Appeals Court Sides With Texas Dad, Agrees Teens Need Parents’ Permission to Get Birth Control
This case isn't about "parental rights." It's part of a larger effort to exert patriarchal control over girls' and women's bodies.
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A federal appeals court said Tuesday that teenagers in Texas need parental consent to receive prescription birth control from family planning clinics that use federal (not state) funding. It’s poised to end one of the only ways Texas minors could get birth control confidentially.
Texas state law says that minors almost always need parental consent in order to be prescribed contraceptives like the pill, ring, or IUD. The only exception is federally funded Title X family planning clinics, which, according to federal guidance, aren’t allowed to require notifying a teen’s parents, let alone seeking their consent. A lower-court ruling from 2022 said the federal confidentiality policy violated Texas Family Code, and on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously agreed. The ruling only applies to Texas for now, but that could change if other states pass similar parental consent policies—or if the Biden administration appeals the decision to the Supreme Court.
The author of the opinion, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby, a 2014 case that limited access to birth control under the Affordable Care Act. (Duncan is a darling of the far-right and appeared on Donald Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist in 2020.)
Abortion has been almost totally banned in Texas since September 2021. As Nan Kirkpatrick, director of external affairs at the Texas-based youth reproductive justice group Jane’s Due Process (JDP), previously told Jezebel, limiting young people’s access to birth control when abortion is banned carries disparate harm as teens have “especially limited ability to travel out-of-state for care.”