“Parental rights” policies are quietly reshaping healthcare access for minors, eroding privacy protections and leaving vulnerable young people with fewer safe pathways to care.
Since the fall of Roe, attacks on reproductive freedom haven’t stopped at abortion—they have expanded deliberately and strategically to target young people.
Under the banner of “parental rights,” conservative lawmakers are dismantling protections that allow minors to access confidential contraception and reproductive healthcare. These policies do not strengthen families; they endanger young people, especially those navigating poverty, immigration instability or unsafe home environments—cutting off care and undermining privacy when they need support the most.
This is not new. For years, conservative lawmakers have limited young people’s ability to engage in medical decisions that affect their lives, especially sexual and reproductive healthcare.
So-called “parental rights” bills may sound appealing in theory, but in practice, they delay access to critical healthcare and violate established privacy and confidentiality standards. Today, conservatives are following the same playbook that dismantled Roe v. Wade to deny access to gender-affirming care, allowing states to restrict the health and safety of transgender youth.
So what is the playbook?
First, deny the legitimacy of established healthcare practices by claiming to “protect” a particular group. That framing allows doubt to spread quickly. When uncertainty takes hold, it becomes easier to advance discriminatory legal theories that can criminalize care.
This strategy appeared in a 2022 Texas court decision that overturned long-standing confidentiality protections for young people seeking care at Title X clinics. For decades, those clinics allowed young people to access contraception regardless of income or immigration status. This ruling emerged amid the wave of “parental rights” legislation that began gaining traction in 2019 and continues today.
Legislation aimed at young people has increasingly become a testing ground for conservatives to restrict reproductive healthcare.
This strategy is spreading.
This year, Florida and Missouri introduced bills mirroring the reasoning behind that decision, proposals that could have serious consequences for young people’s health.
In 2024, Idaho lawmakers passed similar legislation restricting young people’s ability to seek care related to mental health and sexual assault.
Without access to safe contraception and confidential care, young people’s mental and physical health, autonomy and ability to plan for a future are all at risk.
Despite decades of research and international legal frameworks demonstrating that confidential reproductive and sexual healthcare is in young people’s best interest, these protections are increasingly under attack. Yesterday, it was abortion; today, the same methods are being used to attack access to gender-affirming care, birth control and mifepristone. Legislation aimed at young people has increasingly become a testing ground for conservatives to restrict reproductive healthcare.
In response to these coordinated attacks on the rights of young people from the administration, in the courts, and in statehouses, state legislators are defending their constituents’ rights are fighting back. The State Innovation Exchange (SiX), as a national organization for state legislators across all 50 states, has been organizing alongside them. Over the past decade, SiX has become the most trusted community of state legislators across the country, creating cohorts like the Reproductive Freedom Leadership Council (RFLC), a network of state legislators championing reproductive health, rights, and justice.
Through this organizing and deep community work, there are tangible wins originating from the states.
- In Arizona, state Rep. Sarah Ligouri introduced a Children’s Bill of Rights that would affirm young people’s autonomy and dignity in detention, healthcare and educational settings.
- Meanwhile, Illinois state Sen. Graciela Guzman recently introduced a bill to join 24 other states and D.C. in allowing minors to consent to their own contraceptive care.
The legislators in SiX’s network are advancing these bills at a particularly vulnerable time for young people in mixed-status families, many of whom face heightened instability, as parents are detained or deported, and children are left without consistent primary caregivers. These bills are not just helpful but urgently needed.
They also reflect a growing global consensus on children’s rights. Grounded in international human rights law and informed by research on children’s mental and emotional development, they recognize young people’s evolving autonomy and their fundamental rights to privacy, stability and family unity—a principle affirmed by the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In advancing these bills, state legislators are meeting the moment by turning global standards and local realities into concrete protections for the children and families they serve. What happens to young people today becomes the template for the rest of us tomorrow.
Now is also a critical moment for state legislators to lead by upholding the core values of reproductive freedom, including the right to bodily autonomy and the right for young people to access confidential reproductive and sexual healthcare with dignity and without fear.
