Via Amanda, I see that the North Dakota Legislature has defeated a measure that would allow pregnant girls under 18 to receive prenatal care without their parents' knowledge.

Well, that's a charitable reading of the bill. It actually would require doctors to pester their patients about telling their parents, and would allow them to breach patient confidentiality to tell their parents anyway if they thought it would be a good thing.

Amanda says that this shows how the so-called "pro life" movement is less about saving babies and more about exerting control over women. In this situation at least, she is absolutely right, as the following quote shows:

Vast generations have been born without the type of medical care and prenatal care that we have today," said Rep. Dan Ruby, R-Minot. "It's great that people get the treatment early, but we don't need to do something that is going to take away the authority of the parents, who are responsible for paying the bills.

Good treatment is nice, and all, but a parent's authority over a teenage girl trumps all. It's better, I suppose, that parents are able to keep control over their daughters than to make it easier for a child with spinal bifida to have the condition noticed and corrected while in the womb.

Speaking of the hysterical notion that girls who are abused should be protected (ha! snort!), Rep. Jim Kasper said, "in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, that family cares for and loves that daughter, and they need to be involved." See, the fact that only a minority of girls are abused means that they don't count. The fact that the "vast, vast, vast majority" of pregnant girls come from loving, caring absolutely wonderful homes means we need to pass laws to ensure that these well-adjusted, loved and cherished daughters don't go running off to get pregnant so they can secretly see a doctor for their babies' prenatal care. Oh, those poor mothers and fathers, who love their daughters just so much and have never done anything, anything at all to hurt them or damage their relationship in any way - how hurt will they be when their precious daughters inexplicably decide that they don't want their parents' involvement in this most important of times!

Aside from how illogical this thinking is - unsurprising for such a transparent attempt to whitewash execrable reasoning - there are some of us who still think that the purpose of setting up laws is to provide for the protection of the majority in some situations, and the minority in others. By Kasper's thinking, we shouldn't have any laws about abuse at all, since in the "vast, vast, vast majority of cases" people are not abused or mistreated in any way. We really could simplify our legal code by getting rid of all the laws that address behavior by a minority of our citizens: burglary, drunk driving, murder, extortion, sexual assault, embezzling - the whole legal code itself seems to be just a bunch of unnecessary mumbo jumbo that micromanages the behavior of a few people who don't count anyway.

Instead of these stupid laws, people like Jim Kasper could just explain to their daughters when they are the victims of sexual assault that while it's a shame this happened to them, the majority of women and girls don't experience this, so they should just put it out of their minds and move on. That would be very effective, I'm sure.

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