The Wisconsin State Supreme Court has waded into an interpretive fight over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), in such a way as to broaden the scope of the act to cover virtually any “emergency” procedure performed in a hospital. Having brought many more procedures under the scope of the Act, the next (upcoming) step in the issue will be a ruling whether EMTALA requires active resuscitation efforts for any premature infant no matter how hopeless. It may be that the court was merely trying to close loopholes in the act, which is intended to guarantee basic emergency treatment for all patients; the effect, however, may be to remove clinical - and presumably parental - discretion from all childbirth cases, including highly marginal ones.

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The Missouri State Senate is moving a bill to impose parental-consent restrictions on teenage girls - this time to prevent unauthorized Brazilian bikini-waxing.

As Jessica at Feministing points out:

This bill is really about is policing the sexuality of minors. These people know that a big part of the reason women get Brazilian waxes is because it is considered sexy, younger, less hairy and gross, sensational, all of these things. I’m not sure why nipping Brazilian waxes in the bud is supposed to curb teen sex, but whatever.

I’m not sure it’s even about teen sex, so much; I think she was right the first time: it’s about teen sexuality, and particularly teen female sexuality. As Jessica also notes, it’s not likely that banning waxing is going to have any effect at all on the usual problems associated with teex sex: unplanned pregnancies, STDs, or rampant non-virginalism. But waxing involves pubic hair - you know, that yucky part of the body nobody is supposed to talk about. Letting young people treat it as natural, as something they might even be interested in, or regard as part of their personal body image, is dangerous. It gives teens the idea that their bodies are their own, and the sexual parts of their bodies are their own. It’s not that anything can happen because of bikini waxing - it’s that teens, and especially girls, are making choices about their own sexual identities. It’s not the dangers of sex that the law aims to prevent, but the danger that teens will think of themselves as sexual, and dare to act accordingly.

In other words, this is a manifestation of right-wing Sex Panic - and it seems to be spreading. Once teens needed permission for birth control; increasingly they need it for abortion; now they need it simply to trim their body hair “down there”. The Panic spreads from sexual freedom to sexual autonomy to sexual anatomy - an erasure of any recognition that teens have sexual natures.

[Hat tip to Jessica at Feministing.]