The New Zealand Herald | 12 October 2004

Section 37 of the Care of Children Bill reflects a time when schools could cane pupils without parents knowing. Doctors did not have to obtain informed consent.

These days it is different. If a school doctor wants to give a pupil a Panadol, they have to tell parents. Parents fill out forms to give permission for their child to be off the school property. Schools and parents share responsibility and liability for the students.

Today there is also a much better understanding of the risks of abortion for the girl who is having one. A young woman who has an abortion sees the professionals involved for a very short time. She can then find herself isolated from parents and dependent on peers to deal with the effects of a potentially life-changing decision.

The professionals do not have to live with the consequences, but the parents and the girl do. If the parents do not know, they cannot care.

Mr Benson-Pope is wrong when he says the current law on underage abortions was designed to protect the privacy of the girls concerned. The 1977 royal commission wanted a law that protected a young woman from compulsion to carry on with a pregnancy or get an abortion. It did not consider that parents would not know the abortion occurred. Whether parents know is a different matter from whether they consent.

Professionals have decided that the requirement that the girl consent to an abortion is also a requirement that she consents to who is told about it. In fact, a person under 16 does not have absolute privacy in the same way as an adult.

For instance, if a girl under 16 needs a surgical procedure as a result of complications of abortion, the consent of her parents must be obtained. The consent would not be informed if the parents were not told about the reason for the procedure. The welfare of the girl can override privacy.

Since Mr Benson Pope chooses to base his argument on hard cases, let's consider those hard cases. If the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, those are criminal matters that must be reported to the police. If the girl reports violence at home, that ought to be reported to Child, Youth and Family Services and the police.

No doctor or school counsellor would send a 14-year-old girl back into these circumstances after an abortion, and the law should not allow them to do so.

Some girls will show behavioural change after an abortion. If they stop going to school or become suicidal, parents would have to be told about the abortion because of their responsibility for the girl's welfare.

The risks for the girl herself are bigger in the long term if the parents who are responsible for her do not know what happened to her. Who is Mr Benson-Pope to decide parents are a bigger risk than a help to their own daughter?

He also argues that girls already tell their parents, based on a survey by Abortion Law Reform New Zealand. Its access to the confidential medical files of individual young women is remarkable when it is just a lobby group.

Its public statements have left the impression that most girls tell their parents. In fact, its survey found that of 25 girls under 16 who had abortions at Wellington hospital last year, 24 told a trusted adult, parent or guardian.

Who is a trusted adult? How many actually told their own parent or guardian? A trusted adult could have been the school counsellor, the family planning nurse or any number of adults who do nor bear parental responsibility.

Parents have the fundamental legal and moral responsibility for a young person. Parents will not always be right, but they always have to live with the consequences.

It is time to swing the pendulum back in favour of parents. Where there are significant events affecting children, and real risks to their welfare, parents should be involved.

The idea that the law allows your 12 to 14-year-old daughter to have an abortion on her own and go back to school is repugnant.

Will parents get upset when they find out their 14-year-old daughter is pregnant? Of course they will. They might even shout about it, but this is not the end of the world.

It is more likely that a counsellor or doctor will underestimate the impact of pregnancy and abortion on our daughters. Almost any sort of parent will respond positively to pressure to take responsibility.

Clause 37 was written with the best of intentions. But this law is sapping parental responsibility. Public polling shows strong support for a common-sense change, and Parliament should follow suit.