Being a student and unemployed
Wait a second.
Florida court rules teenager ‘not mature enough’ to have abortion
Quick question – which requires the most maturity: having an abortion or having a baby?
I’d say it’s having a baby. Even if the teenager doesn’t raise the baby, just having it requires a lot of maturity. There are things you should do or avoid doing while gestating a baby; it takes maturity to find out what they are and do or avoid doing them. It takes physical maturity just to deal with the whole thing. It takes a hell of a lot of maturity to push a baby out.
The 16-year-old initially petitioned to terminate her pregnancy, citing being a student and unemployed as reasons she is unprepared to have a baby.
A court ruled she was not mature enough to make the decision to have an abortion, blocking her from getting one.
She’s not mature enough to make the decision to have an abortion, but she is mature enough to be forced to have the baby she doesn’t want to have. How does that work exactly? I can’t make the numbers come out right.
In order for a minor to get an abortion in Florida, they must provide a physician with written consent from a parent or legal guardian, or request a waiver.
But actually having an actual baby requires no such hurdles to overcome.
This makes no kind of sense. It’s not as if the state is going to make sure that baby has a good and happy upbringing with a minimum of two loving adults raising it. That baby could be doomed to a miserable infancy and childhood with an underage mother who didn’t want it and was unable to finish school because of the baby.
It’s not about the baby, is it. It’s about punishing the girl.
Recognizing that you’re not prepared to raise a child sounds very mature to me.
By the way, there’s an error in the Guardian article, at least if the Post is to be believed. It’s the baby’s father that she says is unable to help, not her father. Apparently she’s parentless. I don’t know if that means she’s an orphan, or if one or both of her parents have disappeared, but it strikes me that she knows something about the struggles of raising a child you’re not prepared for.
They didn’t claim it was.
I didn’t say they did.
It’s ironic given that anti-choicers generally claim that abortion is an utterly clear-cut decision whose morality should be obvious to a five-year-old, let alone a sixteen-year-old: “Fetus = baby. So abortion = murder. Murder = bad.”
But when they want to force a teenager to give birth, suddenly it’s a complicated and deep issue.
Even most of the forced birthers are more complicated than that; no exception for rape or incest triggers people on a gut level even if they *do* believe abortion is murder. Just like people who at least claim to be pro-choice get squeamish at certain points (aborting babies with trisomy or some such).
I don’t have these problems… strangle an infant in the delivery room if you like, I regularly eat things more sentient than a newborn.
BKiSA, you’re a hard man, but I did laugh out loud.
I read about this case a few days ago and felt disbelief at the ‘not mature enough’ argument. They’re consigning that young girl and her child to a hard life and no doubt in the future will happily blame ‘careless’ solo mums for the ills of the world.
They don’t want these girls raising babies. This is all about producing a new crop of newborns for Dominionist Christians to adopt and turn into warriors for Jesus. They want these immature young women having babies so they can say they are unfit and take the babies away if the young women don’t willingly surrender them for adoption.