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Third time's the charm?

For a third time, social conservatives in the Arizona House of Representatives are attempting to pass a law requiring girls under age 18 to obtain written permission from a parent, legal guardian or judge before having an abortion. After two failed attempts at passing such legislation, a third is only a waste of taxpayer time and money and should be abandoned.

Actually, legislation requiring minors to obtain written permission from a legally responsible adult passed both houses of the legislature several times, but each time the courts have blocked it. This time around, both the House and the Senate passed bills that required written permission for minors seeking abortions, but with slight variations. A conference committee was formed between the House and the Senate to work out the differences, and in the process an exception for rape was abandoned. This is the cause of the bill's recent failures - two times it failed on the House floor last week. The current reworking of the bill does not reinstate the exception.

So long as there are exceptions made for cases of rape and incest, legislation requiring girls under age 18 to obtain written permission from a parent, guardian or judge makes sense. Abortion is, after all, a medical procedure and to obtain one requires entering into a legal contract. Legally, minors can neither enter into a binding contract nor undergo a medical procedure without adult permission. The exception to this rule is, of course, in the case of medical emergencies.

While neither rape nor incest necessarily constitute medical emergencies, they sufficiently mitigate the circumstances surrounding a pregnancy and should be given special consideration. In the hopefully rare case of incest, the absurdity of requiring parental permission is clear. Additionally, the challenge of proving incest makes it burdensome to ask judicial permission.

Incest, however, is not the problem with this legislation. The problem with this legislation is that it makes no exception for cases of rape. The necessity of such an exception is a difficult, but vital, notion to grasp, and it contains two essential elements: one of values and one of practicalities.

Beginning with practicalities, which are easier to argue, rape faces the same challenge that incest does: it is tough to prove. Even in these times more cognizant of implications of rape, it is still a difficult charge for a woman, let alone a girl, to level. Still, there may be feelings of culpability associated with rape and a desire to keep the entire situation secret. If this doesn't preclude a girl from coming forward about rape, the difficulty of proving it may. For the few that admit to anyone being raped, evidence of the rape is often lost to the time elapsed between the occurrence and the reporting. Additionally, doubt is easily cast on evidence, even DNA evidence.

What all this means is that in the absence of a proven rape, it becomes extremely burdensome for a girl to get an abortion, impractical to ask permission of either parents, guardians or judges. The case based on values is not as clear-cut, but this does not diminish its gravity. First, there is the possibility that a girl will not want to terminate a pregnancy that is the product of rape. Fine, this legislation does not apply to her anyhow. Second, there is always the hope that parents or guardians will allow a girl to abort a fetus conceived under such circumstances. If not, however, it is inhumane to force a girl to carry out the pregnancy, her body twice usurped. This most demeaning of situations is rare, but when it occurs those girls that find themselves in it deserve the opportunity to resolve it expediently.

Supporters of the legislation argue that written consent is necessary because minors are not prepared to make such decisions without parental guidance. Guidance is one thing, one good thing; permission is something which ignores the exigencies of the situation. Besides, if a girl is not prepared to make this decision, is she prepared to raise a child - with its gamut of tough decisions - should she be denied written parental consent? The answer is no.

Time after time, conservatives in the House have failed to grasp these nuances, and so they persist in writing and sponsoring legislation that clearly is not feasible. Their time and our money would be better spent reforming public education and deciding budget allocations rather than endlessly trying to revive pet legislation long dead.