Imagine a 14 year old girl in crisis.
She has just found out that she is pregnant.
She is scared.
Scratch that, she is petrified.
What is she going to do about school? Not only is her hope of following the family tradition of going to university quickly fading from her mind, she isn’t even confident she can graduate from high school. She likes her boyfriend, but she knows that he is immature; what if he leaves her when he finds out? Her parents are going to be so disappointed…
With these thoughts swirling obsessively in her mind, creating a tornado of despair, she learns that an abortion clinic can quickly and discretely solve her problem. Unlike the rest of the Canadian healthcare system where there are long waiting lists for life saving medical procedures, an abortion clinic can schedule her in next week.
Best of all, nobody needs to know.
The clinic’s secretary she talked with over the phone reassured her “you just need to show up next week, we can deal with this, the government will cover the costs.”
And so the abortion clinic takes advantage of the young girl who is in the middle of the greatest crisis of her young life. They make their next sale. She is crushed and has to deal with the consequences for the rest of her life.
If you followed this hypothetical story carefully, you will notice that the entire system is designed to get around parents ever having to find out. It manipulates the sense of crisis in the mind of a vulnerable young girl, and building on this psychological state they isolate her from any other influence which might impact the decision and then offer their solution. They want her to believe the choice is between being ruined and continuing with life as if nothing happened. Once she has been primed to think in this way, the sale is guaranteed.
Yet a decision as life altering as whether or not to have an abortion should be made with all the facts, perspectives, and supports that she can possibly have. Her greatest support system are her parents, they are her strongest advocates and the ones without motives beyond the well-being of their beloved daughter, but part of the sales pitch is that they don’t need to know. Never mind that most parents have a deep and abiding love for their children and will selflessly step up to support them, especially after they have made a mistake.
Sadly the abortion industry makes their sales pitch hundreds of times a year in Alberta, and it works. It lines the pockets of the millionaire abortionists and their investors, and a portion of this money gets funneled back to the coffers of their political cheerleaders, the NDP.
That is why we need parental notification.
As it stands, the only people most pregnant girls will talk to before their decision are their friends (who are usually just as panicked as they are, and certainly just as immature) and a sales person for the abortion industry.
Please sign our petition to support parental notification. This is about more information, more support, and more protection for young girls. They deserve it.