What "Choice" Do Fathers Have?

"One of the leading factors with the Danforth case was the right of fathers to legally prevent the brutal abortion death of their own prenatal children. In the Danforth decision, despite laws in many states which upheld and supported that right, the Court declared that every father’s natural right to protect his own preborn infant was to be rendered legally null and void."

The meaning of life has been debated by philosophers for a great many millenia. Yet, it is very basic: we were Created to procreate. And to make the world a better, safer, more enlightened, and fulfilling place for our descendants than it was for our ancestors.

“Each of us has a unique beginning, the moment of conception. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention. It is plain experimental evidence. Life has a very, very long history, but each individual has a very neat beginning: the moment of conception.”

That is the expert testimony of Dr. Jerome Lejeune, known as “The Father of Modern Genetics”. Dr. Lejeune, a professor of Fundamental Genetics for over twenty years, discovered the genetic cause of Down Syndrome. Dr. Lejeune also won the Memorial Allen Award Medal, which is the world's highest award for work in the field of Genetics.

His testimony establishes the concrete basis for the right-to-life movement: empirically, the life cycle of every human being begins at conception, when the 23 chromosomes of the father conjoin with the 23 chromosomes of the mother to form a new human being with a unique 46-chromosome DNA sequence. That sequence both defines the newly-conceived baby as a human being and differentiates her or him from every other human being on Earth.

That individual human uniqueness, which begins at conception, defines everything from hair color, to height, to genetically-based talents and interests.

Some of you may look more like your father; some of you may look more like your mother. Either way, it was determined at your conception. Who you are began at that point, with the conception of your genetically-unique life.

In this new year of 2004 A.D, our country is faced with a great debate over procreation itself. There are two sides to the debate: those who are pro-abortion, and those who are pro-life.

The pro-abortion side is focused on engorging the misanthropic “moral relativity” of Marxist theology. In contrast, the pro-life side is focused on committed faithfulness to the beautiful, timeless reality of moral absolutes.

Moral absolutes exist, and they are eternally immutable. Public recognition of them has been under fire in America for over forty years now. They are often dismissed as purely mystical, religious, and ethereal. As evidenced by this article’s opening quote, however, scientific fact supports moral absolutes. There are a great many moral absolutes in existence, and the first amongst them directly precludes killing innocent human beings.

Those in the right-to-life movement, popularly known as pro-lifers, recognize that this applies to the most innocent human beings on Earth, pre-natal babies. The pro-life quest is to protect tiny, vulnerable pre-natal babies from abortion death.

For Christians and atheists alike, there can be no greater calling. In the end, protecting our sons and daughters is the foundation of what it means to be a human being. Protecting our sons and daughters is mankind’s deepest responsibility.

To set the context of the current debate, let’s clarify the impact of two key United States Supreme Court decisions on abortion:

1973’s Roe vs. Wade, approaching its 31^st anniversary, un-Constitutionally overturned every pro-life/pro-baby state law in the nation with a stroke of Associate Justice Harry Blackmun’s pen. Roe vs. Wade had two dissenters.

One of them, William Rehnquist, is now Chief Justice. However, he only has two associate justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who are willing to overturn Roe and the rest of the Court’s pro-abortion decisions. The other justices currently on the U.S. Supreme Court (Stevens, Ginsberg, O’Connor, Souter, Kennedy, and Breyer) are religiously pro-abortion.

A few years after Roe vs. Wade, another pro-abortion decision was handed down by the United States Supreme Court.

The decision was for a case called Danforth vs. Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s most heavily-bankrolled abortion provider and lobbying group, is subsidized by hundreds of millions of your tax dollars compliments of your selectively-generous federal government.

One of the leading factors with the Danforth case was the right of fathers to legally prevent the brutal abortion death of their own prenatal children. In the Danforth decision, despite laws in many states which upheld and supported that right, the Court declared that every father’s natural right to protect his own preborn infant was to be rendered legally null and void.

In effect, they declared that no father’s child could ever be held safe while the Court’s decision stood, and that even the best of men were to be stripped of the right to protect their own pre-natal baby daughters and sons from death by abortion.

Justice William Rehnquist expressed exactly that position in his dissent from the Danforth decision. Referring to the state law that the Supreme Court had just struck down, Rehnquist wrote:

“The Act provided that a married woman may not obtain an abortion without her husband's consent. The Court strikes down this statute in one sentence. It says that 'since the State cannot proscribe abortion the State cannot delegate authority to any particular person, even the spouse, to prevent abortion’.”

