Jim Minnery: Senate Bill 90 is a threat to parental rights

By JIM MINNERY | ALASKA FAMILY COUNCIL

Alaska Senate Bill 90, legislation introduced by Sen. Cathy Giessel of Anchorage, represents a dangerous overreach that undermines the fundamental rights of parents to guide their children’s healthcare decisions. While proponents may claim this bill helps teens access needed mental health services, it actually creates a system where minors can receive ongoing treatment behind their parents’ backs—with potentially devastating consequences.

What SB 90 Actually Does

Under this bill, 16 and 17-year-olds could consent to up to five mental health treatment sessions without any parental knowledge or approval. But the problems don’t stop there. After those initial sessions, a mental health provider could continue treating the minor indefinitely—still without involving parents—if the provider decides three things: that the teen wouldn’t get treatment if parents knew, that telling parents would harm the child’s wellbeing, and that the minor is “mature” enough to make these decisions alone.

This gives mental health providers extraordinary power to override parental authority based entirely on their own judgment.

The Real-World Dangers

Consider the risks this creates. A gender clinic could use these provisions to begin socially transitioning a child through mental health counseling—all without parental involvement. From there, the provider could recommend irreversible transition drugs and even surgeries without parental guidance or even knowledge.

Think this isn’t happening ? Think again.

In just the past few days, attorneys have discovered “irrefutable evidence that the [California Department of Education] covertly moved…unconstitutional gender secrecy directives inside a password-protected training hidden away from public view, and distributed them to school districts statewide.” Public school counselors, teachers and other taxpayer-funded school officials were actively deceiving parents and, as it turns out, a Federal judge. The attorney noted “This is one of the most egregious attempts I’ve seen — if not the most — to mislead a Court, and it warrants severe sanctions.”

We have plenty of evidence these kind of manipulative, secretive “transitions” are happening all over the country in public schools including right here in Alaska. Giessel’s bill would put even more parents in the dark.

SB 90 also raises grave concerns for parents whose children may be considering an abortion. By allowing older minors to seek mental health counseling in secret and giving providers broad discretion to withhold information from parents, the bill creates a pathway for a teen to receive abortion-related counseling—or referrals—without any parental knowledge. Mental health providers could determine that involving parents would be “harmful,” and therefore continue counseling the minor about pregnancy, options, and next steps without ever notifying the family.

This undermines long-standing parental-consent and parental-notification expectations that exist precisely because decisions surrounding pregnancy and abortion carry profound medical, emotional, and moral consequences. SB 90 risks cutting parents out at the very moment when their guidance, support, and protection are most essential.

These aren’t hypothetical concerns. SB 90 is a roadmap that makes these choices frighteningly easy to follow.

Why Parents Must Be Involved

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that parents’ interest in directing the care and upbringing of their children is among our most fundamental constitutional rights. There’s a good reason for this protection.

When we distinguish between children and adults in the law, we do so because children lack the maturity, experience, and judgment needed for life’s difficult decisions. As the Supreme Court noted in Parham v. J.R., parents “possess what a child lacks” in making these complex choices. This is especially true for mental healthcare, where decisions can have lifelong consequences.

Parents know their children’s full medical history, their struggles, and their needs in ways no provider meeting them for the first time ever could. The constitutional right to direct children’s care—including medical and mental healthcare—belongs to parents for this very reason.

Who Really Knows What’s Best?

Parents love their children in ways that no mental health provider or government bureaucrat can match. When a child faces mental or emotional challenges, parents are best positioned to guide them through those difficulties with compassion and wisdom gained from years of knowing their child intimately.

That’s exactly why parents must be informed immediately when such issues arise. Hiding information about a child’s mental health from parents doesn’t protect the child—it cuts off the very people most equipped and motivated to help them.

The Bottom Line

Mental health providers should never hide information about a child’s wellbeing from parents. Before any treatment of a minor’s mental or emotional health begins, the provider should obtain prior written consent from parents who can contribute crucial context from their child’s complete medical history.

SB 90 gets this exactly backward. Instead of supporting families, it enables providers to exclude them. Instead of protecting children, it exposes them to potentially harmful decisions made without the guidance of those who know and love them best.

Alaska’s parents have both a constitutional right and a moral responsibility to direct their children’s healthcare. SB 90 violates that right and should be rejected.

Tell Senator Giessel to Respect Parental Rights

The best way to put an end to this egregious violation of parental rights is to let Senator Cathy Giessel now how concerned we are. Most legislators don’t see the light until they feel the heat. Let’s let her know how hot we are about this piece of legislation that so blatantly disrespects the God-given, fundamental right of Alaskan parents to guide their children’s lives and to responsibly direct every aspect of their education and care – including mental health care.

CLICK HERE to email Senator Giessel or call her office today at 907-269-0181 and tell her you oppose SB 90.

Legal citations: Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65 (2000); Schall v. Martin, 467 U.S. 253, 265 (1984); Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 602 (1979); PJ ex rel. Jensen v. Wagner, 603 F.3d 1182, 1197 (10th Cir. 2010); Kanuszewski v. Michigan Dep’t of Health & Hum. Servs., 927 F.3d 396, 419 (6th Cir. 2019).