Listening to Youth: Historicising & Challenging Parental Rights Discourse

Derek Cameron, Karissa Patton, and Kristine Alexander

A repeating pattern of multicolored prohibition symbols crossing out the words “Parental Rights.”  Created by Karissa Patton.

In early February 2026, the United Conservative Party announced a change to MyHealth Records, a website that provides Albertans with online access to medical records. Previously limited to children under the age of twelve, parental access to medical records now extends to adolescents up to the age eighteen. 

In response to this change, Dr. Sam Wong, president of the pediatrics section of the Alberta Medical Association, told a CBC reporter that allowing parents to access their teenage children’s medical records would “jeopardize…the health care of certain adolescents.” This is the latest in a series of efforts by the UCP to remove young people’s rights to quality sex education and healthcare in Alberta. By privileging parental rights over adolescent autonomy, the UCP have expanded parental surveillance of young people’s healthcare decisions, including contraception, abortion, gender-affirming care, and vaccination.

This type of parental rights discourse, which poses particular risks for queer and trans youth, is not limited to Alberta. The idea that the rights of individual parents and guardians should come before the rights of young people as well is a transnational phenomenon. It is also historically specific. We suggest it should be understood as one outcome of the post-1970s coming together of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that Melinda Cooper has studied in the context of the United States. Over the past few decades, Canadian politics and public discourse have also been shaped by calls to return to what Cooper dubs the English “poor law tradition of family responsibility.”[1] This framework shifts authority away from the state by redefining healthcare and education as private family obligations and reinforcing hierarchies of gender and sexuality. It also undergirds claims that parents and caregivers have a unique right to surveil and control many aspects of their teenage children’s lives.

This blog post represents the first stage of a broader collaborative research project about the history and politics of contemporary parental rights discourse in Canada and beyond. By bringing together scholars working on childhood and youth, education, medicine, family, politics, and law, we seek to historicize and critique the idea of parental rights – in part by foreground the voices of young people, which are often ignored in well-publicized battles between (adult) conservative parents’ rights advocates and (adult) representatives of the state. In what follows, we offer some initial thoughts about the value of paying attention to children and youth in debates about vaccination and sex education in the twenty-first-century Canada.

Young People’s Voices in Vaccination Decisions

In 1982, the Ontario Government made vaccination of school children mandatory through the Immunization of School Pupils Act. While this act included medical and religious exemptions, it also prompted parent activists to form the Committee Against Compulsory Vaccination (CACV). The CACV invoked the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to force the addition of conscience exemptions.[2] Members of the CACV leveraged their conscience rights as parents to push back on governmental control over vaccination decisions.

In the wake of this late twentieth-century parent activism and the 1998 publication of the now-retracted Lancet article by Andrew Wakefield linking vaccination and autism, Canadian legal disputes about vaccination reflected tensions between parental authority and state views about children’s welfare. In the 2001 court case Chmiliar v. Chmiliar,for example, divorced parents disagreed over whether or not to vaccinate their daughters, aged 10 and 13. While vaccination decisions are normally left to the custodial parent, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench sided with the non-custodial father, who wanted his daughters to be vaccinated. Chmiliar v. Chmiliar, therefore, created an opening for courts to intervene: when parents disagreed, judges could assert their authority to determine the child’s best interests, thus reinforcing public health norms.

While the court entertained the idea that the 13-year-old daughter was capable of making informed decisions about her health they ultimately ruled that her capacity to consent had “been removed by fear instilled by her mother” – and because of this overwhelming fear, declined to order vaccination.[3] The court ordered the 10-year-old sister be vaccinated, however, though her views on the matter are not recorded. Debates about young people and vaccines intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, as numerous new legal cases pitted parental wishes against the rights of the child.

As non-vaccinated youth grow up, some begin to form and share their own opinions about their parents’ beliefs and the medical care they did (or did not) receive. In the 2010s, these youth and young adults started to share their stories on sites like reddit, variously affirming or questioning their parents’ vaccination decisions. 

This online testimony attracted the attention of media outlets, generating a series of magazine and newspaper articles. Among the young people interviewed, a 23-year-old Canadian speaking  anonymously to Salon in 2019 described realizing, at age 13, that she was unvaccinated after having been sent home from school with forms to receive routine vaccinations. While her mother “said that I had an exception,” this teenager responded to learning about her unvaccinated status by “scouring the internet” – which eventually led to her finding support at a local sexual health clinic and receiving her missed vaccines. 

Despite efforts to improve vaccination rates, support for youth who grew up in vaccine hesitant families is limited. While numerous scholarly and professional articles detail approaches for doctors and nurses to support vaccine hesitant parents, few outline support for adolescents and young adults who wish to be vaccinated. While the HPV vaccine is covered for school aged children, for example, individuals who miss that age-based window may have to pay out of pocket. 

