Abortion

Would the Fourth Time Be the Charm for a Parental Notification Law in California?

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again.

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If nothing else, you have to admire the persistence.  A newspaper publisher in California is proposing a ballot measure that would force teens to notify their parents prior to having an abortion.  And this would be his fourth attempt to make it law.

Via MediaBistro:

The first measure, Prop. 73, would have redefined abortion in the state Constitution as “the death of the unborn child….” That wording disappeared from 2006’s Prop. 85. For 2008’s Prop. 4, backers came up with a politically appealing official title—“Parental Notification, Child and Teen Safety, and Stop Predators Act”—and the short title “Sarah’s Law.” Sarah, they said, was a teen who got pregnant by an older man, had an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, contracted an infection and died. Planned Parenthood’s opposition researchers did some digging and found out that Sarah was really Jammie Yanez-Villegas who lived in Texas and was impregnated by her common-law husband—meaning she wouldn’t be subject to any parental-notification law, let alone one in California.

 

Of the two petitions currently in the signature-gathering phase— both with the same title as Prop. 4—one version requires a 48-hour waiting period between notification and when the abortion can be performed; the other version doesn’t.

According to the report, the last time the measure was proposed it was only narrowly defeated.