Anyone with half a brain had to know that if, at some point, the New York Times wrote any type of article about parental notification laws, they would try to paint them as a failure, seeing as they tend to believe strongly in the right to murder your baby. Check out some highlights from the hit piece they had on their site this morning:

Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told
By ANDREW LEHREN and JOHN LELAND
Published: March 6, 2006

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.

Then there’s this:

Yet the Times analysis of the states that enacted laws from 1995 to 2004 — most of which had low abortion rates to begin with — found no evidence that the laws had a significant impact on the number of minors who got pregnant, or, once pregnant, the number who had abortions.

A separate analysis considered whether the existence or absence of a law could be used to predict whether abortions went up or down. It could not. The six states studied are in the South and West: Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. (A seventh state, Oklahoma, also passed a parental notification law in this period, but did not gather abortion data before 2000.)

Supporters of the laws say they promote better decision-making and reduce teenage abortions; opponents say they chip away at abortion rights and endanger young lives by exposing them to potentially violent reaction from some parents.

But some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

The New York Times goes to great lengths to paint parental notification laws as a failure, devoting a two “page” web article to it. They haul out statistic after statistic after statistic that proves, in their mind, that the laws aren’t succeeding in the way “adovcates” had hoped.

Parental notification laws are not intended, only, to reduce the number of abortions, although that wouldn’t be a bad thing either. They’re intended to give parents a say in what their minor child does, much like similar laws in effect that ban tattooin and ear piercing altogether without parental consent. It should strike anyone with a brain as odd that a child can get an abortion at age 13, but can’t legally sign any contract in the first place or get an earring.

The New York Times spends most of its article dismissing the impact of parental notification laws, while at the same time not addressing their actual purpose. Sure those wacky right-wing christian fundamentalists (you know, the only people against murdering your chilld) would like it if it reduced the number of abortions, but the other purpose which was never even mentioned in the article was to keep their children from having dangerous and life-changing surgery without their consent.

How brutal.

I guess when you’re pro-abortion like the Times is, you don’t really have to tell the truth and you can be disingenuous as long as you get your message across: that anything that stands in the way of free and unrestrained abortion is either wrong, inneffective, or some right-wing scam.

Well done on all three fronts, New York Times.

Technorati Tags: abortion, notification laws, consent laws, liberal bias, new york times