Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 9, 1994 TAG: 9402090149
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DALE EISMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
The doctors and social workers, more controlled but nevertheless passionate, provide a different but equally searing perspective. Their stories are of other young women, who committed suicide rather than risk having a parent find out they were pregnant.
And the legislators, most of them men and fathers, sat and listened and asked questions. Most had made up their minds, but few seemed totally at peace with their decisions.
So it went Tuesday as the House Courts of Justice Committee wrestled again with legislation to require that a parent be notified when an unmarried teen-ager seeks an abortion.
Julie Youngblood Waldo of Appomattox, just 17 and in the middle of senior play tryouts when she found out she was pregnant, had an abortion the weekend after getting the news, she told the delegates.
Her parents "had brought me up in a house where this kind of thing could never happen," she said, and she was too scared to tell them. But later, when they found out anyway, they were sympathetic and supportive despite their anger, she said. And she really wished she had had their advice and support after she learned, during a second pregnancy, how developed her fetus had been when she aborted it.
"This is a volatile mix of law and life, politics and policy," said Jane Millken, a suburban-Richmond social worker who followed Waldo to the podium. "When it comes to parental-notification laws, in good families they are unnecessary, and in dysfunctional families they are dangerous."
Millken recounted the case of a 16-year-old who believed notification already was the law: "She had her hands on a lethal dose of pills when she called me. I have no doubt that if she had not called, if she had not been reassured that her parents would not have to know, that she would be dead today."
Amid such contrasts, the committee has endorsed notification legislation several times and is expected to do so again by week's end.
And if, as also is expected, the bill passes, Gov. George Allen has promised to sign it. His predecessor, Douglas Wilder, vetoed similar legislation.
Opponents of notification concede Allen's election likely signaled their defeat. Trying to salvage something, several Democrats, led by Del. Shirley Cooper of Yorktown, have proposed a bill to require notice but let a doctor ignore the requirement if the girl is "mature and capable of giving informed consent to an abortion."
Democrats also are pressing ahead with efforts to stop anti-abortion demonstrators from blocking access to abortion clinics. Del. Clifton "Chip" Woodrum, D-Roanoke, is sponsoring a bill to provide up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 for anyone obstructing free passage to any health-care facility.
Abortion opponents, meanwhile, see the likely approval of notification as a prelude to real restrictions on abortion. One of them, Del. Stephen Martin, R-Richmond, has introduced a bill specifying that doctors must tell patients such things as the probable gestational age of the fetus and requiring the state Department of Health to publish and distribute literature on the subject.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994
Memo: ***CORRECTION***