Happy Father’s Day!
By ALEXANDRA DESANCTIS, Originally Published by National Review
Society should recognize that both parents have duties to their unborn children.
When you hear the phrase “women’s rights,” what comes to mind? In the U.S., at least, many of us likely think not of the right to vote or the right to seek an education — rights that women still lack in many parts of the world — but rather of the supposed right to have an abortion.
Abortion is considered so much a “women’s issue” that when a politician pledges to protect “women’s reproductive freedom,” we know he’s using a euphemism for one reproductive matter in particular. “Her body, her choice,” “No uterus, no opinion”: These slogans articulate the belief that abortion concerns women only and that the decision whether to let the child live rests with the mother alone.
This mindset intentionally overlooks the existence of the child’s father, at great cost to both mother and child and to our society. Mothers, to be sure, have a unique and irreplaceable responsibility to the child in the womb, sustaining him in the closest and most vulnerable of human relationships. No father has conceived or gestated a human being. No father has given birth or nursed a newborn. No father could attempt these things even if he wanted to.