Until recently, I was under the mistaken, but happy impression that the women’s movement had been successful in changing society with the exception of a few men who would be evil with or without women’s rights. I thought that choice—whether to live like June Cleaver or Selma and Louise, to have a career, a family or both—had been not merely established, but accepted. However, increasingly, I have found that there are significant pockets of society that bemoan our increasingly egalitarian society, birth control in general and especially the morning-after-pill. Such people, in addition to feeling that women with careers cannot be happy, see Planned Parenthood as harmful to women—in terms of both physical and mental/moral health—, families, and the parent-child relationship. Apparently, the morning-after-pill has been under special scrutiny because of its wide availability to women under the age of 18. Some parents, it seems, are more concerned that their teenagers will not become pregnant from the sex their parents didn’t know they were having than they are that their teenagers will not talk to them about their emerging sexuality and corresponding activities, emotions or desires.

Some people feel similarly about abortion rights for minors:

Without a Parental Notification law, Dr. Meryl Severson, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs, can puncture your daughter’s uterus and you will not know about it until after she has lost 80 percent of her blood. That is, if she survives the abortion. (http://irlc.org/irlc/get-the-facts/planned-parenthood/hurts-women/)

I could be mistaken, but the author of the above appears to be more concerned that a girl under 18 could die from an abortion than the fact that she might feel the need to have an abortion in secret. I very much disapprove of these priorities and whether or not someone believes abortion to be the right choice, I hope that in the future parents will seek to earn their daughters’ trust and not simply demand further authority over their activities.

On the other hand, if parents must  enforce their beliefs on their children, I do wish that they would, for equity’s sake, demand control over whether or not their sons behave in ways that may impregnate minors.