Who Decides? — The Abortion Rights of Teens

The question of whether a young woman should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy without her parents' knowledge has been one of the most contentious issues of the post Roe v. Wade era. Parental involvement laws reach to the core of the parent-teen relationship in the highly contested realm of adolescent sexuality. This is the first book to examine in thorough detail the decision-making experiences of teens considering abortion. Shoshanna Ehrlich evaluates the Supreme Court's efforts to reconcile the historically based understanding of teens as dependent persons in need of protection with a more contemporary understanding of them as autonomous individuals with adult-like claims to constitutional recognition.

J. Shoshanna Ehrlich is Associate Professor on the Legal Education Faculty of the University of Massachusetts-Boston College of Public and Community Service. As Clinical Legal Education Director, she produced a guidebook for young women entitledThe Teen Girls' Legal Rights Project (1998).