Because of a 2022 court ruling, Minnesota no longer requires that parents be notified prior to an abortion on a minor girl. Some lawmakers have gone further by seeking to erase Minnesota’s parental notification law from the books and deny parents their right to know. But parental involvement helps support minors and protect girls caught in human trafficking (traffickers often use abortion to hide and perpetuate their crimes). Girls are harmed when parents are taken out of the equation. 

An important study published in Annals of Health Law shows that forced abortion is a common practice among sex traffickers. Heath care providers and abortion facilities, the study notes, "are seeing trafficking victims but failing to identify them, thereby unwittingly contributing to continuing criminal activity and exacerbating both public and private physical and mental health problems for this segment of the population." Laws that require parental notification before abortion—like Minnesota's law—guard against this trafficking of minor girls and allow them to be rescued.

One woman, Dr. Brook Bello, was trafficked as a teenager and forced to undergo multiple abortions. “Had my parents been notified, my mother would have been notified what city I was near," she testified. Parental notification could have led to her rescue by law enforcement sooner.

See the study and testimony showing the benefits of parental notification in fighting sex trafficking.