From the Publisher
“Girls on the Stand brings a much-needed evidence-based orientation to a debate that is too often characterized by appeals to raw emotion.”
-Political Science Quarterly,
“Taking on the emotionally charged issue of mandatory parental involvement in the abortion decisions of minors and judicial bypass provisions in three states, Silverstein carefully lays out and skillfully dismantles myths that sustain support for these policies. Her prose is lucid and engaging, her argument powerful and persuasive. This book is one of the best examples of a new generation of scholarship on law and legal processes.”
-Austin Sarat, co-editor of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America
“Does a terrific job of laying out how the courts have conspired to limit the abortion access of teenaged girls. The results are clear, convincing, and enraging. How we—and the lawmakers who represent us—respond will indicate whether the pro-choice community has the wherewithal to fight back and defend Roe. Helena Silverstein has broken the silence on judicial bypass. It is now up to the rest of us to take action.”
-Z Magazine
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“Silverstein develops an incisive, empirically rich, and tightly reasoned case about how the beguiling ‘myth of rights’ props up a fatally flawed public policy for pregnant minors. This is a very original, powerful, and important book that deserves to be read by a wide audience.”
-Michael McCann,co-author of Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis
“Silverstein's research on the bypass protections written into parental notification legislation reveals how and why these protections provided for pregnant minors are subverted by clumsy bureaucratic procedures and by politically driven judicial decisions. In so doing, she brings empirical evidence, conceptual sophistication and extraordinary good sense to divisive controversies over reproductive rights, legality, and democracy.”
-Stuart Scheingold,Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Washington