My senior year of high school, my twin sister Meghan, who would later study poetry in graduate school in England, started writing funny poems documenting the shenanigans that took place every Friday night among the marching band, of which we were both members, and its performances at the weekly football games. Posted on the bulletin board in the rehearsal room the next Monday, the comic tributes to our juvenile activities became quite a hit, with people eager to read themselves immortalized in verse. One particularly memorable line described our friend CJ's success on the bus ride from the game back to the school, with "two girls in one seat!"
Yet according to the Attorney General of Kansas, Meghan's poem would have mandated an official report by our band teacher to the state--and if he didn't, he would be guilty of a misdemeanor. This is because Phill Kline, Attorney General since 2002, wants to require care providers to report all sexual activity by teenagers 16 years old and younger.
The reason Kline thinks he can demand this is that, as Slate reported in an excellent article by Dahlia Lithwick, Kansas law states that sexual intercourse by teens 16 years old and younger is always illegal. Statutory rape laws vary by state, and most have so-called "Romeo and Juliet" provisions that distinguish between an adult having sex with a 16 year old and another 16 year old doing so. Such laws generally do so by establishing an age differential between victim and perpetrator, and setting lower sentencing guidelines or specifying that an act within the age differential is a misdemeanor as opposed to a felony. Kansas has a Romeo and Juliet provision, but still classifies such acts as felonies: so two 16 year olds that had sexual intercourse with each other are, technically, both guilty of statutory rape.
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Care providers in Kansas are already required to report any incidents of child abuse that they have reason to suspect have occurred to minors to whom they provide care. This means that a 16 year old can go to her doctor, say that she has decided to become sexually active with her 16 year old boyfriend, and request a prescription for birth control pills without fearing that her doctor will then report her consensual sexual activity to the government. However, if a 16 year old goes to her doctor and asks for the morning after pill because she was raped the night before, her doctor will report that abuse. It is a balance between the privacy due to teenagers and the need to protect those teenagers from sexual abuse.
Phill Kline, however, doesn't see things this way. In a 2003 advisory opinion to a Kansas State Senator, he declared that care providers in Kansas should interpret the law stating that they must report incidents if they have "reason to suspect that a child has been injured as a result of sexual abuse" to report any and all sexual activity by minors.
This seems unnecessarily puritanical, and Kline's insistence that he is simply aggressively pursuing child abusers seems to be willfully blind to the often sexually active realities of modern teenage life.
Kline's real issue, however, is not with the sexual mores of Kansan teenagers. While he is, as so many ultra-right wingers are today, entirely willing to insist upon ineffective and inaccurate abstinence-only crusades that sacrifice the health of America's youth for some supposed moral high horse, Kline is really after the ultimate boogeyman of the right wing: abortion. On the O'Reilly Factor last week, Kline admitted to Bill O'Reilly that his real aim is abortion clinics.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has followed Kline's past exploits in the national news. During his career as Kansas House Representative and Attorney General, he has authored statutes limiting the ability of Kansan women to have abortions, and he filed a lawsuit attempting to terminate all funding of abortions obtained by Medicaid recipients (despite how under federal law, Medicaid funding is allowed for abortions only when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or the life of the mother is endangered by the pregnancy). Kline is still attempting to subpoena the records of 90 women's abortion procedures--again with the purported goal of investigating sexual abuse of children. But the records he demanded from abortion clinics were not those of children--he insisted that the abortion clinics turn over the medical records of women well past the age of majority.
Kline has made it his mission, in short, to do all within his power, legal or not, to prevent any woman in Kansas from obtaining an abortion. If he causes teenagers not to trust their health care providers, and makes adult women feel that if they obtain a legal medical procedure their personal and confidential medical records will potentially become the property of the state government, so much the better. The more Kline can subvert and undermine a woman's right to a confidential and trusting relationship with her health care provider, the better, in his mind--it might make her less likely to seek an abortion. A legal one, anyway.
This kind of obstructionism is terrible public policy. Adult women deserve--need, in fact--a relationship of trust with their doctor. Teenagers need to be able to talk candidly with those in a position to give them information and support. From my days of teaching sexual education to junior high school students, I know that even children just over the cusp of their teenage years are eager for knowledge, and will take advantage of a trusted and knowledgeable adult if they need it. Never once did I have a student come up and ask, "I'm thinking of having sex with my boyfriend, should I?" Not once did I have a student say, "I'm thinking I might become sexually active, but only if I can get a condom." I did, however, have students who volunteered news of their or their peers consensual sexual activity who were shocked to learn that it was legal for them to walk into a drugstore and buy condoms.
I suppose Kline would think that kind of information exchange is a travesty, and I should have reported the sexual activity of Los Angeles teenagers to the state government. But the reason the students hadn't ever bought condoms in a drugstore is because they thought they would get in trouble if they did--they didn't think they were allowed to do it, and thought that the clerk would call their parents or the police if they tried. They reacted to the potential, invented though it was in their own mind, of being reported by not obtaining contraception--but then having sex without any protection. And that is exactly what will happen if Kline's policy is successful--knowing that they will be reported if they talk to an adult about sexual activity of any kind, however insubstantial or consensual, teenagers will simply stop talking to adults. That means more sexually transmitted diseases, more unwanted pregnancies, more families destroyed. Just what you would expect from a "moral" crusader like Kline--if he has to ruin a number of lives in order to compel everyone to obey his personal religious beliefs, so be it.
