Minors, parents, and minor parents.

AuthorMartian, Maya
PositionII. Minors, Parents, and Minors as Parents B. Minor Parents' Parental Rights in Practice through V. Conclusion, with footnotes, p. 160-207
  1. Minor Parents' Parental Rights in Practice

    A more expansive inquiry into the law on minors' reproductive decision making reveals a troubling approach to adolescent pregnancy and parenting. If we look at the whole picture of adolescents' reproductive rights, comparing abortion law and the law on minor parents' parental rights, we will see that the law undermines adolescents' rights whichever path of pregnancy resolution they choose. At the same time that the law thwarts adolescents' access to abortion care, it also fails to protect adolescents' rights as parents. Although, in theory, minor parents possess the same rights as adults to bear and rear children, in reality, minor parents' parental rights are tenuous. (149) Minor parents from poor communities and, in particular, racial minorities, remain doubly vulnerable to disruption of their parental rights.

    This Part more closely examines the reality of minor parents' abilities to rear their children and unmasks similarities in the law's approach to adolescent abortion and adolescent parenthood, similarities that scholars have previously overlooked. This Part focuses primarily on adolescent mothers, given the greater likelihood of their involvement in parenting decisions. (150) This Part examines how minor mothers fare when they come into contact with the legal system, particularly within the contexts of child welfare law and adoption law. This examination reveals two key insights. First, the law takes a highly skeptical view of adolescent girls' reproductive decision making, whether they seek to terminate their pregnancies or to parent their children. Second, legal rules that claim to protect adolescents' interests, such as judicial bypass in the abortion context and the right to relinquish in the adoption context, instead provide a means to punish female teenage sexuality and enforce gender norms. Rather than standing in conflict, the law on minor parents operates in conjunction with abortion law to enforce a traditional gender script--that self-sacrificing mothers should give birth and give up their infants to better circumstances than teenage parents can presumably provide. (151)

    As this Part will show, adolescent parents remain at an especially high risk of oversight by the child welfare system and, therefore, of having the state remove their children from their custody. (152) Although ample research has shown that poor minority adult parents also face a high risk of scrutiny by child welfare agents, minor mothers encounter multiple layers of bias based on their age, as well as their race, poverty, and gender. (153) Girls in foster care who confront a higher risk of teenage pregnancy remain particularly vulnerable to the involuntary removal of their infants or pressure to surrender for adoption, due in part to state officials' skepticism of teenagers' abilities to parent. The tenuousness of minors' legal rights to access abortion or to parent their children is especially apparent for the most vulnerable groups of minors, as laws restricting access to abortion and child welfare practices disproportionately affect the poor and racial minorities.

    With regard to adoption law, opponents of abortion present adoption as a better alternative to abortion, but research on adoption practices presents a disturbing picture of unwarranted and less than voluntary removals of minor parents' infants by both private actors and state agents. (154) To be clear, this Article is not arguing for the removal of state oversight of teenage parents; protecting the well-being of adolescent parents and their infants remains a worthy goal. Rather, society needs more effective oversight that supports minors' reproductive decision making and seeks to preserve their parental rights if they wish to parent their infants. The analysis below demonstrates that, despite the formal grant of full parental rights to minor parents, the law often undermines rather than supports those rights.

    1. Minor Parents and the Child Welfare System

      Experts generally agree that the child welfare system is broken. (155) The vast majority of child welfare cases involve poverty-related neglect rather than severe abuse. (156) Thousands of children are removed from their parents' custody each year, even though few emerge better off than if they had remained in their homes. (157) Teenage parents present particularly difficult challenges for the system.

      The United States has the highest adolescent pregnancy rate and birth rate of any industrialized nation. (158) Each year, almost 750,000 girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen become pregnant. Roughly sixty percent of these girls give birth. (159) The lives of teenage mothers rarely resemble the nearly idyllic reality of teen motherhood portrayed in media depictions, such as the film, Juno, or the television show, Glee.

