McCain-Palin Agenda Threatens Teens

I produced this public service TV commercial 20 years ago and have updated it to carry today's message about choice in California.

The first time I had a glimpse into the very dark world of child sexual abuse, rape and incest, I was visiting a friend, a psychiatric nurse at the Adolescent Crisis-Intervention Unit at New York's Bellevue Hospital. It was 1969.

Scarred, heavy wooden doors with locks bigger than my fists guarded the unit. The hall reeked of ammonia mixed with tobacco smoke. Voices echoed along the cement walls and up along the high ceilings. My friend had to push hard to pry open the thick, creaky door to let me slip inside.

A dozen teenage girls hung out outside their rooms along the cement hallway. Heavy with mascara, their eyes analyzed everyone and everything that came through the door, sizing up the danger, or perhaps, an opportunity. Several were prostitutes. Some were drug addicts, and others were kept on the locked ward due to violent behavior, including attempted murder.

Almost all of these teenage girls were victims of sexual abuse. For some it started in their early teens. For others, it had begun even earlier, and had gone on all their lives. Most of these teens had been abused by their fathers, uncles, brothers or "family friends." Almost all of them were sentenced to lives of recurring nightmares, their trust and innocence hopelessly lost. Their future, both statistically, and in reality, would lead them to further drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, violence, and in almost all cases, the physical or sexual abuse of their own children.

Almost all of them were medicated. Some were on Thorazine, an extremely strong anti-psychotic and the first widely marketed drug of its kind. They were locked-up inside a pharmaceutical prison for the crimes of others. No one knew what to do with them.

Nearly fifty years later, we still don't know what to do with them. But, in California, and elsewhere the Christian Right knows what they want to do.

In California, conservatives want to pass a law - Proposition 4 - that will require "Parental Notification" of the abused girl's parents if the girl wants an abortion. Or if the parents are the abusers, then notification of some other family member, who just might warn the abusing parents, or be one of the abusers themselves.

This is all in the name of the absurdly Orwellian cliché of "strong family values." As if these teenage girls had been raised by loving and caring parents or guardians. They are victims who will be ever more deeply wounded and humiliated.

Most striking is the number of parents who want parental notification. They say, "Well, I would want to know if my daughter is pregnant, thank you." Most parents are lucky that way; their daughters will come to them. But for those who don't live in loving homes, this proposition may bring them even more harm. In the real world, laws like this don't work.

Parental Notification can't force teens to talk to their parents, but it may force them to do something desperate and dangerous.

A scared pregnant teen is not going to go to her doctor, claim mistreatment and then stand by as law enforcement confronts her abusers. She may not seek care at all.

Even in the most loving families, some teens are afraid to tell their parents, and they delay it until the second trimester of the pregnancy - making decisions even more perilous. Some will go across the border, consider self-abortion, suicide, and some will suffer serious injuries or die.

A recent San Jose Mercury editorial stated: "Less than 3 percent of California's teenage girls become pregnant every year, and it's well-documented that the vast majority tell their parents. Those who don't often have a good reason. They fear violent reactions or being thrown out of their homes. They are also the most likely to be victims of rape or incest. These are the girls who most need help."

Three seats are about to turn over on the Supreme Court. If John McCain and Sarah Palin win, it will be the beginning of the end for Roe v. Wade and many other civil rights.

We must protect pregnant teens that are victims of rape, incest and sexual abuse. Even if McCain-Palin lose, we can't let their agenda triumph in California, or anywhere else.

Don Ringe
NoJohn.com

Follow Don Ringe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dringe

Comments

[lostparrot]

Hopefully all the young women who suported Obama and thought he was the greatest thing since a new Ipod and all the other Democratic women who did not support Hillary Clinton but supported Barack Obama will see this as serious as you do and go to the swing states and try to pull this baby out (meaning BO and Biden)....................and then BO can appoint HRC to the US Supreme Court. I sat in the classroom several years ago as an older returning students in the Women's Studies classes with young women that were bleary eyed and in a trance when you tried to tell them that Roe v Wade was in jeopardy - they just loooked at me and said "oh yeah that will never happen". Well sit back and watch it happen if McCain/Palin have their way.

[disgustedcitizen]

In short, the "Christian" Right and the republican panderers stop caring about the unborn child the minute the umbilical cord is cut. From that point on, the baby and the parent(s) are on their own.

However, it is more then just teens that are threatened, unless you are super rich, or super-insane-religious, you are in danger from these two and the forces they represent.