Parental Consent

An Anne Arundel County official joined advocates for children in urging the General Assembly yesterday to ban marriage under the age of 16, calling the current statute permitting such unions "a shotgun law for pregnant adolescents."Robert P. Duckworth, clerk of the county Circuit Court, noted the well-publicized marriage of a pregnant 13-year-old girl and the baby's 29-year-old father last August in Annapolis. The case of Tina Lynn Akers and Phillip Wayne Compton Jr. received international attention, bringing calls for legislation to ban such marriages.

Authorities in Virginia are investigating the unexpected death Friday of the baby born to a 13-year-old Annapolis girl whose marriage last summer to a 29-year-old man touched off a push to raise Maryland's legal marriage age.Police in Richlands, Va., said Austin Lee Compton, age 5 months, was found dead in a bed in his grandmother's home near the Virginia-West Virginia border.The cause of death is undetermined. Results of an autopsy are incomplete, but officials believe there was no foul play.

BOSTON -- Sooner or later it always comes down to earrings.At some point in the debate, a legislator, politician or moralist who has never previously shown the slightest interest in the public policy on body piercing will utter the same rhetorical battle cry: "If a teen-ager can't get her ears pierced without parental consent, why should she be able to get an abortion?"Frankly, the analogy still escapes me. We are, after all, talking about the realities of reproduction, not jewelry.Teen-agers can have sex (alas)

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, when the Supreme Court issued long-awaited rulings in two abortion cases, even advocates of legal abortion were surprised by the extent of their victory. After years of fighting for incremental liberalization, almost no one expected the court to overrule virtually all restrictions on legalized abortion.The decision erased the need for an underground network of abortion counselors and providers. Some of these services had offered access to competently performed abortions.

WASHINGTON -- The statutory rape of her young daughter was horror enough for Joyce Farley. The botched secret abortion that followed only made it worse.Farley had known nothing of the rape or of her daughter's progressing pregnancy. One day in August 1995, her daughter, Crystal, was simply gone. The stepmother of Crystal's boyfriend had spirited the girl off from their home in Dushore, Pa., for an abortion in New York, beyond the reach of Pennsylvania's parental consent law. The girl returned that night, alone, bleeding and in pain, just days past her 13th birthday.

Michael Dietrich is branded with the tattoo of a bulldog on his chest -- and his mother hopes it's not for life.The 13-year-old Dundalk youth and his mother want the bulldog gone, but that won't be easy. It could take a year's worth of laser treatments to remove the tattoo -- and it's unclear whether it would completely disappear after that.Michael's story became part of a scarlet letter drama in Annapolis yesterday as Sally Dietrich, two state senators and several professional tattoo artists urged members of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee to make it illegal to tattoo minors without parental consent.

HOUSTON -- Two federal courts of appeal and the state of Oregon have given their approval to physician-assisted suicide. As in Roe v. Wade, the federal courts are circumventing democracy and imposing change in our culture by discovering a hitherto unimagined right in the Constitution: the right to kill oneself with the help of medical doctors. The AMA is now rethinking its policy of rejecting such assistance, which means it will soon approve it.We should pay close attention to what has happened in the Netherlands.

Here is how members of Maryland's delegation on Capitol Hill were recorded on important roll-call votes last week:Y: Yes N: No X: Not votingHouse: House budget cutBy a vote of 172 for and 248 against, the House refused to cut Congress' own budget for next fiscal year by 1.9 percent or about $32 million. As later sent to the Senate, the bill (HR 3754) provides $1.68 billion for the House and congressional support agencies such as the Library of Congress and General Accounting Office. After the Senate adds its operating funds, the overall fiscal 1997 appropriations bill for the legislative branch will total about $2.2 billion.

From: Kenneth A. StevensSavageBelieving that the public should be aware of how school board candidates stand on civil liberties issues, the Howard County Chapter ofthe ACLU hereby provides a summary of the responses of the four primary-winning candidates (Sandra French, Linda Johnston, Delroy Cornickand Melvina Brown) to our pre-primary questionnaire.All four were in agreement in favoring added emphasis on the Bill of Rights in the curriculum, supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and opposing a return of corporal punishment to the public schools.

