"Choice"

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I think people are clouding this issue. This isn't an argument about if abortion was right or wrong, it's who gets to make the decision.

The girl is 13 years old, is not an adult, has no idea about the implications of raising a child and is still in her parents' care. If she had the baby she wouldn't be the one responsiable for it, her parents would be. Therefore they should be given total control over what should happen to the baby. You can't force responsibility upon someone in this manner, it's unfair.

 

Ragusa: I'm more interested in what you think of the whole thing, which I'm not sure that you've said. Do you think that the parents made the right decision? Do you believe that a violation of human rights has taken place here?

... and especially - do you believe that these laws are good?

They sicken me. Any law that treats someone as not a separate entity but as an extension of someone else is a law that should be abolished. My bull**** detectors are flying through the roof here; 'So legally it in the essence as if the kid has itself agreed to the abortion. The decision was made for her through her governors because she was unable to do it herself.'

What a crock of ****. She was perfectly able to make a decision herself - she did. It might not have been a very good decision - but that's irrelevant. People make stupid decisions every day, but we wouldn't tolerate the government stepping in there. This is just another form of discrimination against a minority.

Practically - the is no difference between not giving a starving man food and taking it away from him. I wouldn't call myself a consequentialist though - intention matters. It's not just the outcome that determines which act was crueler.

But maybe this line of discussion isn't going anywhere...

Clixby:

Your view may very well be realistic. I also don't think it's relevant.

Here's a bad analogy:
Let's say that you have a great deal of old, beautiful jewelry worth a fortune. It would be a lot better for you in a practical sense if you sold it all and were thus able to pay off your loans or buy a car or whatever. However, you don't want to.
Would it be okay then for the government (or any third party) to force you to sell it so that your life will be measurably better later?

No - that would be the government overstepping their bounds where they have no business interfering.

It's somewhat the same here - the government/parents see that life will be better if the girl has the abortion. However, they're also being a bunch of authoritarian wankers. Just because it will be a good thing doesn't mean that they should do it.

This assumes that you think that minors should have rights, mind you. If you don't then we have a totally different debate on our hands.

(apologies for the bad analogy...)

 

maybe you should try thinking of a slightly better one, since that is pretty awful and doesn't illustrate the argument at all.

The crux of the matter is that the girl's parents decided the best course of action would be for her to get an abortion, and this was supported by a judge simply because the girl's a minor and isn't capable of making such decisions for herself since she's a Goddamn child. Also, the government does have some business in this, since if the girl had her crotch-droppling they would be the ones who would have to pay benefits, since it's pretty obvious that her parents would abandon her if she did, seeing as they were so outraged about her pregnancy. Hey, how about an analogy?

Imagine your nephew wants to get a pet, but he'd have to look after it himself, and since he's only about 6 or 7 and seems to consider the idea of a pet more of a novelty than a responsibility, his parents think that he shouldn't get one, claiming that he's too young to properly look after a pet. Also, if he were to get the pet, YOU would have to pay for all of it's food, medical bills etc. until your nephew is old enought to get a job. Now imagine that you have over a hundred nephews that already have pets that you have to financially support out of your own pocket. The final decision falls to you.

Do you honestly think that a 13 year old girl understands the responsibility involved in raising a child? Or do you admit that she might consider a baby as a kind of doll? But you're right, her parents are being "authoritarian wankers" in deciding what's best for their own pubescent daughter. They should just let her do whatever she wants, right? After all,she is a fully reasonable, adult capable of making informed decisions and looking at long-term factors in a decision, right? that's why she had unprotected sex with a 15-year-old, after all.

 

Just to play Devils advocate, the main problem with allowing a child the legal "right" over something like this is that there is a logical progression that they also have the legal right to grant consent to have sex. And this could be a girl of 11 or 12 having the right to grant consent to a man of 50 to have sex with her - something most people would shudder at. You're also granting the child the right to do anything else they might want without parental consent - have a boob job or other plastic surgery for example.

