Crusade to get parental consent initiative on ballot begins
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KTUU: The Alaskans for Parental Rights campaign began Thursday night, a quest to place the issue of parental consent for minors to have an abortion before Alaska voters. The event kicked offminus one of the star speakers that had been advertised for weeks -- former Gov. Sarah Palin. But a very vocal right-to-life advocate made her pitch to Alaskan voters at ChangePoint Church -- Star Parker, a nationally known crusader, was here to stir the faithful. "I was using abortion as my birth control," Parker said. "That it wasn't until the fourth time I went into one of their so-called legal, safe clinics that I had a gut instinct way down deep inside that there has to be something wrong with this." The campaign needs more than 30,000 signatures to get parental consent on the ballot for next year. "I have two lovely children of my own, they wouldn't be around -- excuse me, I get emotional -- if I had chose abortion," parental consent supporter Bernarditte Baker said. "I have three lovely grandchildren, they wouldn't be here if somebody had chose abortion."
But not everyone supported Parker's message or the campaign's cause. Planned Parenthood says a majority of teens who seek abortions in Alaska already bring their parents, and those who don't have strong reasons. "The teens that don't bring their parents generally have some pretty extenuating circumstances in their lives, and those are the young women we're especially worried about," said Clover Simon, the Alaska vice president of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest. Worried, Planned Parenthood says, because those teens often come from abusive homes, and making parental consent to get an abortion won't help. "You can't mandate parental communication and family communication if it's not already in place when the unplanned pregnancy happens," Simon said. "It isn't going to start because there's a law in place."
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