WASHINGTON -- The Democrats are beginning to have some second thoughts about their plan to force President Bush into a politically embarrassing veto of an abortion rights bill. The obvious explanation is that they have been reading the opinion polls.The original plan hatched by the Democrats was to pass the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" early enough so that the president would be obliged to veto it, as he has pledged he will do, before the Republican National Convention opens in Houston Aug. 17. Such a strategy, they figured, might exacerbate the tensions over the abortion question already expected to be prominently on display at the convention.

House OKs parental consent for tattoos A proposal to require parental consent for tattoos and body piercings was unanimously approved yesterday by the House of Delegates, days after House Republicans tried and failed to amend the measure to address abortion rights as well. Last week, Del. Gail H. Bates, a Howard County Republican, tried to amend the bill on the chamber floor to have it require parental consent for "other invasive surgical procedures," language intended to refer to abortion.

Gov. Martin O'Malley will push to allow the Department of Juvenile Services to share information about children in its care with other social agencies - something now prohibited by state law. The governor's bill, which he plans to announce today, would lift the parental consent requirement that hampers even simple communication. For example, when a youth is arrested, Juvenile Services workers cannot make a phone call to social services workers to see whether the child is in foster care.

Panel favors ban on felons' use of fund A proposal to ban certain felons from tapping into a state fund for crime victims has been approved by the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Sen. James Brochin's measure would ban people convicted of murder, assault, sexual offenses, robbery, serious drug charges and other felonies from receiving awards from the Maryland Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. The board compensates crime victims for medical bills, burial expenses and lost wages.

Tanning in artificial devices would be prohibited for minors in Maryland without parental consent under legislation that's headed toward final passage in the General Assembly. Over objections about government intrusion and teenagers being prevented from getting a golden bronze for prom, the state Senate narrowly approved the bill on a 24-22 vote yesterday. The House of Delegates previously passed the bill, and the final vote by the Senate is expected today. Gov. Martin O'Malley has not reviewed the proposal, spokesman Rick Abbruzzese said.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans pushed through legislation yesterday making it a federal crime to evade parental consent laws by taking minors across state lines for abortions. The 65-34 Senate vote - which came just a week after a bill on stem cell research divided several leading Republicans from their anti-abortion base - gave the party another plank for its "values" agenda. Building on parental consent requirements in many states, the vote marked another victory in the drive by abortion opponents to limit access to the procedure.

BOSTON - If I hear one more person refer to Sandra Day O'Connor as the swing vote on the Supreme Court, I'll ban him forever from my playground. I have a different metaphor for the first woman on the Supreme Court or, as she described herself archly, the FWOTSC. She's the Justice of the Peace, occupying a rather female ground as the mediating force in the court and the country. As several justices said after Ms. O'Connor's retirement announcement, she brought us closer together. But it's pretty clear now that without Mom, the kids are going to behave badly.

BOSTON - I won my merit badge in Raising a Teenager. I still wear this small and rather tattered patch on my maternal sleeve. So I get it. I understand the fear that your 15-year-old is in trouble and you're out of the loop. I understand the anger that someone else is with your 17-year-old in a crisis and you don't even know about it. This is why the laws requiring parental notification and consent have fared so much better than anything else on the anti-abortion wish list. No one thinks a teenage girl should go through the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy or the decision about abortion without a caring parent.

WASHINGTON - The House passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for an adult to transport an underage girl across state lines to have an abortion without the consent of her parents. A vote on a similar bill is expected in the Senate later this spring or early this summer, and backers says its chances are good. The measure, called the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, passed 270-157, and was a victory for abortion opponents, who have been pushing an ambitious legislative agenda now that Congress is under strengthened Republican control.

WASHINGTON - Encouraged by election wins in November, anti-abortion groups say their chances of persuading the Senate to approve new abortion restrictions and to confirm abortion foes to the federal judiciary have improved sharply. Republicans are still short of the 60 votes needed to block a filibuster in the Senate, where many abortion restrictions have been defeated in the past. But abortion rights opponents have gained from the election. The Senate will have five new members who are fiercely opposed to abortion, and Democrats are soul-searching on the issue after their election losses.

Schools announce student information disclosure policy Information about past or present students in the Howard County public school system can be disclosed without parental consent if the data has been designated, "directory information." In accordance with state and federal law, the Howard County Board of Education has designated as "directory information" a student's home phone number; home address; date and place of birth; major field of study; participation in officially recognized activities and sports; the weight and height of members of school athletic teams; dates of attendance; degrees and awards received; the most recent educational institution attended; and similar information.