chris epic
Perpetual Student
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2006
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This is a 3 1/2 page arguement paper I wrote for my college english class on father's rights and abortion. Just giving you a heads up on the length of it before you decide to read on.
Abstract
Women have many more reproductive and parental rights termination options than men, contrary to the equal rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although over turning the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court in 1973 would unconstitutionally limit a woman’s choice to determine her reproductive and parental destiny, a father’s genetic and parental stake in his prenatal child must not be overlooked. As a woman’s right over her body is legislated by her natural right of autonomy, a father’s natural obligation to protect his child from abortion should be legislated equally.
“No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before, (faithsite.com)”
- Lafcadio Hearn, (1850-1904)
When I was 19 years old, I was a legal adult and a reckless teenager. My impetuous lifestyle consequently yielded the impregnation of my then live-in girlfriend. Quick to action, she wanted an abortion. I asked her if she was sure and she began to cry. She expressed several hearted reasons why she could not have a child at this time. Understanding that I had no rightful bearing in the decision, I supported her. Together we went to every clinical appointment, including the procedure; I acquired half of the cost, and I made myself available to her personally and emotionally.
I hadn’t truly thought about the abortion until the following Father’s Day. At that moment I began to understand the capacity of my lack of “rightful bearing.” Something felt very wrong at the fact that I didn’t have the right; not to force my girlfriend to have a child against her will, but to protect my child from the abortion. I truly believed that at the moment of conception, I was a father and even if a “father” was only reserved for persons born, then I was at least the advocate for my biological creation, a human life, my progeny, my child. As a woman’s right over her body is legislated by her natural right of autonomy, a father’s natural obligation to protect his child from abortion should be legislated equally.
There is no law in the United States that affirms my plight for advocacy in the case for my prenatal child. There is not even a law that automatically or fairly secures the parental rights of an unmarried father in the event that a father wants to protect his child from an abortion (Leving 199). It is especially difficult for a father to establish paternity, given that he is unaware of his sexual partner’s pregnancy, unless the mother seeks financial support. In this case, a father can be court ordered to pay child support for the next 18 years (Lerman and Ooms114). In “Young Unwed Fathers,” Robert Lerman and Theodora Ooms state that 90% of the time, a father will have only a financial responsibility to the child, and not a custodial or emotional responsibility to the child as determined by the family court system. Jeffrey Leving, author of “Father’s Rights,” says that this is due, in part, to dated gender stereotyping that typically favors the mother over the father when sole custody is awarded. This is because, generally, the family court system perceives the mother as that child’s nurturing and emotional custodian, and the father exclusively as a financial custodian (Leving 42).
This gender stereotyping contributes to an attitude which assumes that fathers do not have an emotional stake in their children’s lives in an early prenatal stage, but rather they are only concerned with financial provision for their families; thus fathers are sought to fulfill this financial obligation for their children in the event of divorce or paternity establishment by a single mother. This is based on a gender role model that assigns emotional nurturing to the mother and financial nurturing to the father (Leving 37).
Leving displays a poll result demonstrating that American society contradicts this general family court presumption. Of the 11,000 survey participants, 88 percent of Americans felt that moms and dads should have equal child-rearing responsibilities, both emotionally and financially (39). Leving continues to explain that many fathers experience various degrees of “torture” and “devastation” when separated from their children (40). If the opinion of the average American doesn’t sufficiently contradict the court’s opinion, perhaps the words of a historical philosopher who has contributed to American ideology, will paint a vivid picture of true fatherhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau says that “paternal love” is one of the “sweetest sentiments known to Man,” (Fiero). Understanding of the reality of a father’s emotional stake in his child’s life versus the court’s misconception will generate a turnaround in the one to nine ratio of paternal custody to maternal custody, and impact the more controversial issue at hand: that of a father’s right to protect his child from abortion.
Claiming that gender stereotyping has contributed to the detriment of fathers’ parental rights in the United States, the options of parental right termination and reproductive rights of women must be clarified. Men and women are naturally obligated to protect themselves and their children. This should be clearly understood, as this is conducive to the protection and reproduction of the human species. These natural obligations to protect ourselves and each other, along with the enculturation of our values that lend to morality, are, themselves, protected by legislating them into laws under the umbrella of the United States Constitution. This is simply restating the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed… with certain unalienable Rights…among these are Life…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted,” thus, when we say “protect” it is this very “Life” that is being protected.