Now I'm guessing that the Italian law isn't specific to Abortion, but pertains to any medical condition. (Something similar is in place in the UK, with "Parental Consent" - required for any medical procedures on children). As such the law itself probably isn't wrong, but didn't directly consider this situation when it was made.
Parents should be responsible for their own children, but in this instance I believe they have made a bad decision - particularly as there is the option of adoption.
(Until the child objects to that and there is a hue and cry about being "forced" to give up her baby)

 

seeing as for the last 4-5000 years of written human history and before and in large part of the world even today, 13 year olds are not considered children, in most parts they are adults, in our society we have another term. teenagers, simply becuase even we know that thier is a difference between a 10year old and a 13 year old. a woman cabeble of becomming pregnant is no more a child, she might not be an adult yet (in our society), but she can hardly be compared to a 8year old getting a dog.

and its bull**** patronizing her for having unprotected sex, millions of adults(people over 18) makes the same mistake, the difference here is, she is forced to take a quite cruzial medical precidure, where as an adult can freely choose.

forcing her to abortion, is as bad as forcing any woman (teen/or adult) to give birth.

imho let her have her child, then councel her and make her give it away for adoption. make her realise that she cant possibly support it alone, because she cant. she could possibly with her parents help, but in a conservative country like italy her career possibilities would be almost ruined.
but seriusly she is a young adult, forcing her to do something like this will ruin her relationship to her parents and will most likely have some hard psykological impact on her

 

Now that I do agree with. However, I think Abomination made a great point that makes any arguement against the parents' decision irrelevant. The parents have legal responsibility of their daughter until she is 18 years of age. As a result, any children their daughter has would also become the legal responsibility of the parents until the daughter is 18. For all practical purposes, the decision is no different than if the parents were deciding to abort their own child. Finally Ragusa is completely correct: From a legal standpoint, the girl is agreeing to the abortion.

And to murky the waters a little further, let's say both the girl and boy wanted to keep the child, and that the girl was allowed to have the baby. The legal responsibilities would initially fall on the girl's parents. However, since the boyfriend is 2 years older than the girl, would the legal responsibility shift to him when he turns 18, or would the girl's parents retain the legal responsibility until the daughter turned 18?

 

i cant see why it makes it irrellevant that the law removes her choice. while the law says she agrees, she herself, says she dosn't. somehow i dont trust the law here...

and from a legal standpoint, forced marriages are okay in several countries. rape as a punishment in a few and so on...

 

Monty,

It's the nuance that makes the difference to knowing to be wrong. Cynics go through that all the time before correcting themselves to the worse to better reflect reality.

Equester,
the law doesn't remove her choice. It's that she cannot execute her right to choose herself since she is being governed by her parents because she is too young. They exercise the right for her. They also take care of her money, because kids do childish things with money, or for instance they can give consent to have her operated in hospital to heal her, or to deny that because they believe that after their faith God is against blood transfusions.

In this case, the parent's agreement to the abortion is analogous to them agreeing to an operation at the open heart on the child.

With her protesting there was dissent, however, thus no doctor would abort because he would potentially risk to commit a criminal act, if her protest was relevant. Therefor the trial - the judge's verdict replaced the dissent by interpreting her statement in what is in her best rational self-interest -- in this case, the complete opposite -- thus generating the fiction of consent, so that the doctors have a legal basis for abortion and can proceed without risking prosecution.

 

It's actually quite a bit more complex than that. Parents shouldn't be able to force their child to have an abortion precisely because abortion poses a moral dilemma. Being that the legal and fiscal responsibility for the care and well being of the child falls upon the parents, the parents naturally are going to have some say about whether or not the child should be kept. You can't force the parents to take on that kind of responsibility. This is why they deserve a say about whether or not to keep the child. They merely shouldn't be allowed to force their daughter to have an abortion. I would also argue that they shouldn't be allowed to stop their daughter from having an abortion, either, in cases where abortion is legal. (Those who know me know I'm actually pro-life. I also happen to be pro-laws-being-uniformly-enforced-and-never-contradicting-themselves, though.)

 

From a legal standpoint that unborn child is the parent's responsibility despite it being the child of their daughter. If it is their responsibility then they should get the final and only say in what should happen to it. Otherwise you're forcing them to care for a child they don't want... boy, that'll go down well and that child will be certain to have a loving and caring upbringing...

