If you judged political movements based on sound bites, you’d be surprised anyone ever votes against anything.
All the proposed laws would protect kids, stop pollution or make our schools the best in the country.
In reality, though, they’re much more complicated than that.
Such is the case with House Bill 1176, a bill Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, championed in the state Legislature ,before it missed a recent cutoff deadline, as another push for the party’s parental rights movement.
A ruling from King County Superior Court, which upheld the “parents’ bill of rights” introduced last year through a conservative-backed voter initiative, has further emboldened the state’s Republican party, though the ACLU is appealing that ruling.
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House Bill 1176 was framed in a way that makes it sound unreasonable to question. “Greater consistency in health care for minors,” as the bill is described on the Legislature’s website, seems innocuous. But in truth, the bill would have restricted access to medical, mental health and substance abuse care care for kids 13 to 16, endangering public health under flimsy pretenses.
We want parents to have rights over their children, but unfortunately not all parents are the responsible, helpful adults we would envision them to be. In some cases, like when seeking mental health or substance abuse help, youth need to be able to make decisions on their own because a guardian may want to prevent them from seeking such care based on ideology that is not science based.
It could be a parent who “doesn’t believe” in mental health disorders, aims to cure leukemia with crystals, or wants to keep their kid out of rehab because they’re worried about gossip. Under this bill, a child with such parents would have been locked out of seeking necessary treatments.
In addition, youth living on the streets often have no guardian to turn to for such help. Kids who are homeless and alone would no longer be able to access medical care at all, as they would no longer be considered independent people who can consent to their own care. With no parent or guardian to contact, they’d be locked out of our health care system, from reproductive and STD treatment to routine medical procedures.
This would have effects not just on individual people, but drag down public health as a whole. Having people go untreated risks additional exposure and provides more vectors for a contagion to spread in our community, in addition to likely creating more negative outcomes due to the link between mental health and crime.
Faulty data
Walsh also seeks to tie the state’s mature minor doctrine, first established in a 1967 Washington Supreme Court case, to suicidal ideation, mental health and drug use. But we find his conclusions highly questionable.
The doctrine states minors who do not meet the age requirement can still consent to their own care if the doctor determines that they are mature enough to understand the consequences or if they meet certain other conditions.
Walsh believes Washington would be worse off than a state like Utah, which lacks similar policies. However, data from the CDC shows the opposite: as of 2022, the most recent data available, Utah’s youth suicide rate sits at 22.1 per thousand compared to Washington’s 14.9 per thousand.
It’s true that suicide rates have increased since 1967. But that’s true nationwide. Washington is squarely in the middle of the pack, sandwiched between Minnesota and Ohio.
Furthermore, the notion that “fixing” this problem would somehow improve adolescent mental health doesn’t make any sense. This is not a case of giving parents the authority to get help for kids who don’t want to seek it — that was already codified in 2019’s House Bill 1874. What it would do is reduce the access people age 13 to 16 have to health services by making it contingent on their parents.
Parents who are supportive and getting their kids the care they need won’t notice, but not every kid is so lucky. Failing to account for that is risking their safety.
Serious consequences
It’s not pretty to think about, but the worst-case results are the kinds of consequences we need to keep in mind when discussing the issue of adolescents’ independent medical consent. Walsh’s concern is that he believes “parents can be perfectly supportive of the child and still be cut out of a child’s life,” and that is the injustice which must be fixed.
What he fails to ask is “what are the consequences if those parents aren’t perfectly supportive?” His proposal ignores the potential consequences in favor of a Pollyannaish view that parents will always make the right decision and will always make better health decisions than their kids.
The net effect of this now-dead bill would have meant parents who aren’t keeping their kids’ best interests in mind would be given one more vector of control.
That sounds like giving more power to the people who illustrate why a “mature minor” doctrine is needed in the first place, and why the parents’ rights movement often ignores youth’s needs.
