CA Prop 73

In just over a month, Californians will be voting on Proposition 73, which will, if passed, require some form of parental consent for teenage women seeking an abortion. Here is an excellent summary and response to a great discussion on these, including links to the previous participants.

Hugo's response is essentially to state that his liberalism trumps his Christian communitarianism in this case--he isn't even defending that value ranking, so much as explaining it. Again, I approve of this, but the communitarian in me thinks we can and should do better. I'd like to suggest that there are good communitarian reasons to oppose initiative 73, and that while Russell identifies a problem with liberal individualism, he repeats the error at another level of abstraction. Liberals may be guilty of reifying and overstating the value (both descriptive and moral) of individual autonomy; but his brand of communitarianism reifies the value (again, both descriptive and moral) of familial autonomy.