A ‘Breaking News’ item emailed from the Life Issues Institute recently told of a teenage high school student in Seattle, Washington, whose school’s health clinic arranged for an abortion for her without informing her parents. This prompted a question from a Halton Pro-Life member: what’s the policy in Canada on parental consent? The policy is: no legal requirement for parents to be informed, even though teenage abortions are more psychologically damaging than abortions on adults.  

In the Halton region, according to research done by the founders of Shifra Home maternity residence for young pregnant women and teens, three out of four teen pregnancies end in abortion, and each year about 200 teens have an abortion.

Teenage crisis pregnancies

 Teenage girls in crisis pregnancies need even more help than adults in similar situations for two main reasons, according to the book, Women’s Health after Abortion, from the deVeber Institute*:

 Abortions during adolescence create greater health risks than for adults.

• Adolescents, being less mature emotionally and cognitively, are more likely to have unrealistic views of the future and less able to make long-term plans. They are more likely to make hasty decisions to abort.
• A study of more than 40,000 women released in the year 2000 by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario revealed that, in the three months after an abortion, women who aborted were five times more likely to require hospital treatment for psychiatric problems than a matching group of women who had not had abortions.

Psychological health risks of abortion 

Abortion affects teens more than adult women in several ways, some of which are (according to the deVeber book):

• Lowered self esteem.
• Lowered ability to express emotion.
• Higher levels of depression (twice as high as for teens who gave birth and 60 percent higher than teens who had never been pregnant).
• Dysfunctional rates for antisocial traits, paranoia, drug abuse, and psychotic delusions.
• Higher levels of suicide attempts. Underlying factors are anger, anxiety and impulsiveness.
• Difficulties with relationships: One study showed that, in the year following an abortion, 90 per cent of adolescent relationships end. If the teen chose to abort as a way of keeping a boyfriend, the split will cause feelings of anger, hurt and abandonment.

Parents’ rights and duty

It’s hard enough for pregnant teens to make decisions even when faced with the facts of the pre-born children they are carrying. Asking their teenage friends can make it worse.

Of course, many pregnant teens are pressured into abortion by their parents. However, experience shows that, where laws mandate that parents be informed and give consent, abortion levels fall.

Parental advice helps teens choose life, according to a 2008 Family Research Council study of abortion rates in the U.S., where some states require parental consent for teen abortions by law. The author of the study, Michael New, Ph.D, assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, wrote, “Laws that require parental consent instead of parental notification reduce the minor abortion rate by about 19 per cent. Furthermore, laws that mandate the involvement of two parents, instead of just one parent, reduce the in-state abortion rate by approximately 31 per cent.”

In the Breaking News story, the school acknowledged the parents of the teen had a right to sign a consent form. The school just didn’t make it clear what the mother was consenting to. Parents have a duty to care for their teens. That’s why it’s their right to be informed and to give or withhold consent for treatment for their teens, a right not guaranteed to them in Canada.

**Women’s Health After Abortion, the Medical and Psychological Evidence, Second Edition, by Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy, MA (developmental psychology), University of Guelph, and Ian Gentles, Ph.D., FRHS, Professor of History at York University’s Glendon College; The deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research, Toronto, www.deveber.org