 

Please explain how exactly she is not capable of making the decision herself. That she's a 'Goddamn child' isn't a very clear explanation. Make sure to include in your answer how she is incapable of making the decision when she clearly has done so.

... The government is able to force people to have abortions so that they don't have to pay benefits? Wow - I'm not sure that they're fully aware of this one yet - imagine all the money they could save here...

Well - if my bad analogy totally failed to illustrate the point - yours has managed to miss it.
We're talking about forcing someone to have an invasive medical procedure against their will here - which really doesn't compare very well with deciding to not buy 6 year olds a dog.

Maybe this would be a better one for you:
Your nephew brings home a stray puppy and tells you that he wants it as a pet. You pick up an axe and brutally hack the puppy apart in front of him because you don't want to pay the bills.

Irrelevant! Whatever answer I speculate here has nothing to do with reality - and whether or not she would consider it a sort of doll is in no way a justification to force her to have an abortion.

I shudder - but that's the business of him and her - not of the government, the parents, or anyone else.
The solution to these sticky problems is education - not throwing around authority. If they choose to go ahead with it even after they know the facts - they have made an informed choice and I don't find there to be a problem with that.

All the more reason to get rid of this nonsense about the parents having total control over their children. How many have died for this kind of stupid **** when they were quite willing to take the blood and not die instead?

I'm not sure why it keeps being brought up about the legalities of it all though - everyone seems to accept that it was legal - it's a matter of whether it was right.

 

Ok, if other analogies have failed, let me give this one out:

What if it wasn't a child the parents wanted removed from their daughter? What if it was a kidney, and not to give it to someone else, just because they didn't want it in there anymore, or, God forbid, they wanted to sell it on the black market. They are forcing a dangerous and invasive medical procedure that can easily (or in this case will) cause permanent damage (though not as severe in this case). There is no really good reason to do this, as there are other options. Do the parents have the right to just because the child is a minor and doesn't have a legal choice? I don't know what the law is in Italy, but in the US those parents would be jailed for child abuse and the daughter, kidney and all, would be placed in foster care with a court appointed guardian.

 

It appears you answered this question yourself at the end of your post when you said:

It's not that she couldn't make a decision, it's that her decision has no legal bearing. Unfortunately, when it comes to a decision as to whether or not someone has an abortion, there has to be a single individual who is responsible for making this decision. Asking whether or not it is "right" depends on your definition. It was "right" in the sense that the judge felt the parents were the proper people to make the decision, regardless of the girl's wishes.

Here's a corrolary that may make more sense. Say two consenting adults have sex and the woman gets pregnant. The man "decides" that she should keep the child, but the woman decides to have an abortion. Just like in the example with the girl and her parents, the man is capable of making a decision, but his decision bears no legal weight. To go back to the issue in question, the girl also decides to keep the child, but again, her decision is irrelevant to the outcome. I think it is "right" that parents should have legal authority over their children - if they did not, while this particular case may have worked out in a way that you liked better, there would be thousands of other cases where the child would end up being in a worse situation.

I find this curious - you said yourself if it happened in the U.S. the parents would be placed in jail. That's because removing a perfectly healthy kidney for no reason at all would never happen, because a doctor who performed such a procedure would lose his medical license. Also, if the purpose was to sell the kidney, that would be illegal. Last I checked, abortion was not illegal.

I guess the main flaw in this example, is that you can argue that there are both positive and negative consequences (for both the girl and the parents) in deciding whether or not the girl should keep the child, which is, afterall why it went to court. If there were only positive or only negative consequences it never would have entered the legal process in the first place. In the kidney example all possible consequences are negative - I can conceive of no way anyone would benefit in any way from this.

However, let me modify your example a bit. Say the parents in question had two children - one of which was in kidney failure, and the other of which had two healthy kidneys. Additionally, the child with two healthy kidneys was a match for the sibling in kidney failure. In such a case they COULD legally have the one child give up their kidney to the sibling - with or without the permission of either child. However, the main difference here is again, both positive and negative consequences. Most judges would rule that the positive consequence of saving a child's life outweighed the negative consequence of the other child going through the rest of its life with one kidney.

