care of the children

The parliamentary Justice and Electoral select committee report on the Care of Children Bill will be released on 20 May - a far cry from December when it was initially going to be released.

One of the issues is parental consent for teenage girls having abortions. Under the current Guardianship Act parental consent is not required for abortions. Most people are not even aware of the law. A few are now wising up. Many maintain that parental consent should be required for abortions on girls under the age of consent - after all you have to get parental consent to give kids an aspirin at school these days. In 2002, 388 abortions were carried out on people aged 11-15. All were girls ;-)

So, last month AC Nelson surveyed 1001 people asking whether they thought parental consent should be required for under 16 year olds who are considering having an abortion.

Here's the results:

Strongly agree 51%
Agree 25%
Neither 4%
Disagree 11%
Strongly disagree 5%
Don’t know 3%
Refused 1%


Of course the older the person was the more they agreed that parental consent was required. Of those 15-24, 56% agreed that parental consent should be required, rising to 89% for those aged 65+.

Most of those who presented submissions to the select committee opposed the Care of Children bill. More than 10 percent of submitters wrote specifically opposing the bill's status quo provisions on underage abortion. Some parents were appalled that they were not legally required to be informed or to give consent if their daughter wanted an abortion, although they had to provide consent if their schoolteacher was to give their child an aspirin.

The Care of Children Bill was initailly going to reform Adoption laws. That's now got it's own bill. The COC Bill is supposed to give priority to the welfare and best interests of the child. Yet the bill does not even define what "best interests" even is. Not much different to the term "public domain" really, except that phrase has been taken out of the foreshore and seabed legislation.