I made this comment in response to Lorraine's posting of the diary originally. It was in answer to the privacy young girls deserve to have, it dealt with parental notification laws and also the bill that was passed, with Majority Leader Harry Reid's affirmative vote, federal bill S403 which prevents young girls from crossing state lines into states that have parental notification laws. As is seen on the map Lorraine has posted, it's in more states than not by a wide margin.

This is my first comment on Culture Kitchen, I don't know how to do blockquotes or italicize yet so I ask your indulgence, here's the comment to Lorraine's diary on My Left Wing.

When S403, the bill that makes it illegal to help a young girl cross state lines to have an abortion, was being debated on the senate floor, Barbara Boxer spoke of what an egregious bill it is, she said it's really the worse piece of legislation she has seen in all her years of holding office, she said there are so many things in it that need to be fixed, she also said something that is heartbreaking, she said there will be many, many young girls who will choose to take their own lives because they don't feel they have any other choice.

The bill gives a rapist father full parental rights. The only thing Boxer was able to change in the bill, so far, is that the rapist father can no longer sue those who help his daughter in terminating the pregnancy that comes as a result of the incestuous act he forced upon her.

I hear the argument so often that some can't imagine a more vulnerable being than that of an unborn fetus. I have to disagree, I can't imagine a more vulnerable being that a young girl or a woman who finds herself pregnant when she doesn't have the means to support that child, either emotionally, financially or physically.

The bans on abortion, including parental notification, have to be considered. How vulnerable do some people think a young girl or woman is when they are told their very lives are at stake if they don't terminate their pregnancy? How vulnerable are young girls or women who have been raped and are forced to carry a pregnancy to term that is a consequence of that rape? How vulnerable are women who are the victims of unrelenting domestic abuse? How vulnerable are teenaged girls or preteens who live with fathers who rape them?

How vulnerable is a young girl who lives in extreme poverty? How vulnerable is she if there are no abortion clinics in her state? Isn't it bad enough that money, the funds needed to have an abortion, aren't readily available? What if that young girl isn't able to seek help? How does that cycle of deep poverty stop if these young girls have no access to terminate a pregnancy?

We are told we have a right to privacy but that is a lie if we don't have the freedom that comes with knowing we have control over what happens to our bodies, if we don't have the freedom to our design our own future what do we have?

I've been that teenaged girl without a choice. I know, in the deepest part of me, that terror and horror, I know what it's like to be driven to a place where life is the greatest obstacle imaginable, I know that place, that deep down dread, I can still hear my footsteps taking me to that drawer that held the knife I used to slit my wrist. I've been that teenaged girl who woke up in the hospital when the first thought was, why didn't I die?

It makes me weep for all those young girls who will, guaranteed WILL, feel all those things, all those girls who will bear the same scars as they're either lowered into the ground or as they live their lives, those scars will always be there as a reminder of what happens when we've lost our freedom to be who we were born to be.