Roe v Wade and the Rights of the Father

By Tommy DeSeno, cross posted at ricochet

January 22 marks a contemptible day in American history.  On this day in 1973 a divided Supreme Court issued a spurious decision that led to the deaths so far of 50 million innocent Americans, now claiming more lives than Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward.” The consequence of Harry Blackmun’s announcement of a new government policy outstrips all 20^th century European dictators combined in death toll. 

Current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg long ago made a statement about the “right” that was being protected and in so doing opened up the soft underbelly of the Roe decision. With the appropriate court case, an attack could be led to end the American holocaust.  Here is what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 1974:

The emphasis must not be on the right to abortion, but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Justice Ginsburg thwarts the deceptive and preposterous argument that declares because women hold our children in their womb and only women can physically abort (kill) the child, abortion is therefore an issue saved for women alone.  While “abortion” can’t be equalized, Ginsburg rightly points out that abortion was not the right being protected.  “Reproductive control” is being protected, and that most certainly can be equalized between men and women under the law.

Look at the actual language Justice Blackmun penned in Roe wherein he described what exactly outweighed the Texas Law protecting the baby, and note it was NOT a right to an abortion procedure.  It was this:

Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved.

To solidify this point Justice Stewart in his concurring opinion described the right which outweighed the Texas statute which sought to protect the baby as follows:

That right necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. “Certainly the interests of a woman in giving of her physical and emotional self during pregnancy and the interests that will be affected throughout her life by the birth and raising of a child are of a far greater degree of significance and personal intimacy than the right to send a child to private school protected in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), or the right to teach a foreign language protected in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).” Abele v. Markle, 351 F. Supp. 224, 227 (Conn. 1972).

Let us then summarize the rights actually protected by the Roe decision, noting again it was not a right to an abortion procedure (abortion is only the tool allowed to be used to further the following interests of the woman).  Here are the eight [8] legally acceptable reasons for allowing a woman to relieve herself from parental obligation, any of which now outweigh the life of the baby under American law:

1. A woman may find parenting to presently cause her distress.
2. A woman my find parenting to potentially cause her distress in the future.
3. A woman may be caused psychological harm now by parenting.
4. A woman may find child care taxing mentally and physically.
5. A woman may suffer stress because she does not want a child.
6. A woman may find her and her family psychologically unable to care for the child.
7. A woman may find her and her family are “otherwise” unable to care for the child.
8. A woman my want to avoid the stigma of unwed motherhood.

These are the things being protected in American law, not abortion itself.  They are, to say the least, homage to selfishness. But they are the law; the “rights” which outweigh a baby’s life.

Yet therein we find the best legal challenge. While a man can’t have an abortion procedure, he certainly can fit into any of the eight categories described above.  If those are the rights being protected, then those rights can be equalized. Under equal protection jurisprudence, if they can be equalized, they must be.

Note that currently “reproductive rights” are not just imbalanced between men and women; rather for men they are nonexistent.  In 2009 I wrote a column called “Roe v Wade and the Rights of the Father” wherein I describe the legal case needed to equalize reproductive rights between the sexes.  I call it a “Father’s Abortion” (no – it does not require the women to abort their child).  The challenge however will assert, based upon equal protection principles, the equalization under law of a man’s reproductive control currently afforded to women, using precisely the same arguments made in Roe v Wade as cited above.

The father will seek a ruling from the court, one that is routinely granted in courtrooms today, often against a man’s will, regarding his born children:  The termination of his parental rights and obligations.  This will leave the women to decide if she wishes to go it alone and have the child, or to have an abortion.

Please note that if the case were to prevail I personally would find the result abhorrent and inconsistent with morality concerning good fatherhood.  However, the only way to finally awaken the pro-death adherents of abortion is to impose ourselves upon them, by asserting the same claim of rights that they have been imposing on the rest of us for the past 39 years.  Only then will the obvious madness of it all be laid before them in such light to make any denial of it unbelievable.

Some may argue that the Courts will never let fathers unilaterally decide not to be fathers the way Roe has allowed it for mothers. What those people don’t know is that 49 states and Puerto Rico already allow new fathers to do so after the child is born, in what are known as Safe Haven Laws. Like it or not, the cultural shift away from parental responsibility is cemented now in both federal and state law.

The only difference between the result of the lawsuit I propose and the Safe Haven Laws is that the mother will be notified before the child is born that the father is foregoing all parental rights and responsibilities, thus the term “father’s abortion.”

When I first proposed this back in 2009, thanks to the editors at FoxNews.com who printed it, the column got enormous attention and was reprinted in a variety of online media (where is SOPA and PIPA when you need them?).  I jest.  I was happy it was getting attention.

Here is what I didn’t expect:   I was overwhelmed with emails from men who suffered, and suffered greatly, from having their children killed by mothers who refused to carry their children to term.  It was not my intention to bring their issue to the forefront, but it came.

I was emotionally moved to tears reading of their plight.  They are so helpless.  They are so lost in the conversation. The court focuses only on what harm might come to a women for being a mother, but won’t consider for a moment the harm that comes to a man when his child is killed.  The media will not address him.  Instead of programs that focus on his psychological devastation from his child being killed, media will only run stories claiming that the women behind abortions are somehow civil rights heroes.

These men tried everything:  Court injunctions, offers to let the mother have no parental or financial responsibility, offers of ransom money in exchange for their child’s life and more.  Yet they are powerless, held to the whims of a mother who, often for selfish reasons, wishes not to be one.

There is the story of one man I will never forget.  I don’t even know his name.  Someone reprinted my column on Free Republic, and in response he left this poem he wrote for his dead son. It was written in 1973, so this boy was one of the first victims of the American killing of innocents.  It is the rawest, most real and chilling poem I’ve read.  It is so compelling not because it is out of the ordinary, but because it is the common exemplar of what is happening to men and children since Roe v Wade:

I’ve got a son that never came.

One that flew kites and arrow-planes.

One that danced in the springtime rains.

Don’t know why or who’s to blame.

But I’ve got a son that never came.

 

Bullfrogs and butterflies he’ll never see.

He’ll stroll through an open field, but not with me.

There was a time his heartbeat strong.

It beat with rhythm as in a song.

And to me his love belonged.

Don’t know why or what went wrong.

But there was a time his heartbeat strong.

 

It’s left in my mind and my heart will tease.

There’s no love in my life for my son and me.

Before I had a chance to fight.

They took my son up a flight.

To a room to take his life

Don’t know why I had no rights.

Before I had a chance to fight.

 

Then five months early they stole him from his womb.

Laid him in a corner and watched him die in his tomb.

But for one split second I thought I heard him cry…

“I’m gonna have to leave you now. I love you Dad. Goodbye.”

Posted: January 22nd, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: Abortion | Tags: Abortion, Harry Blackmun, Justice Stewart, Mao Tse-Tung, Reproductive control, Roe v Way, Roe v Way and the Rights of the Father, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Supreme Court, Tommy DeSeno | 3 Comments »

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