{"id":229755,"date":"2026-06-27T17:10:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T17:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/229755\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T17:10:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T17:10:45","slug":"meet-the-pennsylvania-lawyer-helping-minors-access-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/229755\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet The Pennsylvania Lawyer Helping Minors Access Abortion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Illustration by Casey Beifuss<\/p>\n

Minors are the canaries in the coal mine: their rights\u2014to abortion, to gender-affirming care\u2014are always the first on the chopping block, often under the guise of warped \u2018parental rights\u2019 concerns. In too many states, minors must obtain parental consent to access abortion. But what about when the minor seeking care already is a parent, themselves?<\/p>\n

Christine Castro, a Pennsylvania-based reproductive justice attorney, specializes in judicial bypass\u2014the dehumanizing legal procedure through which minors seek permission from a judge to access abortion by proving they\u2019re \u2018mature\u2019 enough. In Pennsylvania, minors must receive parental consent or a judge\u2019s permission for care. But paradoxically, Castro tells Abortion, Every Day, her clients, who are most often ages 16 to 17, sometimes already have a baby. Despite being parents themselves, they still, inexplicably, need either a parent or judge\u2019s permission to access health care.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how badly the law is written\u2014they\u2019ve already gone through pregnancy and childbirth, they can make medical decisions for their children, but not themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The premise of judicial bypass, itself, is downright puzzling, entirely rooted in stigma rather than logic. If someone isn\u2019t \u2018mature\u2019 enough for an abortion, how do you argue they\u2019re \u2018mature\u2019 enough to parent? In 2022, one Florida judge denied a teen abortion access over her C-average grades<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In other cases, when parents do support their child\u2019s abortion or try to help them access care, Child Protective Services might investigate and separate them<\/a>, or the parents might be accused of \u2018coercion\u2019 and criminalized, as we\u2019ve seen in Louisiana<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Minors systematically face a convalescence of specific, devastating barriers<\/a> to care, lacking money or literacy in navigating complex health and legal systems. Many of Castro\u2019s clients are juggling all kinds of extracurriculars, jobs, classwork, babysitting their siblings, or even household abuse; some aren\u2019t in contact with their parents at all, and some have parents who are incarcerated or dead.<\/p>\n

Yet, all too often, Castro says she\u2019s watched as reproductive rights advocates make concession after concession on young people\u2019s rights to anti-abortion and \u2018parental rights\u2019 groups. \u201cWhat we need is to center those at the margins. What we need is to center young people,\u201d she tells AED.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s AED\u2019s conversation with Castro on what an average judicial bypass case entails, her clients\u2019 stories, what\u2019s bringing her joy through this work, and more.<\/p>\n

AED: How did you get involved in abortion \/ reproductive justice?<\/p>\n

CC: I\u2019m a senior staff attorney at the Women\u2019s Law Project<\/a> where I\u2019ve been for 10 years. Before that, I\u2019ve worked with New Voices for Reproductive Justice and If\/When\/How. I always knew I wanted to use my legal career for social justice. Being raised in Pennsylvania, I\u2019ve always seen the clever ways our state overregulates abortion in a way that, on the surface, looks reasonable. I was drawn to youth access because they\u2019re this group at the margins, and there are these concessions that are often made on their behalf that don\u2019t actually reflect their real needs. And, all too often, this can come down to which county you live in in this state and the judge there.<\/p>\n

AED: Where were you when Roe was overturned? How did that affect the kind of work you wanted to do?<\/p>\n

CC: I was in Pennsylvania. I was helping someone under 18 from another state, in Ohio, where we didn\u2019t know a six-week ban was immediately going to go into effect. This young person was already past six weeks pregnant, due to all this chaos, these delays and confusion. Youth access work has become even more important, because we\u2019re getting more and more young people from out-of-state.<\/p>\n

AED: What does a typical case helping a minor seek abortion look like? How did Dobbs affect this?<\/p>\n

CC: Ever since Dobbs, young people will call and not know if abortion is legal. There\u2019s such poor access to clear, accessible information, and logistical barriers. We\u2019ve started to see an increase in patients from Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and others, which can delay care for young people who live in Pennsylvania. When you\u2019re trying to keep your pregnancy private and already navigating a lot of logistical barriers like transportation, raising the funds, or maybe you need child care\u2014many of our clients are already parents\u2014any delay can be a real problem.<\/p>\n

For our many clients who already have kids, it shows how poorly written this law is. They\u2019ve already gone through pregnancy and childbirth, but they\u2019re still required to go through judicial bypass or parental permission for abortion.<\/p>\n

Typically a case comes in when a provider tells us their patient needs judicial bypass. Our youth access coordinator will then connect with the patient, connect them with an attorney. Many of our attorneys are volunteers. We talk the patient through the process. It can be difficult for them to make the time for the phone call if they fear an adult find out, or they have scheduling conflicts because they have a job or after school sports or take care of their younger sibling.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then we prepare them for their hearing. We try to minimize the amount of invasive questions the judge asks them. We prepare our clients on how to present what we think of as the traditional markers of maturity\u2014if they\u2019re the volleyball captain who has a scholarship to a state school and wants to become a nurse, or a young person with aspirations of this or that. We\u2019ve represented over 300 petitioners since 2018. We prepare them a lot, but the hearing winds up being very short, compared to all the time it takes to navigate.<\/p>\n

AED: Can you tell us about the clients you typically serve? What are their stories? What are we not hearing about them?<\/p>\n

CC: Our clients are so resilient. I\u2019ve worked with someone who couldn\u2019t get parental consent because one parent passed and the other was incarcerated. We usually represent young people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and maybe they live with a supportive grandparent, but the grandparent can\u2019t consent for them under Pennsylvania\u2019s laws. And it\u2019s not uncommon they already have one or two kids. Most of our clients are 16 or 17 but they come from all ages. A majority of our clients are young women of color, young Black women. Communities of color are most targeted by these laws, if the young person comes from a household that doesn\u2019t look like the traditional family structure that this law is based on.<\/p>\n

AED: Can you tell us about the clients you typically serve? What are their stories? What are we not hearing about them?<\/p>\n

CC: We really just need to center the experience of those that are the most marginalized, which is young people, and do the work of tearing down restrictions that impede young people\u2019s access to the full spectrum of care. I\u2019m proud of WLP because we look at care as a spectrum, as young people\u2019s access to abortion, to gender-affirming care, to raising their existing children with dignity, not being pushed out of school. Any type of legislation or proposal that carve outs young people is something that we strongly oppose.<\/p>\n

AED: What are some of the biggest challenges you face helping young people with judicial bypass?<\/p>\n

CC: Something that can be hard is knowing we\u2019re participating in this mechanism that was created to cause harm. We envision a state where Pennsylvanians under 18 can get care without forced parental involvement. We support our clients through this judicial bypass process, but we can also feel there\u2019s this harm of, are we helping this system to continue? Yet, we still very much recognize we need to help young people exercise their rights to control their reproductive future and this is the system that\u2019s available to us. So, it\u2019s a double-edged sword.<\/p>\n

AED: I can imagine that this is exhausting, emotionally difficult work. How do you unwind? What brings you joy as you do this work?<\/p>\n

CC: I find joy in being able to discuss wins with my team. Outside of that, I have a golden retriever and a baby. I\u2019m a first-time mom now, so I try to find moments of joy with my family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration by Casey Beifuss Minors are the canaries in the coal mine: their rights\u2014to abortion, to gender-affirming care\u2014are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-229755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}