Tue May 3/05
Emperor Jeb, usurped 

The right-to-life themed medical dilemmas are coming thick and fast these days: the case of "L.G.", the 13-year-old Floridian girl who wants an abortion, is another hum-dinger, though in the end not nearly as complex as the Schiavo or Jehovah's Witness cases. In fact, the whole thing is pretty much b-s.

The Florida law prohibiting minors from getting abortions without their parents' consent was struck down in 1989. In fact, thanks to another Florida Supreme Court decision in 2003, parents aren't even required to be notified. (This is lunacy, it seems to me, but that's a topic for another day.) So, as has been pointed out in the media, L.G. could probably have had an abortion with no questions asked had she not sought help from Florida Children and Family Services, that is, from her de facto "parents".

That's where it gets silly. As has been widely reported, Florida law states: "In no case may the department consent to sterilization, abortion, or termination of life support" for one of its wards. But L.G. doesn't even need that consent! This wasn't a matter of Children and Family Services trying to follow this bizarre legislation, to stop L.G. from having the abortion — they realized that would never fly. It was, yet again, a matter of Jeb Bush trying to leapfrog the rule of law on the backs of the underage, the permanently vegetative and the retarded.

My standpoint is and always has been that all abortions are morally equal. Where abortion is legal, as it is everywhere in the United States and Canada, the decision whether to allow a minor to have an abortion should be between the girl, her parents and her doctors. Though one would hope that the girl's best interests would be the overarching criteria, they should be free to make their decision on whatever basis they choose. Devoutly Roman Catholic parents would be unlikely to consent, for instance, because their moral code forbids all abortion, and that's fair enough. But the state of Florida's "moral code" allows abortion. To sanction that freedom with one hand and write laws with the other prohibiting a tiny class of people — underage girls of whom it has custody — from taking advantage of it is discriminatory, hypocritical and desperate.

(But hey, at least they know where L.G. is — that's something of a victory in itself.)