From time to time, I dip into another blog whose principle author is even more opinionated than I am (and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing). And recently I encountered this article on the the “rights” of parents to be informed of their offspring’s sexual activities – arising from the requirement for underage girls to get what we in the UK term the “morning after” pill on prescription. Now it took a while for me to get that last point, but of course in the US, you don’t get anything on prescription without insurance; and an underage girl is going to get that on her parent’s insurance.
Or in other words, an underage girl has to ask her parent’s permission to take the morning after pill … and admit to the people she’s probably least inclined to, that she’s been fucking.
It seems that the politician’s excuse for this, is that there might be some health risks associated with underage girls taking the morning after pill despite there being no evidence to indicate so. But the suspicion is that this is pandering to the right-whingers who want to punish those teenagers who break the rules and have sex below the age of consent.
The article I mentioned of course (as it is a feminist blog) points out that this is an attack on women’s rights. I don’t disagree, but there is also something else lurking behind the support of parent’s rights over their children’s sex lives. Many of the parents who support the parent’s rights over their children’s lives would be horrified to think that they are being accused of eroding women’s rights because that is not their intention.
They believe that their right to control their children’s lives overrides any rights their children might have.
Most of us believe that there are certain rights that all people have certain human rights. Not adult human rights but human rights – so that includes both children and teenagers (who are not really children as we are talking about people with the physical maturity to impregnate, or become pregnant).
Now it is true that it may be necessary to restrict the rights of children, and to a lesser degree teenagers. But that should be a step we always take with extreme reluctance. And parental rights should not override human rights – children don’t belong to their parents, but to themselves.