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 In 37 states, including Texas, that require minors to notify or
obtain permission from parents before an abortion, girls who can't
ask, are afraid to ask, or have been denied can go before a judge to
obtain permission to terminate their pregnancy.
After examining 18 years of records, researchers determined that the
number of denials of permission by judges has been on the rise since
2014, according to the results published in the American Journal of
Public Health.
"Prior to this study, the number of denials of judicial bypass has
not been previously discussed in the literature," said the study's
lead author, Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology
at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
"The whole purpose of the bypass process is to protect minors from a
veto of their abortion decision," Stevenson said. "We find sometimes
the process doesn't protect them from being vetoed. It's just the
judge instead of the parent."
Judges deciding whether a minor can bypass the parental notification
rule are required to determine two things: (1) is the minor mature
enough to make the decision and (2) is the bypass in her best
interests, Stevenson said.
There are instances in which the judges don't rely on these two
conditions to make their rulings, Stevenson noted.
"We know it is happening and we see troubling patterns," Stevenson
said. "In one case a judge decided that based on her appearance one
minor could not terminate her pregnancy because she was past the
gestational age limit in Texas. The doctor said she was well below
that limit. The judge denied the bypass even though this was not
supposed to be grounds for denial."
To take a closer look at the bypass process in Texas, the
researchers turned to the Texas Office of Court Administration
annual reports of all bypass cases filed in the state and data from
Jane's Due Process, a legal referral service founded in 2001 to
serve pregnant minors in Texas.
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The researchers focused on the years 2001 to 2018, which included
changes in the state's law governing judicial bypass in 2016. Among
the main changes were an extension of the deadline for the ruling
from two days post filing to five days post filing. The new version
also removed one of the criteria for determining that a girl need
not inform her parents: if notifying a parent might lead to
physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
Another tweak to the original law: girls now had to file their
petitions in the county they lived in and their name, address and
date of birth had to be included.
Between 2001 and 2015, the number of denials ranged from zero to six
per year. But in 2016, the number of denials peaked at 23, falling
off to 10 in 2017 and then rising slightly to 12 in 2018. Stevenson
sees these fluctuations as signs of possible arbitrariness on the
part of the judges.
"Judges may been responding to increased politicization," Stevenson
said.
The study shows how state laws may be impacting women's right to
choose, said Dr. Albert Wu, an internist and professor of health
policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health in Baltimore.
"The results of this study, particularly the fluctuations in
judicial denial rates around the time of this specific piece of
legislation, suggest that what is happening is that judges are being
allowed to veto adolescents' access to abortion," Wu said. "And this
is really contrary to the intent of U.S. law. I think this is part
of a pattern of state laws and regulations that are chipping away at
a woman's right to choose."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2GfbXxo American Journal of Public Health,
online January 16, 2020.
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