"I wouldn't want to have someone take my daughter to a hospital for an abortion or something and not tell me. I would kill him if they do that." So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger's typically expressive sup port for Proposition 73, a constitutional amendment requiring doctors to give parents 48 hours' notice before carrying out an abortion on a girl under 18.
Will the voters agree with the governor？ His own status erstwhile hedonist turned responsible father of two teenage girls and two pre-teen boys reflects his state's mixed feelings about sexual politics. California is one of the most sexually liberated states in the nation. It also boasts the fifth worst rate for teen age abortions and the seventh for teenage pregnancies. In 2000, some 116,000 teenagers in California became pregnant, and almost 44,000 of them chose to have an abortion--including 1,620 under the age of 15. A recent Field Poll showed 45% of respondents in favour of the amendment, 45% against and 10% undecided.
The proposition's advocates are careful to argue that supporting parental notification is not the same as opposing abortion full stop. Mr. Schwarzenegger is a "pro-choice Republican" and the proposition would allow a minor to petition a court to allow her an abortion without notifying a parent. The real point, they say, is that a 17-year-old girl "can't get an aspirin from the school nurse, get a flu shot, or have a tooth pulled without a parent knowing", but a 13-year old can have a surgical or chemical abortion without her parents' knowledge. And since a majority of the prospective fathers are over 21, the current system in effect condones statutory rape.
Opponents, including the California Nurses Association and Planned Parenthood, are unconvinced. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times argued: "It's nice to think that all girls feel comfortable talking to their parents about sex, birth control and abortion. Nice, but absurd." Equally absurd, add other opponents, is the notion that a pregnant teenager from an abusive family will have the gumption to go to court rather than to some backstreet operator--to seek her abortion. And they suspect the proposition is the start of an effort to ban all abortions: instead of speaking of a fetus, the proposition defines abortion as causing the "death of the unborn child".
Just how parental notification would affect the rate of teen pregnancies and abortions is an open question. Some 34 states require some parental involvement in a minor's decision to end a pregnancy, but there is no hard and-fast correlation with the number of abortions. For example, New Mexico and New Hampshire require no parental notification, but according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health, they ranked 18th and 25th in the rate of teen abortions in 2000. By contrast, Wyoming and Florida, which do have notification laws, ranked 14th and 7th. And even if notification laws deter abortions, they do not seem to deter teen pregnancies: Texas, for example, is ranked 26th in abortions for girls aged 15--19 but fifth in pregnancies for that age group.
This last statistic matters for California, where the main problem is teens getting pregnant in the first place. Roughly a quarter of California's 14 year-olds and three-fifths of its 17 year-olds have had sex. True, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, birth rates fell from 73 for every 1,000 15--19 year-olds in 1991 to just 44 in 2001. But California's teenage girls become mothers at between 4 and 12 times the rate of their peers in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan; the figures for blacks and Latinas in the state are particularly appalling. Whatever your views on abortion, these statistics add up to an awful lot of heartache.
Which of the following statements about Arnold Schwarzenegger is TRUE？

A. He has been elected governor of California 10 years ago.
B. He used to attach much importance to personal enjoyment.
C. He has been thinking of solving sexual problems for long.
D. He has troubles with his two daughters and two sons.