Access to Reproductive Health Care for Minors Is a Political Flash Point

A nine-month pregnant 13-year-old recently turned up in an Idaho emergency room experiencing contractions. Because a new Idaho law forbids providers from offering any health care to minors without parental consent — not even a Band-Aid, some reports claim — doctors delayed care. 

A frantic search for the teen’s guardians ensued, the Washington Post reported. Her mother was living in a car and unreachable. The hospital finally obtained consent for medical care from her grandmother, who was being held on drug charges in a jail almost three hours away. 

The Idaho law is an extreme example of measures focused on parents’ rights, the idea that parents should control decisions related their children’s upbringing. The parents’ rights movement has largely focused on education, targeting school policies that respect students’ gender identities and demanding that books about racism be removed from school libraries. 

Increasingly, however, the debate is centering on health care — and reproductive rights are a flash point. 

Many of the fights over restrictions on reproductive care have focused on access to abortions for adults. Women and doctors have sued over abortion bans in multiple states, saying they were forced to wait until they were septic to receive medical care or were denied abortions though their fetuses had no chance of surviving until birth. In a recent lawsuit in Texas, for example, women who required abortion for medical reasons said that their doctors feared that they would face up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000 if they provided medical care too early. As a result, the women endured life-threatening infections and harm to fertility. And after Georgia passed a near-total abortion ban with criminal liability for providers, doctors waited 20 hours to treat a women experiencing complications after inducing a miscarriage with abortion pills, ProPublica reported. She died. 

But Idaho’s law about health care for minors hamstrings medical providers even more dramatically. It targets not just abortions but almost all medical care. And it affects children, among the most vulnerable people in our society.

Defenders of the Idaho law point out that it allows emergency services. But the pregnant teen’s experience suggests providers in Idaho are uncertain about when they can legally provide care — just as doctors in states like Texas and Georgia are confused about the scope of exceptions to strict abortion bans. 

This summer brought an uptick in litigation over parents’ rights to involvement in minors’ abortion care. The Montana Supreme Court unanimously struck down a law requiring parental consent for a minor to get an abortion, holding that it violated the state constitution’s privacy protections. The ruling, which prompted sharp criticism from parental rights advocates, including Montana’s governor, came on the heels of a Minnesota Supreme Court decision leaving in place an order blocking a parental consent law. The Minnesota court found that the law infringed upon the fundamental right to abortion under the state’s constitution. 

Earlier parental consent laws have also attracted judicial attention, including a 2016 ruling from the Alaska Supreme Court declaring unconstitutional the state’s parental notification law. The court found that burdening only minors who seek abortion — but not those who carry to term — violated the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Each of these decisions are more protective of minors than the U.S. Constitution was even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Pre-Dobbs, the Supreme Court had held that parental consent laws were constitutional so long as they contained a judicial bypass mechanism by which minors could seek an order allowing them to obtain an abortion without consent.

As voters in 10 states consider ballot initiatives in this election that would amend state constitutions to protect abortion access, opponents have ramped up messaging over parents’ rights. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis told crowds that the state’s proposed abortion-rights amendment “will eliminate parental consent for minors.” (The text of the amendment states that it “does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”) 

Similarly, anti-abortion rights advocates in Missouri have argued that a proposed amendment to protect abortion access would invalidate the state’s two-parent consent law. A lawsuit filed by Arizona Right to Life alleged that an abortion-rights ballot initiative there would nullify the state’s parental consent law and that the proposed amendment’s description was inaccurate because it did not notify voters of that potential outcome. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected the challenge. 

Lost in the debate, medical experts and children’s rights advocates say, are the risks to minors’ health and well-being posed by parental consent laws. According to U.S. governmental data, pregnancy and childbearing have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives of teens as compared to adults, including by lowering their likelihood of obtaining a high school diploma and increasing their rates of poverty. Minors who don’t want to tell parents about their pregnancy report fear of punishment, like being kicked out of their homes. Scholars point out that teens face higher barriers to accessing contraception and sex education, which could help prevent pregnancy, and are less likely than adults to be able to travel out of state for abortion care. And adolescents are more likely than adults to be pregnant as a result of rape, studies suggest. 

Despite this, some states are moving to further limit access to contraception for minors. Eight bills to require parental notification or consent for contraception were introduced in six states in the first half of 2024, reproductive health organization Guttmacher Institute reports.

In a country with deep geographic disparities between those who can access the health care they need and those who can’t, the gap is even more pronounced when it comes to children’s rights.

Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot is the managing editor of State Court Report  and a senior counsel in the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Betsy Zalinski is a student at New York University and a former intern at the Brennan Center for Justice and State Court Report. 

Suggested Citation: Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot & Betsy Zalinski, Access to Reproductive Health Care for MinorsIs a Political Flash Point, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Nov. 1, 2024), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/access-reproductive-health-care-minors-political-flash-point