ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 19, 1997 TAG: 9702190100
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO GENERAL ASSEMBLY
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY AND ROBERT LITTLE STAFF WRITERS
THE DISPUTED ISSUE centers on parental notification details - can grandparents or siblings be notified instead of a minor's parents?
Virginia's lawmakers are scheduled for their annual abortion rights showdown today, and the results could change the lives of girls who get pregnant in Virginia.
At issue this year: a bill that would prevent girls who are 17 or younger from having abortions unless one of their parents knows about it.
The idea already has cleared the Senate. The House appears poised to pass some version of the measure as well, but the state's legislative process rarely is that simple - especially when it comes to laws governing abortion.
Passage of the bill is threatened by a fight over whether grandparents and adult siblings could be notified instead of parents. An amendment to that effect was tacked onto the bill by the House Courts of Justice Committee on Monday.
Gov. George Allen says he won't sign the bill if it contains a grandparents clause. And earlier this year, that's exactly what the House of Delegates passed. The grandparents clause on a nearly identical bill was approved 52-48, but later killed in a Senate committee.
For any other bill, that kind of history would spell doom. But parental notification is not only one of Virginia's most resilient legislative topics, it is also among the least predictable.
The House of Delegates passed the grandparents clause last year with four votes to spare. It killed the idea the year before by a similar margin.
Now, even though delegates approved the clause earlier this month, the anti-grandparent faction is promising converts when the vote is taken again. Pro-grandparent clausers, meanwhile, are also promising vote flips.
The result: one of the state's most contentious topics - effectively dead three weeks ago - is being reconsidered and is fetching even odds of passing. If 51 delegates want grandparents and siblings on the bill, Allen will veto it. If not, he'll sign it into law.
"With this bill, you can't assume anything," said bill sponsor Mark Earley, a Republican senator from Chesapeake.
The parental notification issue in Virginia is older than the girls it targets. It has been debated for 18 years - ever since Sen. Joseph Gartlan, D-Fairfax County, proposed the first bill requiring it in 1979.
But lawmakers have never been able to agree on the details. They have argued about the age of the girls who should be affected, about a judicial bypass clause that would allow them to notify a judge instead of a parent, and about whether the law should also require notification of the parents of the underaged fathers.
Now, for three years running, the contention has focused on the grandparents clause. Several lawmakers who voted against the clause in previous years now say they're in favor of it.
Del. David Brickley, D-Prince William County, is one of them. "I want parental notification. I think it's important and I've always supported it," Brickley said Tuesday. "I voted for the stricter version in the hope that it would pass. It didn't, and I sense that unless we make this modest addition, it's not going to pass again."
The problem, as Brickley sees it, is that some legislators "take the extreme view that there is only one pure form of parental notification and nothing else is acceptable."
Earley, a parental rights purist, does not describe the issue in political terms. As far as he's concerned, the clause would allow girls to notify those who are "least involved" in their lives while keeping their parents in the dark.
"We're setting up a situation whereby the minor can choose the person who has the least amount of involvement in the decision-making process," he said Tuesday.
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