| Abstract: | During adolescence, dependent children grow into independent and autonomous adults, and it is necessary to make difficult policy judgements about children's rights. Questions that arise include: shoudl minors have the right to work, to marry, to make legal contracts, and to obtain medical care without parental consent; or should parental consent be required by the state in order to protect minors and to preserve parental authority. This discussion focuses upon the area of family planning, a topic of special interest to policymakers because they now face many questions about minor's contraceptive and abortion rights in Congress, in state legislatures, and in the courts. comprehensive response to policy questions about family planning rights for minors would require information about adolescent development, maturity, and autonomy; about teenagers' sexual and contraceptive attitudes and behavior; about the nature of parent-child communication regarding sexual and contraceptive questions; and about politics and values. Many from the legal system want help in answering questions about minors' rights. As little research has been conducted, policymakers can obtain only limited guidance from social scientists. As the policy issue is fundamentally tied to developmental issues, the better the knowledge about the development of cognitive competence, social competence, and autonomy, the easier it will be to make the difficult legal and policy judgements about minor's rights. Regarding minors' access to contraceptives, the situation is somewhat cloudy. There is only 1 state statute that requires parental consent for access to contraceptive medical services, passed in Utah in 1981, and pertaining to services provided with public funds. Yet, common law requires parental consent for any medical treatment (with exceptions for emancipated or mature minors) and "physicians often hesitate to serve young people without first obtaining parental consent because they fear civil liability." The situation is even more cloudy in the case of abortion. The Supreme Court's present position seems to grant emancipated and mature minors access to abortion without a requirement for parental consent or notification, but states may place some requirements for parental involvement upon other minors, as long as these minors have an alternative route to abortion. A thorough search of the literature on adolescent development reveals that the policy questions loom larger than the alternatives. 2 policy alternatives are: to single out a reasonable age below which minors require either parental consent or some form of adult involvement; or treat family planning and fertility control as basic rights which cannot be abridged because of age. |