In 1973, the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade protected a woman’s right to complete autonomy over her body (Goldman 34). That is to say, women have the right to make decisions in regard to their bodies, which includes the decision of continuing or terminating her pregnancy. Abortion is a hotly debated issue but it is not my contention to argue against abortion, or even a woman’s right to choose. I must respect the fact the many women believe that this is their natural right to choose their reproductive future.
Another option that unwed mothers have to terminate their parental rights without paternal consent is through adoption. According to an article published in the New York Times by Tamar Lewin, Jeremiah Clayton Jones, a 23 year old father of an 18 month old son he has never seen, has no legal right to bar his ex-fiancé from giving the child up for adoption. He lost this right because he failed to file his paternity with a putative father registry. Over thirty states have a similar registry which allows fathers to file paternity in a certain amount of time before or after the child’s birth (Lewin). Lewin says the deadlines range from 5 days to 30 days after birth, or when a petition to adoption has been filed. Jones discovered his ex-fiancé was pregnant three weeks before the child was born when he was contacted by a lawyer asking for paternal consent to adoption. Jones wanted that baby, but he didn’t find out about the paternal registry until it was past the deadline. Ultimately, Jones lost his parental rights due to a technicality. Across the country, Jones is a representative voice for many fathers who are fighting for their children.
To establish a case for fathers that could limit the legal action that has to take place to fight for their children, fathers should no longer be looked at as merely the bread winners in the hierarchy of the family infrastructure. The father’s emotional involvement is just as important, if not more, than financial provision. Leving cites social scientific studies that link the absence of a father to a “wide range of social nightmares and developmental deficiencies [including] increases in juvenile crime, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, promiscuity, truancy, and vandalism,” (47). My family left my father when I was eleven years old. The disintegration of my family was the disintegration of my life-stability. After experiencing many of the above “nightmares” and “deficiencies,” I attributed them to the absence of my father. I have yet to fully heal, emotionally, from the absence of my father. Having established the needed equity of mother and father involvement, and sharing of financial responsibilities, I am almost able to make a case for fathers’ rights. But first I need to explain the Supreme Court’s opinion of why fathers come second to mothers in parental decisions from abortion to adoption.
Leslie Friedman Goldstein, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware, traces the development of women’s rights and abortion through Supreme Court cases in her book “Contemporary Cases in Women’s Rights.” First, in the 1976 case Planned Parenthood v Danforth, the Court’s opinion states that “it is the woman who physically bears the child and who is the more directly and immediately affected by the pregnancy. [If both parents disagree, and one has to make the decision] as between the two, the balance weighs in [the mother’s] favor,” (20). Since it is well known biological and scientific knowledge that a fetus is fifty percent composed of the father’s DNA, the decision weighs in her favor because she is the one that experiences the physical effects of pregnancy and the painful process of birth. These effects and this process of pregnancy and birth are held within the nine month gestation period. However, in stark contrast, when a father who wishes to terminate his parental responsibilities before his child is born, exercising the same option that a woman has, he can still be found financially responsible for the child if the mother chooses to continue the pregnancy. Thus, a father does not have the legal reproductive or parental options a mother has.
I have a friend who pays child support to a daughter he lives a thousand miles away from, and whose mother prefers he not be involved with. My friend makes a thousand dollars a month after taxes. He is an average adult with average adult living expenses in addition to the $500 a month he has to pay for child support. The math is evident and the stress and frustration, without a doubt, could be equated to the emotional health detriment a woman can cite as a justification for abortion or adoption.
Goldstein accounts in the Roe v Wade case that abortions are justifiable at the cost of the maternal health, both physically and mentally (17). Stress contributes to both mental and physical health. David B. Posen, MD, wrote in a Canadian journal of medicine that “stress is the most common cause of ill health in our society, probably underlying as many as 70% of all visits to family doctors (Posen). Therefore, if stress can be used as an excuse for a legitimate abortion of an unwanted child and an undesirable 9 month pregnancy, then the stress fathers experience from the financial burden of supporting an unwanted child, and an undesirable 18 year period, cannot be ignored.
