July 26, 2006
How Young Is Young? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:50 AM EST Yesterday, by a vote of 65 to 34, the United States Senate passed a bill making it a criminal act to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of evading parental consent or notification laws governing abortion in her home state. By a vote of 270 to 157 the House passed similar legislation last year (HR748, #144, 4/27/05).
The House bill goes a step further in requiring that out-of-state doctors notify the parents of underage patients and wait 24 hours before performing the procedure, to give the parents an opportunity to intercede. The House bill also allows parents to sue out-of-state doctors who do not comply with these regulations. If the two chambers work out their differences in a conference committee, President Bush has indicated that he will sign the legislation.
Before I proceed, I’d like to make clear that it’s not my intention to delve into a discussion about abortion. Reasonable people can disagree about its morality and about the legal reasoning behind Roe v. Wade. My historical interest in the recent congressional votes has to do with age.
The National Right to Life Committee claims that the proposed law would apply to underage women in 26 states that currently enforce parental notification or consent laws, though by my count, using data provided by the Center for Reproductive Rights, 34 states have such laws on the books pertaining to women under the age of 18 (several other states have such laws pertaining to women under the age of 16 or 17).
Under current law, a 17-year-old can enlist in the armed services. Even conceding that the law requires 17-year-old enlistees to receive parental consent before joining one of armed forces, is there not a contradiction in allowing a young woman to fight and die in Iraq, but denying her the right to make her own health care decisions?
Again, this isn’t about abortion. It’s about age. For purposes of this discussion, women have a constitutional right to abortions because the Supreme Court says so. To quote the late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, “the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”
Americans engaged in a similar debate in 1970, when Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) fastened a provision onto the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Their argument was twofold. First, in Bayh’s words, by virtue of near-universal high school education, young people were “better prepared to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship than at any previous time.” Second, if 18-year-olds could fight and die in Vietnam, they should be given the chance to vote in federal and state elections.
So convincing was this argument that when the Supreme Court ruled in 1970 that the voting proviso was constitutionally binding only in presidential elections, Congress quickly passed a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to 18, and in just three months, 38 states ratified what became the new Twenty-Sixth Amendment.
There’s something perverse about Congress authorizing a war in Iraq but denying full constitutional rights to women who are eligible to fight—and who may, in fact, die—in that same war. The same applies to drinking laws, I suppose. Since the Iraq war began, over 2,500 American servicemen have been killed in action. Of these casualties, many were not yet 21 years old, the legal drinking age in America.
Social historians have done some fine work demonstrating that definitions of childhood, adulthood, and adolescence are socially constructed ideas, and fluid ones at that. It’s therefore imperative that we reexamine our laws with an open mind. The contradictions governing our current ideas about age need to be ironed out, for, surely, if someone is old enough to take a bullet in a foreign war, she is old enough to make her own medical decisions or order a beer.
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