By Tali Woodward

Backers of Proposition 73, which would prevent any California teen under 18 from having an abortion without her parents' knowledge, say they want to protect young women.

The rhetoric is enticing – who wouldn't want a young woman grappling with an unintended pregnancy to have the support of an understanding parent?

But virtually every credible study of parental-involvement laws ever conducted has found that they don't have the real-world effects their promoters advertise.

In fact, as baffling as it may seem, there's evidence that notification laws don't really lead more teens to talk to their parents before getting an abortion.

Instead, these kinds of laws increase the chances that teens will do risky things like secretly travel out of state or seek a later-term, more dangerous abortion.

Parental involvement laws are increasingly popular – more than 20 states have enacted them in the past six years. Yet somehow, only one study has looked specifically at how they affect teen-parent communication.

In the late 1980s researchers examined whether pregnant girls turned to a parent in Minnesota, which had a notification law, and in Wisconsin, which didn't. They found a difference of only 3 percent between the two states.

How did the Minnesota teens who still managed to have an abortion avoid the law? Well, some of them probably sought a personal exemption from a state judge, which most of these laws allow. Others undoubtedly used the favored method of teens in other places: traveling to a state that doesn't require parental involvement.

Research has found that once a law requiring the notification or consent of parents goes into effect, the number of abortions performed on minors in that state typically falls – something that has encouraged anti-abortion groups to keep pushing the approach.

However, studies published in 1986 and 1995 that explored whether pregnant teens were simply crossing state lines for an abortion found that the number of abortions performed in neighboring states rises accordingly.

The 1986 study, which looked at the effects of Massachusetts's parental-consent law during its first 20 months, found that more than 1,872 minors went to one of five nearby states to have an abortion. That number accounted for the measured in-state decline almost entirely. The thought of your daughter getting an abortion without your knowledge may be a troubling one, but it's hard to see how having her travel far from home beforehand improves the situation.

There's also irrefutable evidence that parental-involvement laws cause many teen girls to seek abortions later, when the surgery is more complicated and, therefore, more risky. The chances of bleeding, uterine perforation, or even infertility are almost nonexistent in a first-trimester abortion, but they increase week by week as a pregnancy progresses.

According to NARAL Pro-choice America, after Minnesota passed a notification law, second-trimester abortions increased by 27 percent. Similar trends have been documented in Missouri and Mississippi. And national data show that states with parental-involvement laws have a higher incidence of late-term abortions.

Dr. Clair Brindis, a UC San Francisco researcher whose focus is adolescent health, recently reviewed all the data on parental-notification laws. Existing research shows "there is no real impact" on communication, she concluded.

She added that it's important to consider this measure in the context of larger goals like reducing teen pregnancy. California's teen pregnancy rate has dropped more than 40 percent since the mid-1990s, and teens in the state are reporting that they're both delaying sex and more commonly using contraceptives.

"California has been at the forefront of reductions in teen pregnancy, teen abortions, and teen births over the past 10 years," Brindis said. "I don't believe that if [Prop. 73] passes, it will significantly decrease the number of young women who are having sex."

Karen England, the director of a "pro-family" group in Sacramento and a spokesperson for the Prop. 73 campaign, feels differently. "My daughters are safer making a decision with me than on their own," she told us. She refused to answer questions about how she would feel if one of her daughters went out of state to get an abortion, saying, "It's another false tactic used by Planned Parenthood."

We also asked England about claims on one pro-Prop. 73 Web site, including the statement that "parental involvement laws reduce teen pregnancies and abortions without danger or harm to minors." She referred us to a campaign consultant who said that he couldn't speak to every fact on the Web sites and that he doubts the veracity of most of these studies because some information comes from surveys of abortion clinics themselves.

But the public health research has led an overwhelming majority of experts on teen health to oppose laws like Prop. 73. The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that "mandating parental notification does not achieve the intended benefit of promoting family communication, but it does increase the risk of harm to the adolescent by delaying access to appropriate care."

Plus, there's always the nagging issue of adding a new, possibly insurmountable hurdle for pregnant girls in the worst possible circumstances – those who are estranged from their families or would face abuse if they revealed that they were pregnant.

Prop. 73 does contain language allowing for certain exceptions. If a teen can convince a judge that she's "sufficiently mature and well-informed" to make her own decision, she can get a personal waiver." But it's not always a smooth process.

In Texas the organization Jane's Due Process matches girls with an attorney who can help them navigate the court system (in most cases the state pays attorney fees). Board member and attorney Rita Lucido told us that, in her experience, "the ones who go through this process are the ones who just can't tell their parents. They don't live with their parents – a lot of them are de facto orphans."

Lucido emphasized that these teens bear the brunt of parental-involvement laws. "If people don't think those girls exist, they're very naive," she added. "They're in every neighborhood."

E-mail Tali Woodward at tali@sfbg.com.