Illinois Attorney Lawyer

The abortion bill most likely to federal law this year would affect a relatively small number of pregnant teenagers, but their impact on them could be dramatic - sharply reducing the opportunities for girls in many countries fear, say the parents of their plight.

Supporters and opponents each offer vivid worst-case scenarios in the debate on the bill, which was this week in the Senate Republicans’ priority list. It would outlaw transporting a small state lines to obtain an abortion to circumvent parental Consent or notification laws in the girl at home.

The Bill of supporters evoke the image of a girl to be impregnated by an abusive older man, then goes to an out-of-state abortion clinic so the girl’s parents and the authorities will no longer have a relationship that may be illegal because age differences.

Opponents of the bill say it would be the punishment well-meaning acts of an aunt, older sister or other confidante help a girl beaten or fear of eviction from home when their parents learned of the pregnancy.

“They are talking about girls who really need support - let them use what they have,” said Shawn Towey of the National Network of Abortion Funds. “This bill is based on a cooling effect on the people who are only there to help.”

Title of the Child Custody Protection Act, and with a sentence of up to one year in prison, the bill has bounced around Congress for years, winning House approval three times, but never for a vote on the Senate floor. Only now - after the Senate GOP’s Top 10 list of priorities - do supporters and opponents believe its passage is likely.

“We are procedures, as if we are talking about,” said Lorraine Kenny of the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project. ACLU lawyers already are studying possible challenges on grounds that the law violates the right to travel from state to state and not an exception for cases in which a girl’s health is at risk.

Activists on both sides expect support for the bill by majority Republicans, perhaps together with some Democrats. Some doubt Democratic state and government leaders will wage an all-out fight against them.

“Politically it would be very high risk for the Senate Democrats on this bill Filibuster,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. “Polls show that about 80% of Americans support the concept of parental notification.”

Opponents agree that young women are better tell parents about a pregnancy, and say most do so voluntarily. But abortion-rights activists argue that politicians should not mandates, which may be backward in cases where family communication already has broken down.

“Rather than encourage, in which a trusted adult, may be able to offer much-needed assistance, this law will mean that some young women still intergovernmental travel for medical care alone,” says a NARAL Pro-Choice America briefing paper. “Tube Still, it may force young women to become self-induced or illegal abortions.”

- Two states have parental involvement laws in force when the National Right to Life Committee considers eight of the laws ineffective because of loopholes.

In all 32 states with the exception of Utah, a procedure called judicial bypass allows a minor to petition a judge for permission for an abortion without their parents say. In many courts, these waivers are granted routinely to any reasonably mature girl who asks; elsewhere the requests are often denied what some girls to opt for an abortion in another state without a parental involvement law.

Abortion-rights supporters cite Alabama - where consent of one parent is required before a minor’s abortion - as a state with notable roadblocks for girls, a court waiver.

Jennifer Dalven of the ACLU’s reproductive freedom project, said judges in Birmingham and in some other municipalities Alabama adamantly against exemptions so that legal aid attorneys now advise pregnant minors not to disturb requesting. Instead, Dalven said, girls are discuss to consider getting an abortion in Georgia or Florida, where the procedures are somewhat more flexible.