This brings to mind a recent case dubbed “Roe v Wade for Men.” Journalist Nancy Gibbs publishes an article in Time Magazine in March of 2006.She reports on this case being brought to U.S. district court by the National Center for Men (NCFM, an American men’s rights group), advocating a 25 year old Matt Dubay. He contends that his girlfriend assured him that she had a medical condition that prevented her from conceiving children. Not expecting that he would be a parent, he was more than a little surprised when he was court ordered to pay child support. The NCFM is using this case to bolster the quest for equating men’s reproductive and parental rights with those of women’s. Initially, if a woman can opt-out of her parental responsibilities, a man should be able to as well (Gibbs).
I absolutely, whole-heartedly, 100 percent disagree with this case in the event that a child will not be financially provided for. Although many biologists and physicians agree that a fetus is a human life; a human life is not a person. A person, defined by the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment, is “one born in the United States.” If a human is not born, it technically does not have the same rights and protections that persons do, if at all. The only case I know that does offer protection of a fetus is detailed by the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL). They state that if the mother has an intention to see the pregnancy to birth such as the Fetal Homicide Law. This law equates a miscarriage brought on by an automobile accident to vehicular homicide (NCSL). But, again, this is only in the interest of the mother primarily.
When a human is born and becomes a person, it is vested with rights and protections, including the right to be financially supported. I do not believe men should be able to financially opt-out of supporting their children. However, the principal underlying this court case is addressed by the young Matt Dubay from Nancy Gibb’s article.
Dubay says he doesn’t expect to see a victory. He tells the Associated Press, “What I expect to hear [from the court] is that the way things are is not really fair, but that's the way it is… Just to create awareness would be enough, to at least get a debate started.” Dubay and the National Center for Men hope to create awareness that men and women not only have unequal parental and reproductive rights, the differences in their rights are grossly uneven and evident through double standards. Although I am for the fundamental support of children born, and I support a woman’s legal right to choose, I believe that at the very least, amidst all the rights a man; a father lacks, I should be able to legally bar my sexual partner from having an abortion if I desire to protect my child. But any attempt to do so in the past has failed because of this statement that encompasses the general opinion of the Supreme Court in this matter. “It cannot be claimed that the father's interest in the fetus' welfare is equal to the mother's protected liberty...," (Gibbs). Her liberty to choose her parental destiny outweighs a father’s “interest” in a fetus. Her freedom to terminate her parental responsibilities overrides my freedom to protect my child. I cannot understand why; for if I were mandated by nature to protect my genetic destiny, I would sacrifice a lifetime of fatherhood over a brief and painful nine months of gestation.
The Supreme Court recognizes the preciousness of “potential personhood” and understands that the “State does have an…important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life...,” (Goldstein 18). However; they fail to recognize a father’s obligation to protect his unborn child. They believe a woman’s liberty is more important than a father’s interest in his unborn child. I don’t believe one outweighs the other. I know that both are equally important and should be equally legislated as such. A woman must maintain her right to determine her reproductive destiny if her unborn child is unwanted by both of its parents. But just as a father cannot force his sexual partner to abort their child, a mother should not have the right to do the same if the father desires to protect his unborn child, unless the continuation of pregnancy was a detriment to either the health and life of the mother, or the health and life of the child as originally intended by Roe v Wade.
Passion swells. Any attempt I make to articulate this issue in a logical, nonabrasive, invitational way seems to only slightly stray by wave of righteousness. The order of responsible rhetoric favors rigid objectivity when, in truth, there isn’t such an object that exists. I am inclined to maintain my possession of natural obligation I find refused by the State that undermines me. I believe that every human being deserves a right to life. I believe the mother’s right to life and liberty supersedes that life vulnerable and quick to death without the life support of the mother. But I believe a father’s State-demanded 18 year support of a child born should at least be equated, if not chronologically, then fundamentally to the healthy mother’s naturally demanded 9 month support of a healthy, unborn child. This being evident; a father and a mother must be recognized as equal participants in the decision over their parental destiny; the variable of favor being Life, whether that be the Life of the mother or the Life of the unborn child whom is advocated by the father with a desire to see that life grow, love, and be loved.