 

Ah, but that's saving a life, something the law has always accepted as a good justification for otherwise questionable actions. What about plastic surgery? That's legal, unneccessary, invasive, and risky. What if the parents decided their 13 year old girl wasn't pretty enough and wanted to give her a total facial change, including implants to some areas and bone reduction to others (I think this can be done), give her a boob job, and just for the hell of it lets throw in a tummy tuck and break her legs so she gets taller. The daughter, a perfectly pretty 13 year old girl with no defects of any kind, finds this to be a totally horrendous idea, an invasion of her privacy, and an attempt to destroy her concept of self. Do the parents have the right to force this radical and unneccessary procedure on her just because they want it for her? Again, in America, I'm pretty sure the parents would be arrested, or at least the girl would be taken out of their custody.

There's something else I would like to point out. As has been mentioned before, both the girl and the grandchild are the parents' responsability. That's re-spon-sa-bility, not property. That means that the parents are supposed to act in the best interests of the child and grandchild, thinking of them first and themselves second. That's the job of any legal guardian. Now unless there is a serious medical condition we don't know about where the daughter would have a substantial risk of suffering permanent injury or death if she gave birth, the parents' probably aren't acting in her best interests, and they certainly aren't acting in the best interests of the grandchild.

 

NOG, so you're saying that if you had, say, ten underage children, which would be really burdening in itself already, and they all would go and get pregnant at the same time, you would have to bear with it, perhaps move to a bigger house, go to two jobs, quit all unnecessary expences and simply survive with as little as humanly possible to feed all the mouths?

Sure, the chance of this kind of scenario happening is more than nonexistant, but it's still along the lines of "thinking of them first and themselves second".

 

Aldeth: I get all that. I understand that this is the way the law works - I just don't agree with it. Basically - I don't understand *why* the law is like that. Why people think of minors as the property of their parents. To me it reeks of discrimination and (though I hesitate to say it) - slavery. As I see it - when someone has no legal control of their own body things are seriously wrong with the legal system.

I don't think that it matters how this case would've turned out - happy or miserable, taking away someone's right to choose in this situation is so sick that I could never support it.

I'll stand my ground even on this one - if the child losing a kidney doesn't give consent then the operation shouldn't happen. The kidney belongs to the child, not to the parents.

Things get hazier if, say, the child is too young to verbalise their opinion on the matter - but that's not really a problem in this case. Let's say that they're 13 years old to keep the analogy running smoothly. If the one with the healthy kidneys is dead set against saving their sibling - it should not happen.

With your logic here I don't see why we can't extend this further. Let's say that there's a man dying of kidney failure. Why isn't the government allowed to force someone with healthy kidneys to give up theirs? Why is it only children whose rights to their body are stripped?

You could argue, of course, that children are unable to make decent decisions (or whatever the arguement for giving parents control of their bodies is) - why then can't the government order the mentally ill to cough up their kidneys? Many of them are incapable of making decisions for themselves - so why not?

 

Goli, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that the children would go up for adoption. I'd pay medical expenses through child-birth, then they would be put up for adoption. If any of my kids did that, though, they would probably be kicked out of the home and on their own at 18, unless they had severely turned their lives around by then.

My whole point is that the parents shouldn't have the right to force a risky, invasive, and morally questionable medical procedure on an unwilling child when there is a perfectly good alternative that is none of those things.

 

However you'd be forcing the girl to give up her child for adoption. Now after giving birth who knows what she could be thinking? I suppose her parents don't want to risk her suddenly becoming incredibly attached to the child she just gave birth to then that child being taken away from her.

Doesn't matter how you look at it, it's a lose-lose situation.

 

Well, forcing the girl to give up her baby isn't nearly as drastic as killing it, and risking that the girl will never have children again. It is a matter of what is actually best for the girl. Abortion is definitely not it. Allowing her to keep the baby is almost certainly not it, especially if the parents aren't going to support the baby.

But my question still remains, do the parents have a right to force a dangerous, invasive, morally questionable, and unneccessary operation on their child?

 

Well, they can't do it themselves but yes they do have the right to.

Revese sitution. What if the parents wanted the girl to have the child yet the girl wanted an abortion?