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Parents Right to Know Campaign Underway

On Monday, February 6, thousands of petitions for the Parents' Right to Know and Child Protection ballot initiative rolled off the presses. This initiative, intended for the November state ballot, will require a doctor to notify at least one parent of an under-18-year-old girl before performing an abortion on her.

On the ballot of last November's special election as Proposition 73, Parents' Right to Know barely lost; in fact it got the most Yes votes of all eight measures in the voting -- even though backers spent the least of all 16 Yes and No sides.

Initiative backers this time need 900,000 signatures before mid-April. They hope that 500,000 of these can be collected at the 1,000 Catholic churches in the state -- an average of 500 per parish.

(If your parish is not yet collecting signatures, call toll-free 866-828-8355 or e-mail Janet@ParentsRight2Know.org, and volunteer staff will send you petitions and other materials.)

What are the benefits of such an initiative? If passed, Parents' Right to Know will bring families closer together. Thousands of young girls will be protected from sexual abuse from older males.

Volunteers in Oregon and Montana are hoping to put parental notification initiatives on the ballot in those states this fall -- using the same language as the California initiative.

Since the largest out-of-state donations against Proposition 73 last year came from Planned Parenthood in states with no parental notification in effect-- New York, New Jersey, and Illinois -- presumably those states would be prime targets for a Parents' Right to Know measure if the law passes in California.

Already on February 2, before petitions were printed, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU held a press confer ence in Sacramento, saying that the "voters have decided" (by defeating Proposition 73 in November, 2005) and that another attempt to put Parents' Right to Know on the ballot would be "an abuse of the initiative process."

Planned Parenthood is an interested party, as the web site for Proposition 73 shows. The abortion provider in Planned Parenthood affiliates throughout the state is recorded telling girls as young as 14 that they will not report their relationship with their adult pedophile boyfriends. See the "Secret Tapes" section of the website.

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