Let me start by saying I'm glad this case turned out the way it did. I think what the parents were doing to her was despicable and fucked-up and crossing a line into outright abusive, and I'm happy that the court sided with her against her parents.
But I have one question.
What makes this case, where the parents were going to force a young woman to have an abortion, different from a situation in which parents force their teen to have a baby?
Because they are different. Anti-choicers will applaud the fuck out of "parents' rights!" and such when it comes time to restrict a young person's ability to make their own decision about ending their pregnancy, when their decision is to have an abortion - witness anti-choicers' repeated and often-successful efforts to pass the most restrictive possible versions of parental consent/notification laws, which require a teenager to at least notify, and in many cases get a permission slip from, their parents before having an abortion. Which gives the parents the opportunity to interfere, thus forcing the pregnant teen to give birth.*
Yet they're also applauding the fuck out of this case, where the court sided with the young woman in question to override the "parents' rights" in order to let her make her own decision about ending her pregnancy.
Good gods. The malodorous stench of hypocrisy is so thick in here, I may need a gas mask.
Which is it, anti-choicers? Do you support the rights of the parents to control which medical procedures a teenager may, may not, or must undergo? If so, why are you viewing this court case as a victory? It specifically placed an injunction against the parents' attempts to assert their "rights" to control their daughter's reproductive health. It placed the teen's wishes and choices above the parents' "rights" to make fertility decisions for her.
And if you support the right of pregnant teens to make their own reproductive health decisions independently of their parents' wishes, as your behavior regarding this case suggests, then why have a large portion of your legislative efforts historically been dedicated to attempting to enact laws that require parental consent before a minor undergoes an abortion? You'll take "notification" if that's all you can get, but you're always angling for "consent" whenever possible, and y'all have gotten pretty fucking stingy about those judicial bypass clauses too, putting as many obstacles as possible between a pregnant teen and their ability to make independent choices about their pregnancy.
So with one hand, you work to enact laws that take decisions about a minor's reproductive health and fertility out of that minor's hands and place them firmly under parental control, while with the other, you work to give those decisions back to the minor even if it means getting a court to overrule the parents' control.
And you do this based purely on which decision the teen is making and how that aligns with your opinion on how the situation should be handled.
Either you trust teens to make their own reproductive health choices, or you don't. If you're going to help and be happy for this girl because she gained the legal ability to choose for herself how to manage her pregnancy, then you damn well ought to be extending that same courtesy to young people who need that legal ability to make their own decisions, even if you don't agree with the decision in question.
Because "More rights...for people who agree with me, and fuck the rest of you, I will legally force you to "agree" with me too!" is in no way a morally-sound position to take. And since y'all are so attached to your notions of being on the moral high ground, you might want to attend to that little problem.
*And indeed, I've heard some horror stories about parents who refused to sign consent forms for epidurals or other pain medications during labor, to "teach her a lesson she won't forget". It's not about "preventing abortion" - that's just the mechanism by which it works. The true intent is to force them to give birth.*