“However, the State was not delegating to the husband the power to vindicate the State's interest…it was instead recognizing that the husband has an interest of his own…which should not be extinguished by the unilateral decision of the wife.”

“A father's interest in having a child may be unmatched by any other interest in his life.”

It is no small irony that the federalization of child-support collection was instituted exactly one year before the Danforth decision. It is in no small measure incongruous that the two have co-existed ever since:

How can a rational legal system contend that a father is liable for eighteen years of financial obligation by virtue of his procreative role in conception, while simultaneously disenfranchising his right to save his own pre-born child’s life, a right also rooted in his procreative role in conception? Having both conditions co-exist in law is not only unparalleled hypocrisy, but is a violation of the USA’s most central principle, that rights and responsibilities must be wed and inextricable.

In 1776, this principle was encapsulated by the phrase that the Founding Fathers used to launch the Revolutionary War:

Additionally, fathers simply love their sons and daughters and want them to live. Fathers have an innate need to protect their childrens lives. This core fact of fatherhood, this immortally deep paternal instinct, is the foundation of civilization itself. The United States Supreme Court has wrapped judicial chains around that instinct, which is the most devastating thing it could have done to the human race.

A nation that tells fathers not to protect their daughters and sons is a nation telling fathers not to love their daughters and sons. Such a nation is proactively engineering its own social collapse, an assertion to which observers of the devolution of America’s moral character over the last three decades bear regretful witness.

Abortion is the ultimate cruelty. We have, thanks to ultrasound technology, full-motion video of adorable prenatal babies very humanly sucking their thumbs, sleeping, stretching, reaching out…again thanks to modern ultrasound technology, we have full-motion video of those babies being dismembered until dead: “abortions”, the artificial termination of the babies’ innocent, defenseless lives in the most unspeakably violent way.

I doubt that any of the tens of thousands of young people reading this essay would ever subject themselves to such a painful fate. If empathy lives yet in this world, they would not subject a baby to it either. With that fact in mind, kindly look deep into the angelic, sinless, faithful, trusting eyes of an innocent little baby and ask yourself the critical question: “Is the baby’s life worth less than your own life is?”

Infants are without fault of character. They deserve to be held, fed, rocked, kept warm, and protected from any who would do them harm. Their lives began with their conception, and developed day by day ever since. As pre-natal infants in the first nine months of their lives, from their conceptions to their births, their right for legal protection from those who would do them harm is the most basic of all civil rights. As a civilization, we need to protect infants pre-natally. Indeed, the obligation to do so is humanity’s most sacred trust. Abortion breaks that trust, and betrays the perfect innocence of the prenatal baby who very simply wants to live.

America must restore that trust. Infants, from conception forward, must be protected in law.

Earlier, we clarified the social impact of two key United States Supreme Court decisions on the life versus death issue of abortion. And in that simple phrase, “life versus death,” is found the incomparably ancient and primordial nature of this ongoing war.

Moral absolutes do exist, and they are eternally immutable. They don’t falter at the Orwellian behest of cultural winds, but are forever timeless and unchanging.

Because of that, and solely because of that, there will always be things worth faithfully protecting: life, love, faith, family, innocence, innocents…

Much of what will happen on the abortion-death versus right-to-life issue from this point forward hinges upon the current race for the Presidency of these United States and the changes that our 2005-2009 President will most certainly make to the roster of the Supreme Court. The shape of this nation gets decided in Campaign ’04, which is in progress right now.

In tandem with the political, we have the personal. Procreation is as personal as it gets. In our society, decades of devolution have wrought a culture of death.

Instituting a culture of life is a task charged only to the strong, only to those with the fortitude to walk uphill, to walk against the winds that set the Winter in challenge against the Spring.

Pro-lifers willingly do this in order to defend millions of vulnerable little pre-born babies who are given no voice in civilization save by those who care about their lives.

Real political progressives are pro-life, pro-fatherhood, and pro-family. Progressive social change on this issue requires those who care about protecting humanity’s most endangered and innocent members to stand up for them bravely and firmly: in romantic relationships, in families, in Campus Christian groups, in local churches, in political parties, and in America’s courts and legislatures.

The pro-life trust is to strongly protect tiny, innocent, frightened little pre-natal babies from ever suffering the horrific violence of abortion death.