CA Special Election - No on 73

Last weekend I phone banked at the Campaign for Teen Safety for 3 hours to urge independents to vote down Proposition 73, a parental notification law for abortion services that is on the ballot on November 8. I really don't think this issue has very much to do with abortion so much as protecting troubled teens. Studies show that 90% of teenagers do tell their parents in the event of an unplanned pregnancy; it's the other 10%, victims of abuse, incest, kids who would be kicked out of their homes, kids who could be killed. This bill would force those kids to notify their parents, unless they received a judicial waiver (because we all know how comfortable troubled 16 year-olds are in courtrooms), if they want an abortion. This will achieve what I assume is the intended goal of stopping teenagers (at least this subset of teenagers) from getting an abortion; instead, they'll carry it to term without medical care, or go to a back alley somewhere and end the pregnancy themselves. The upshot of this for too many teenagers is injury, pain and death. It's not worth it.

A largely hidden aspect to this law is that the text of Prop. 73 defines "abortion" as:

the use of any means to terminate the pregnancy of an unemancipated minor female known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the unborn child, a child conceived but not yet born. For purposes of this section, "abortion" shall not include the use of any contraceptive drug or device.

Putting this kind of language in the state Constitution could have all kinds of unintended consequences, like blocking in-vitro fertilization or stem cell research. While this would also please its backers, I assume, large majorities of the public would decry such an outcome, including myself. Yet I can tell you this is not at all in the messaging of the Campaign for Teen Safety, the main group opposing Prop. 73. It's important to make people aware of this side issue, even if it strays from the main message. It was hard for me to bite my tongue on the phone.

However, we did get 83 people to pledge "No" on this proposition. Not bad for a night's work.