Having shared a personal story and introduced a general overview of parental rights and obligations, I have established a desire to bring attention to the gross inequity of legal parental rights between men and women, and the generalizations of gender stereotyping harmful to fathers today who are surrounded by the constant redefinition of these roles. The laws that lend themselves to women’s rights (in regard to parental and reproductive) have a basis in biology and fundamentality through the pursuit of liberty mandated by nature or “God” as written in the Declaration of Independence. A father, too, has the same fundamental, the same natural pursuits and should not be told otherwise by any person or State.
“Self-determination and freedom are the basis of human rights…Today, on Human Rights Day, we…recommit ourselves to fighting forward until our right to determine our reproductive destiny is understood as essential to human freedom,”
-Gloria Feldt, Former President of Planned Parenthood, 10 December 2004
Declaration of Independence. Preamble Clause. 1776.
Feldt, Gloria. “Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights.” Planned Parenthood. 10 Dec. 2004. Planned Parenthood. 23 March 2006 <www.plannedparenthood.org>.
Fiero, Gloria. “Rousseau’s Revolt Against Reason.” Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1755. 12 April 2006. <http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/foi/readings/rouss.htm>.
Gibbs, Nancy. “A Man’s Right to Choose.” Time. 15 March 2006. <www.time.com/time>.
Goldstein, Leslie Friedman. Contemporary Cases in Women's Rights. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1994.
Lerman, Robert and Theodora Ooms. Young Unwed Fathers. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Leving, Jeffery. Fathers’ Rights. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Lewin, Tamar. “Unwed Fathers Fight for Babies Placed for Adoption by Mothers.” New York Times 19 March 2006, late ed.: sec 1. p 1.
National Conference of State Legislatures. Fetal Homicide Law. June 2005. 14 April 2006. <http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/fethom.htm>.
Posen, David B. “Stress Management.” Internet Mental Health. April 1995. 14 April 2006. <http://www.mentalhealth.com>.
Abstract
Women have many more reproductive and parental rights termination options than men, contrary to the equal rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although over turning the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court in 1973 would unconstitutionally limit a woman’s choice to determine her reproductive and parental destiny, a father’s genetic and parental stake in his prenatal child must not be overlooked. As a woman’s right over her body is legislated by her natural right of autonomy, a father’s natural obligation to protect his child from abortion should be legislated equally.
“No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before, (faithsite.com)”
- Lafcadio Hearn, (1850-1904)
When I was 19 years old, I was a legal adult and a reckless teenager. My impetuous lifestyle consequently yielded the impregnation of my then live-in girlfriend. Quick to action, she wanted an abortion. I asked her if she was sure and she began to cry. She expressed several hearted reasons why she could not have a child at this time. Understanding that I had no rightful bearing in the decision, I supported her. Together we went to every clinical appointment, including the procedure; I acquired half of the cost, and I made myself available to her personally and emotionally.
I hadn’t truly thought about the abortion until the following Father’s Day. At that moment I began to understand the capacity of my lack of “rightful bearing.” Something felt very wrong at the fact that I didn’t have the right; not to force my girlfriend to have a child against her will, but to protect my child from the abortion. I truly believed that at the moment of conception, I was a father and even if a “father” was only reserved for persons born, then I was at least the advocate for my biological creation, a human life, my progeny, my child. As a woman’s right over her body is legislated by her natural right of autonomy, a father’s natural obligation to protect his child from abortion should be legislated equally.
