Legal Commentary

    And if so, what are they? I have been thinking about this issue quite a bit lately.

    I am mainly interested in thinking about whether there are any constitutional limitations on states giving parents the ability to control their children's bodies - specifically in the contexts of medical treatment (therapeutic and non-therapeutic) and corporal punishment (or physical abuse). These matters are ones that are largely regulated by state law, of course. State (common or statutory) law places limits on parents' legal rights to physically punish their children, and state law generally dictates parents' rights to make medical decisions for their children in most instances. Indeed, it is difficult to see much of a constitutional issue in this area most of the time due to the Supreme Court's reluctance to find state action (i.e., a state obligation to protect children from their parents) even in the most extreme circumstances (e.g., DeShaney).

    But then there's abortion.....

The "minor abortion cases" hold that minors have a right to access abortion without involving their parents if they can convince a judge that 1) they are mature and well-informed enough to make the abortion decision on their own or 2) that the abortion would be in their best interests. This appears, then, to be a constitutional right against both the state (the state cannot forbid all minors from accessing abortion) and the parents (even the parents do not have a right to dictate the minor's medical choice in this context).

Admittedly, the minor abortion cases arise in a somewhat unusual context. They were constitutional challenges to parental notice or consent laws, many of which created a different rule for minors seeking abortions than for minors seeking prenatal care or treatment for STDs. So there was obvious state action. But what about a case where the common law dictates that parents can make medical decisions for their children, and a parent seeks to force her child to donate a kidney to another child. Would the donor child have bodily integrity rights that prevent this? Does it matter whether the child is old enough to understand what is going on? These cases arise rarely (and are generally resolved without reference to constitutional claims), but they do arise - and in my view they raise difficult, relatively unexplored questions.

Or maybe I'm missing something?