Young People’s Voices in Debates about Sex Education

Tensions between parental authority and young people’s autonomy were not unique to vaccination. Decades earlier, teenagers struggled to access sexual and reproductive health education. In Canada, debates about teenagers’ rights to access reproductive health services and privacy occurred following liberalisation of contraceptive and abortion law in 1969.[4]

Some medical professionals wondered whether these services should be provided to teens without parental consent, while others argued that teens should not have access to these services because premarital sex was immoral. Parents also debated their authority over youth’s access to sex and reproductive health education. Some even claimed it was their ‘right as a parent’ to decide if, when, and how their children would learn about sex. These debates among adults ultimately left youth themselves in the dark about which people and services were safe for them to access when they did have questions about these topics.[5]

Some progressive organisations tried to help youth navigate the tumultuous sexual and reproductive health landscapes of the 1970s. The Calgary Birth Control Association (CBCA), for instance, created ‘Physician Information Cards,’ which provided information such as: “Will prescribe to patients under 18 without consent of parents.”[6] And the Lethbridge Family Planning Centre taught youth and medical professionals about suppressed healthcare billing to ensure teens’ medical records remained private. One oral history narrator explained: “So if you were sixteen years old and you had gone on birth control and your doctor didn’t disclose to your parents they would have to ask for suppressed billing, or it would show up on the statement that your parents got.”[7] 

While teens themselves rarely had a say in how their sex education and health services were delivered, many made their opinions known. Letters from teenage clients of the CBCA identified parents as a barrier, or at least unreliable narrators, when it came to sex and reproduction. In 1974, one teen thanked the CBCA for giving a presentation at her school, stating “I find it very helpful to know more about birth control, since some parents are, you could say, ‘shy’ or ‘embarrassed’ to ‘talk to their kids’ about such things.”[8] Other letter-writers implied that they were tired of confusing, innuendo-filled sex education from the adults in their lives: “I was surprised that you covered everything […] Most shows, films, etc., only cover the basic facts. This isn’t so good because then you get mixed up. If you show and tell everything, it is much better.”[9] Teens also found ways to circumvent parental, medical, and educational barriers to accessing sex and contraceptive information, often by requesting informational material from their local birth control centres. One group of teens worked around parental surveillance by asking for pamphlets on contraception and abortion, to be sent to “[name] address as above, in an unmarked envelope, as the parents involved would not approve.”[10]

Canadian teens in the 1970s advocated for their access to clear and ‘straightforward’ sex education. The letters they wrote are evidence that adolescents, when armed with clear quality information, were prepared to make their own decisions about sex, contraception and reproduction.

Young People as Stakeholders

Including young people’s voices allows for a more complete and nuanced analysis of “parental rights,” which is often framed as a struggle between adults – parents and state. Looking at vaccination and sexual health information shows that youth formed independent opinions and sought services with or without parental permission. By creating self- and peer-learning opportunities, they embodied the legal and cultural notion of the “mature minor.” In the wake of recent “parental rights” legislation in Canada, these histories remind us that young people are not passive subjects, but active stakeholders whose perspectives shape medical decision-making and deserve recognition in policy debates today.

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[1] Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017), 69.

[2] John Cavarzan, “Memorandum Re: Letter of January 18, 1984 – to R. Roy McMurtry,” RG 10-26-0-52 Archives of Ontario, 2-3.

[3] Chmiliar v. Chmiliar, 295 A.R. 140 ABQB 525, 2001.

[4] Katrina Ackerman and Shannon Stettner. “‘The public is not ready for this’: 1969 and the long road to abortion access,” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2019): 239-256.

[5] Karissa Patton, “‘Two more calls, one in tears …’: Emotion, labour, and ethics of care at the Calgary Birth Control Association, 1970–79″, in ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950, (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2024).

[6] Physician Information Cards, M-7265-282, Calgary Birth Control Association Collection (CBCA), Western Glenbow Research Centre.

[7] Interview with Terri Forbis, 24 January 2013, transcript, 20171019, Galt Museum and Archives.

[8] Letters of Appreciation 1974, M-7265-191, CBCA Collection.

[9] Letters of Appreciation 1973, M-7265-190, CBCA Collection.

[10] Correspondence 1972, M-7265-80, CBCA Collection.

Derek Cameron (he/him) is a historian of health and medicine, activism, and digital history at the Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University. His work explores the formation of anti-vaccine activist networks in the late 20th century. Derek’s Post Doctoral Position is funded through grants from AMS Healthcare.

Karissa Patton (she/her) is a historian of health and medicine, gender and sexuality and activism and Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, University of Edinburgh. Her work explores and compares histories of reproductive health activisms and pelvic health in the late 20th century. 

Kristine Alexander (she/her) is the L.R. Wilson Chair in Canadian History and Director of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. A historian and child and youth studies scholar, her current research examines how chronological age has worked as a vector of power and difference in the history of modern Canada.