      Although it is a common intuition that teenage parenthood is likely to lead to poverty, recent research shows that teenage parenthood may be caused by poverty. (160) Poor young women are more likely to become pregnant than their economically better off peers. (161) Teenage motherhood is a symptom of poverty that often cycles to the next generation. Generally speaking, teenage mothers are more likely to need public assistance compared to girls of similar socio-economic status who postpone childbirth. (162) Adolescent mothers are also significantly less likely than their non-parenting peers to complete high school or obtain a GED by the age of twenty-two. (163) Furthermore, as with adult parents, poverty places minor parents at a greater risk of oversight from the child welfare system. (164) Bias in the child welfare system has been the subject of extensive study and criticism, and ample evidence suggests that poverty and race place adult parents at a higher risk of state intervention. (165)

      However, teenage parents face additional hurdles to preserving their parental rights based on their minority. Multiple vectors of discrimination, including gender, race, and class, intersect with age-based concerns, leaving minor parents doubly vulnerable to disruption of their parental rights. Minor parents are generally more likely to come into contact with the child welfare system than adult parents. (166) For mothers age fifteen or younger, the risk of the state removing their child from their care due to neglect or abuse are nearly double that of mothers between twenty and twenty-one years old. (167) Adolescents who are themselves wards of the state are more likely to become teen parents than their peers, (168) presenting particularly thorny problems for the child welfare system. (169) This population of parenting wards "is nearly invisible in the academic literature of both law and the social sciences, in state policies, in practice guides for children's attorneys and guardians ad litem, and in the demographic data on children in foster care." (170) An adolescent parent who herself was a victim of abuse and neglect remains accountable to the same extent as an adult to charges of child abuse or neglect of her child. (171) Yet, the child welfare system does little to ensure that the cycle of abuse does not repeat itself. (172) Research shows that adolescents in foster care are more likely to become teenage parents, and children born to teen mothers are more likely to end up in foster care. (173) Sarah Katz, a lawyer for parents in dependency cases, describes this double-edged system of "protection":

      I am startled by how quickly the system turns the tables on young parents, holding them accountable for their lack of independent living skills or poor judgment as parents--the very proficiencies that the dependency and delinquency systems are supposed to provide in loco parentis. (174) Minor parents in the foster care system are at a particularly high risk of having both inadequate access to abortion care, especially in states with parental involvement mandates, and of losing custody of their infants. (175) Although there are legal and economic incentives for the child welfare system to allow foster children to maintain custody of their infants, child welfare scholars have surfaced ample evidence that, in practice, state officials often ignore minors' parental rights. (176) Historically, state agents often viewed parenting wards as inherently inadequate parents, and accordingly, they separated infants from their teenage mothers. (177) A combination of prejudices based on the age, class, and race of parenting wards worked against teenage mothers' rights to maintain custody of their infants. (178) Supposedly "voluntary" surrenders of infants to foster care or adoption frequently resulted from coercive pressures, including lack of financial resources, denial of housing unless the minor parent surrendered her legal rights to her infant, and lack of understanding of legal rights. (179) One commentator observes:

      "[V]oluntary" separation of parenting wards [minor parents in foster care] from their children is frequently the result of coercive measures; specifically young mothers have been pushed into giving up their children because of a lack of available services and funding. Foster care staff may threaten removal of their children, coercing these mothers into following strict rules and into not complaining about inade (180) quate care. (180) Stories abound of child welfare workers unjustifiably removing children from teenage mothers under the guise of child protection. (181) For example, due to a shortage of placement availability for mother/child pairs in the foster care system, minor parents may suffer unwanted, and sometimes illegal, separations from their children. (182) In their study of parenting youth in foster care, Eve Stotland and Cynthia Godsoe find:

      Most disturbingly, advocates across the country report that states and counties frequently violate parenting ward's due process rights by coercing teens into "voluntarily" placing their child...

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