There is no law in the United States that affirms my plight for advocacy in the case for my prenatal child. There is not even a law that automatically or fairly secures the parental rights of an unmarried father in the event that a father wants to protect his child from an abortion (Leving 199). It is especially difficult for a father to establish paternity, given that he is unaware of his sexual partner’s pregnancy, unless the mother seeks financial support. In this case, a father can be court ordered to pay child support for the next 18 years (Lerman and Ooms114). In “Young Unwed Fathers,” Robert Lerman and Theodora Ooms state that 90% of the time, a father will have only a financial responsibility to the child, and not a custodial or emotional responsibility to the child as determined by the family court system. Jeffrey Leving, author of “Father’s Rights,” says that this is due, in part, to dated gender stereotyping that typically favors the mother over the father when sole custody is awarded. This is because, generally, the family court system perceives the mother as that child’s nurturing and emotional custodian, and the father exclusively as a financial custodian (Leving 42).
This gender stereotyping contributes to an attitude which assumes that fathers do not have an emotional stake in their children’s lives in an early prenatal stage, but rather they are only concerned with financial provision for their families; thus fathers are sought to fulfill this financial obligation for their children in the event of divorce or paternity establishment by a single mother. This is based on a gender role model that assigns emotional nurturing to the mother and financial nurturing to the father (Leving 37).
Leving displays a poll result demonstrating that American society contradicts this general family court presumption. Of the 11,000 survey participants, 88 percent of Americans felt that moms and dads should have equal child-rearing responsibilities, both emotionally and financially (39). Leving continues to explain that many fathers experience various degrees of “torture” and “devastation” when separated from their children (40). If the opinion of the average American doesn’t sufficiently contradict the court’s opinion, perhaps the words of a historical philosopher who has contributed to American ideology, will paint a vivid picture of true fatherhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau says that “paternal love” is one of the “sweetest sentiments known to Man,” (Fiero). Understanding of the reality of a father’s emotional stake in his child’s life versus the court’s misconception will generate a turnaround in the one to nine ratio of paternal custody to maternal custody, and impact the more controversial issue at hand: that of a father’s right to protect his child from abortion.
Claiming that gender stereotyping has contributed to the detriment of fathers’ parental rights in the United States, the options of parental right termination and reproductive rights of women must be clarified. Men and women are naturally obligated to protect themselves and their children. This should be clearly understood, as this is conducive to the protection and reproduction of the human species. These natural obligations to protect ourselves and each other, along with the enculturation of our values that lend to morality, are, themselves, protected by legislating them into laws under the umbrella of the United States Constitution. This is simply restating the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men…are endowed… with certain unalienable Rights…among these are Life…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted,” thus, when we say “protect” it is this very “Life” that is being protected.
In 1973, the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade protected a woman’s right to complete autonomy over her body (Goldman 34). That is to say, women have the right to make decisions in regard to their bodies, which includes the decision of continuing or terminating her pregnancy. Abortion is a hotly debated issue but it is not my contention to argue against abortion, or even a woman’s right to choose. I must respect the fact the many women believe that this is their natural right to choose their reproductive future.
Another option that unwed mothers have to terminate their parental rights without paternal consent is through adoption. According to an article published in the New York Times by Tamar Lewin, Jeremiah Clayton Jones, a 23 year old father of an 18 month old son he has never seen, has no legal right to bar his ex-fiancé from giving the child up for adoption. He lost this right because he failed to file his paternity with a putative father registry. Over thirty states have a similar registry which allows fathers to file paternity in a certain amount of time before or after the child’s birth (Lewin). Lewin says the deadlines range from 5 days to 30 days after birth, or when a petition to adoption has been filed. Jones discovered his ex-fiancé was pregnant three weeks before the child was born when he was contacted by a lawyer asking for paternal consent to adoption. Jones wanted that baby, but he didn’t find out about the paternal registry until it was past the deadline. Ultimately, Jones lost his parental rights due to a technicality. Across the country, Jones is a representative voice for many fathers who are fighting for their children.
To establish a case for fathers that could limit the legal action that has to take place to fight for their children, fathers should no longer be looked at as merely the bread winners in the hierarchy of the family infrastructure. The father’s emotional involvement is just as important, if not more, than financial provision. Leving cites social scientific studies that link the absence of a father to a “wide range of social nightmares and developmental deficiencies [including] increases in juvenile crime, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, promiscuity, truancy, and vandalism,” (47). My family left my father when I was eleven years old. The disintegration of my family was the disintegration of my life-stability. After experiencing many of the above “nightmares” and “deficiencies,” I attributed them to the absence of my father. I have yet to fully heal, emotionally, from the absence of my father. Having established the needed equity of mother and father involvement, and sharing of financial responsibilities, I am almost able to make a case for fathers’ rights. But first I need to explain the Supreme Court’s opinion of why fathers come second to mothers in parental decisions from abortion to adoption.
