably better equipped to understand this type of information than I am.

What the Funcionalist Approach Indicates

The studies on parental consent and notification laws do not entirely make clear the effect that they have had on people. These studies focus on comparing the minor abortion rate in states with and without such laws, and occasionally look at what point during a pregnancy a minor is likely to have an abortion. Even on these limited categories, the results of the studies are not conclusive. Although one study indicates that abortion rates among minors do drop after the enactment of a parental consent or notification law, a different study indicates that this is possibly accounted for by minors who leave their state to obtain abortions in a state that doesn’t have these laws. Essentially, these studies indicate that no one is entirely positive what these laws really do: they seem to reduce in-state abortion rates among minors, but maybe they just force minors to leave their home states to seek out abortion services. This confusion indicates something that I consider problematic: for such a hotly contested topic, we have a real lack of information about what parental consent and notification laws actually do.

Some Suggestions for Further Action

I think that to really get an idea of what parental consent and notification laws do, we need to look at a wider range of effects. After determining if the change in abortion rates among minors in state is accounted for by minors that travel out of state for abortion services, I think that there are quite a few avenues for further research: How many minor girls would have discussed their abortion with their parents anyways? How do these discussions affect the parents’ lives? The girl’s? The overall dynamic in the family? If there is a major increase in girl’s traveling out of state for abortion services, what does it do to the girl’s mental health and support network to have to make this trip? I would also like to see studies on how these laws affect a girl’s life, mental health, and family planning in the long-term. This may require a more multidisciplinary approach to a discussion about these laws, that draws on sociology, statistics, psychology, and potentially a wide range of other fields. This may require that extra work and thought be put into these discussions, however, I think it would be worth it if we could start a more accessible conversation about the effects of abortion regulations, without getting bogged down in overly heated and polarizing rhetoric.

As it turns out, this is less a draft about its nominal subject than it is about the difficulties of research. In the first place, it's helpful in showing how destructive Google is: your initial difficulty in separating scientific efforts from political ones arises from an effort to learn by reading web documents in order of popularity. You needed not Google but a social science reference librarian. University libraries used to be full of people who were trained to help students manage efforts to find and understand relevant professional literature. The Law School is the only Columbia library still maintaining a full-time reference department, and our people—though still excellent—can no longer count on enough support around the university's other libraries to help our own students effectively. And, because students are no longer taught how to use a librarian as well as a library, our own reference department does not help as much as it could because it isn't asked.

Your next difficulty was in the mastery of material whose statistical language of expression is unfamiliar to you. Here the fault lies again with the deplorable failure of our educational system. Law students need to be taught early how to read and understand the literature of scientific social description, including at least a brief introduction to relevant math. Precisely for the reason you indicate, realistic legal education wants students to inquire what actually happens in the world, even as its current form makes no serious effort to help students read the results of others' professional inquiries.

From there, your next problem is the comparative difficulty of undertaking research in this particular area. Precisely because of the politics you are decrying, funding to study the real consequences of abortion regulation is not available in proportion to the importance of the public health issues raised.

Next, even the interpretation of the results you were able to find depends on more context than you have provided, or perhaps were in a position to provide. Because more than three quarters of the counties in the United States do not have an abortion services provider, travel is inevitable for most women seeking abortions. Whether "leaving the state" in order to avoid a parental notification rule is an additional burden, or even an additional step, depends on whether the state, or area of a state, in which the patient is located contained a service provider anyway.

Lastly, as you say, any attempt to evaluate the consequences of parental notification rules will involve not only an effort to determine whether they reduce abortion rates, or produce requests for judicial bypassing of the requirement where available, but also, qualitatively, their effects on the physical and psychological well-being of the citizens whose liberties are curtailed by them. Such questions require modes of inquiry that are not likely to be furthered by patient records or reports filed with state health departments.

But all these points aside, it remains to ask whether the depoliticized conversation you are seeking can be had by these means. If there ever was a time when this subject could have been discussed under the rubric of value-free social science, that time seems likely to have passed. Far less controversial subjects, like atmospheric chemistry, have become highly politically polarized, and it remains impossible to teach even basic biology in many parts of the United States, as a result of religious interference. I find it hard to believe that there are any facts "out there" that would be self-interpreting, or that would lead to any conclusions that wouldn't be the subject of primarily political debate.

How to improve this draft, then, depends on whether you want to go the route of finding more public health research, improving your research skills or networks on campus as a result, or whether you want to write more analytically about the sorts of investigations you believe can have nonpolitical results.