An Anthropological Meditation on Ex Parte Anonymous--A Judicial Bypass Procedure for an Adolescent's Abortion

legality of the text"92 by conjecturing about the benign intent of the community of women who came to the decedent's aid. It is these anti juridical conjectures that establish the "condition of contextuality"93-that is, those "linkages" that enable the historian to work a decontextualized document "into the torn fabric of the past and restore it to an ideal called the full story."94 These speculations and inferences make an event that was once claimed by the law available as an event of history. If coercion and extraction are indeed the work that the making of a legal document performs on lived experience, it is fascinating (and disturb ing) that a judicial bypass proceeding asks young women to try to speak through barren legal discourse about an event as deserving of detail and context as an unplanned pregnancy and an attendant desire for an abortion. In effect, the procedure compels adolescents to "flatten" out their experi ence into legal testimony so that a court can rule whether this flattened ex perience does or does not prove something as complex as "maturity." Can age, grade in school, grade point average, post-secondary-school plans, and the number and general substance of conversations had about one's preg nancy-all those things that are recorded and made into legal discourse really reveal a young woman's "maturity"? Does the number of fights an adolescent has had with her parents, and a general description of some of the worst, provide sufficient knowledge of an event as complex as a "parent-child relationship"?95 Does it provide enough information that a judge can determine whether an abortion without parental consultation is really in a young woman's "best interest"? The law appears to compel the construction of a decontextualized narrative about such complex aspects of a young woman's life that it is not mysterious that these young women fre quently fail to meet their burden. If one were to act like an historian and contextualize the testimony given in Ex parte Anonymous, one would have to speculate about the ex periences of the petitioner. What must it have been like to be seventeen years old and living with one's "religious" grandmother? Would the age 92. Id. 93. Id. at 37. 94. Id. 95. When inquiring into whether abortions without parental consent are in the best interests of minors, many states (including Alabama) consider the nature of the minor's relationship with her parents. Nevertheless, even when pregnant young women provide evidence that their relationships with their parents are less than positive, courts are hesitant to rule that an abortion would be in their best interests. For example, the Texas Supreme Court declined to overturn a consent waiver denial even though the petitioner had shown that her parents had previously kicked her pregnant sister out of their house. See Rosenberg, supra note 82, at 1119 (citing In re Doe 4, 19 S.W.3d 322, 326 (Tex. 2000)). Also, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's decision to deny a consent waiver even though the petitioner had shown that her father was violent and had hit her in the past. See id. (citing In re Jane Doe 1, 566 N.E.2d 1181, 1184 (Ohio 1991)) This content downloaded from 207.46.13.145 on Wed, 27 Apr 2016 05:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2006] ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEDITATION 241 and generation differential have made the minor more independent or more dependent on her primary caretaker? How did the grandmother feel about the minor's relationship with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend? Did she even know about it? How would a secrecy surrounding her romantic rela tionship have affected the young woman? I pose these questions-the answers to which are less important than the fact they we do not know them-not to argue that the minor was "legally mature" (whatever that means), but rather to demonstrate that con textualization might simply mean posing questions that the trial court thought irrelevant. Contextualization would mean building perspective around an event that was cut off by legal discourse, cut off through the crushing of complexity into the mold of "testimony." Faced with the "cold, printed record," the Supreme Court of Alabama might have attempted to act like a historian and contextualize the document in front of them. However, they were stymied from doing so by their pro fession and their discipline. Jurists-being legal technicians and not an thropologists or historians-are forced to deal with legal documents as they are. If they choose not to remand the case with the instruction for the lower courts to develop the record further, then they are forced to presume the presence of everything legally relevant to the matter at hand in the "cold, printed record."