Leslie Friedman Goldstein, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware, traces the development of women’s rights and abortion through Supreme Court cases in her book “Contemporary Cases in Women’s Rights.” First, in the 1976 case Planned Parenthood v Danforth, the Court’s opinion states that “it is the woman who physically bears the child and who is the more directly and immediately affected by the pregnancy. [If both parents disagree, and one has to make the decision] as between the two, the balance weighs in [the mother’s] favor,” (20). Since it is well known biological and scientific knowledge that a fetus is fifty percent composed of the father’s DNA, the decision weighs in her favor because she is the one that experiences the physical effects of pregnancy and the painful process of birth. These effects and this process of pregnancy and birth are held within the nine month gestation period. However, in stark contrast, when a father who wishes to terminate his parental responsibilities before his child is born, exercising the same option that a woman has, he can still be found financially responsible for the child if the mother chooses to continue the pregnancy. Thus, a father does not have the legal reproductive or parental options a mother has.
I have a friend who pays child support to a daughter he lives a thousand miles away from, and whose mother prefers he not be involved with. My friend makes a thousand dollars a month after taxes. He is an average adult with average adult living expenses in addition to the $500 a month he has to pay for child support. The math is evident and the stress and frustration, without a doubt, could be equated to the emotional health detriment a woman can cite as a justification for abortion or adoption.
Goldstein accounts in the Roe v Wade case that abortions are justifiable at the cost of the maternal health, both physically and mentally (17). Stress contributes to both mental and physical health. David B. Posen, MD, wrote in a Canadian journal of medicine that “stress is the most common cause of ill health in our society, probably underlying as many as 70% of all visits to family doctors (Posen). Therefore, if stress can be used as an excuse for a legitimate abortion of an unwanted child and an undesirable 9 month pregnancy, then the stress fathers experience from the financial burden of supporting an unwanted child, and an undesirable 18 year period, cannot be ignored.
This brings to mind a recent case dubbed “Roe v Wade for Men.” Journalist Nancy Gibbs publishes an article in Time Magazine in March of 2006.She reports on this case being brought to U.S. district court by the National Center for Men (NCFM, an American men’s rights group), advocating a 25 year old Matt Dubay. He contends that his girlfriend assured him that she had a medical condition that prevented her from conceiving children. Not expecting that he would be a parent, he was more than a little surprised when he was court ordered to pay child support. The NCFM is using this case to bolster the quest for equating men’s reproductive and parental rights with those of women’s. Initially, if a woman can opt-out of her parental responsibilities, a man should be able to as well (Gibbs).
I absolutely, whole-heartedly, 100 percent disagree with this case in the event that a child will not be financially provided for. Although many biologists and physicians agree that a fetus is a human life; a human life is not a person. A person, defined by the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment, is “one born in the United States.” If a human is not born, it technically does not have the same rights and protections that persons do, if at all. The only case I know that does offer protection of a fetus is detailed by the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL). They state that if the mother has an intention to see the pregnancy to birth such as the Fetal Homicide Law. This law equates a miscarriage brought on by an automobile accident to vehicular homicide (NCSL). But, again, this is only in the interest of the mother primarily.
When a human is born and becomes a person, it is vested with rights and protections, including the right to be financially supported. I do not believe men should be able to financially opt-out of supporting their children. However, the principal underlying this court case is addressed by the young Matt Dubay from Nancy Gibb’s article.
