Bruce Lesley looks under the hood of another Parental Rights bill and examines what it will really accomplish.
Jamie Martin is a Missouri parent of three teenagers. She would want to know.
If one of her children had a sexually transmitted infection, she would want to know. If one was struggling with substance abuse, she would want to know. She said so herself, in testimony submitted to the Missouri House Children and Families Committee in February of this year.
She still urged the committee to vote NO on Missouri’s new parental rights bills moving in the legislature.
What Jamie Martin understands is something that the bill’s sponsors — and the national organizations that flew in from Washington and Georgia to support it — do not seem concerned about: that stripping teenagers of the right to seek confidential medical care does not make parents more informed.
Tragically, it makes sick teenagers go untreated and without needed medical care. It makes young people struggling with addiction delay getting help. It makes teenagers who may be pregnant forego receiving reproductive health care services. It closes the door precisely at the moment a young person might first be reaching for the handle.
“Minors are less likely to receive treatment,” Martin wrote, “which is likely to increase rates of infection overall.”
That is a parent — not an advocate, not a lobbyist, not an ideological opponent of parental rights — reading the actual text of the bill and concluding that it would harm children.
The Missouri legislature should listen to her.