A bill moving quickly through the House of Representatives calls for criminal penalties for the act of taking a minor across state lines for an abortion to avoid parental notification requirements. The law is not so much another attack on freedom of choice, writes PNS commentator Nell Bernstein, as a seriously wrongheaded attempt to deal with a new, and growing, group of young people by placing them outside the law. Bernstein is the Editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), a magazine by and about young people published by the Pacific News Service.

The House of Representatives votes this week on a bill that sounds hard to oppose -- the "Child Custody Protection Act."

The act makes it illegal for anyone to transport a minor across a state line to get an abortion, if the minor has not met the requirements for parental consent in her home state.

This bill -- which has attracted over 135 co-sponsors, nearly a third of the members of the house -- looks like a political gimmick, another effort to narrow access to abortion in a limited way since the Constitution makes it impossible to outlaw the procedure outright.

But the Child Custody Protection Act is not so much concerned with abortion as it is with the growing numbers of young people for whom "family" isn't where they come from but what they yearn to find. Although the words "child" and "custody" do not appear at all in anything but the title of the legislation, it represents an attempt to outlaw a relationship -- exactly the kind of relationship these solitary young people need.

These children form a new class of "illegals"-- young people with no legal standing until they turn 18. They can't go to school, can't work, can't get shelter or medical care because their parents cannot care for them and they have not been able to reconcile themselves to life in what they simply call "the system" -- the foster care and juvenile justice bureaucracies (which have become, in many respects, one and the same).

At a time when "mentorship" is being widely hailed as the solution to the problems of America's youth, helping these children is becoming a crime like hiding illegal immigrants or fleeing felons.

For the child, this can be devastating. Mary, 17, was addicted to heroin. She could not live with her parents as both were addicts themselves. She could not return to the foster care system because she had run away from a rehab facility, which meant there was a Youth Authority warrant out for her -- and going back into the system might lead to several years in prison. For some months, she bounced around between welfare hotels and acquaintances' apartments, but there came a time when she had no place to stay. Not long after, a man offered her a place to sleep in a hotel room, then raped her.

She asked me for help for the first time since I had known her. She wanted to come inside. I called every place I could think of -- shelters, rehab facilities, teen centers -- but the best I could do was three nights in a runaway shelter. After that, they said, she would have to contact her probation officer or head back onto the street, or the shelter itself would be violating the law by "harboring" her.

A friend who works as a drug treatment counselor finally suggested taking Mary to the county hospital and telling them she was suicidal. Then they would be legally obliged to give her shelter and treatment on the psychiatric ward-- but, my friend warned, there was no way to know when they would let her out.

"Never mind," said Mary. She said she would hang on until she turned 18. A few weeks after her eighteenth birthday she died from a drug-induced heart attack.

These new illegals have no patent on desperation, of course. Young people from apparently supportive families can find themselves frightened and alone. But laws that restrict non-familial relationships do not honor the sanctity of the family. They just put all of our children in danger.

What young people need most isn't easy, feel-good assistance that takes a few hours a week, offers the helper immediate gratification, and involves no difficult decisions. It isn't "mentorship," let alone "role modelling." It's a messier, more intimate, more contentious kind of help -- the kind a parent might ideally provide. Making this kind of relationship illegal will only serve to push already isolated young people further into the margins, out of our line of vision, where we can pretend they don't exist.