Dubay says he doesn’t expect to see a victory. He tells the Associated Press, “What I expect to hear [from the court] is that the way things are is not really fair, but that's the way it is… Just to create awareness would be enough, to at least get a debate started.” Dubay and the National Center for Men hope to create awareness that men and women not only have unequal parental and reproductive rights, the differences in their rights are grossly uneven and evident through double standards. Although I am for the fundamental support of children born, and I support a woman’s legal right to choose, I believe that at the very least, amidst all the rights a man; a father lacks, I should be able to legally bar my sexual partner from having an abortion if I desire to protect my child. But any attempt to do so in the past has failed because of this statement that encompasses the general opinion of the Supreme Court in this matter. “It cannot be claimed that the father's interest in the fetus' welfare is equal to the mother's protected liberty...," (Gibbs). Her liberty to choose her parental destiny outweighs a father’s “interest” in a fetus. Her freedom to terminate her parental responsibilities overrides my freedom to protect my child. I cannot understand why; for if I were mandated by nature to protect my genetic destiny, I would sacrifice a lifetime of fatherhood over a brief and painful nine months of gestation.
The Supreme Court recognizes the preciousness of “potential personhood” and understands that the “State does have an…important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life...,” (Goldstein 18). However; they fail to recognize a father’s obligation to protect his unborn child. They believe a woman’s liberty is more important than a father’s interest in his unborn child. I don’t believe one outweighs the other. I know that both are equally important and should be equally legislated as such. A woman must maintain her right to determine her reproductive destiny if her unborn child is unwanted by both of its parents. But just as a father cannot force his sexual partner to abort their child, a mother should not have the right to do the same if the father desires to protect his unborn child, unless the continuation of pregnancy was a detriment to either the health and life of the mother, or the health and life of the child as originally intended by Roe v Wade.
Passion swells. Any attempt I make to articulate this issue in a logical, nonabrasive, invitational way seems to only slightly stray by wave of righteousness. The order of responsible rhetoric favors rigid objectivity when, in truth, there isn’t such an object that exists. I am inclined to maintain my possession of natural obligation I find refused by the State that undermines me. I believe that every human being deserves a right to life. I believe the mother’s right to life and liberty supersedes that life vulnerable and quick to death without the life support of the mother. But I believe a father’s State-demanded 18 year support of a child born should at least be equated, if not chronologically, then fundamentally to the healthy mother’s naturally demanded 9 month support of a healthy, unborn child. This being evident; a father and a mother must be recognized as equal participants in the decision over their parental destiny; the variable of favor being Life, whether that be the Life of the mother or the Life of the unborn child whom is advocated by the father with a desire to see that life grow, love, and be loved.
Having shared a personal story and introduced a general overview of parental rights and obligations, I have established a desire to bring attention to the gross inequity of legal parental rights between men and women, and the generalizations of gender stereotyping harmful to fathers today who are surrounded by the constant redefinition of these roles. The laws that lend themselves to women’s rights (in regard to parental and reproductive) have a basis in biology and fundamentality through the pursuit of liberty mandated by nature or “God” as written in the Declaration of Independence. A father, too, has the same fundamental, the same natural pursuits and should not be told otherwise by any person or State.
“Self-determination and freedom are the basis of human rights…Today, on Human Rights Day, we…recommit ourselves to fighting forward until our right to determine our reproductive destiny is understood as essential to human freedom,”
-Gloria Feldt, Former President of Planned Parenthood, 10 December 2004
Works Cited
Declaration of Independence. Preamble Clause. 1776.
Feldt, Gloria. “Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights.” Planned Parenthood. 10 Dec. 2004. Planned Parenthood. 23 March 2006 <www.plannedparenthood.org>.
Fiero, Gloria. “Rousseau’s Revolt Against Reason.” Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1755. 12 April 2006. <http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/foi/readings/rouss.htm>.
Gibbs, Nancy. “A Man’s Right to Choose.” Time. 15 March 2006. <www.time.com/time>.
Goldstein, Leslie Friedman. Contemporary Cases in Women's Rights. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1994.
Lerman, Robert and Theodora Ooms. Young Unwed Fathers. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Leving, Jeffery. Fathers’ Rights. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Lewin, Tamar. “Unwed Fathers Fight for Babies Placed for Adoption by Mothers.” New York Times 19 March 2006, late ed.: sec 1. p 1.
National Conference of State Legislatures. Fetal Homicide Law. June 2005. 14 April 2006. <http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/fethom.htm>.
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