My views which are not specifically aimed at anyone…
Other than the father’s rights to have his opinion heard on the matter, I think the mother should have the last say.
If it could be done, under what circumstance would anyone else force a woman to bear a child she did not want?
And, how would such force be applied?
Would we, at first sight of pregnancy, strap the woman to a table, put her on life support, induce a coma, wait for gestation and deliver via caesarean section?
That was meant to be absurd, reductio ad absurdum, but if we can’t face the logical consequences of our beliefs then that is what it would become. The mother’s body would have become little more than a baby factory under the control of others.
And, in the extreme, how would the birth and subsequent survival of the child be enforced?
(Please do not approach the answer to that question from the point of view that we can not guarantee the subsequent survival of any child;
I mean murder.)
Would it therefore become imperative that any mother tobe who, at anytime expressed a desire not to bear the child, should, for safety reasons, have access to the child removed from her after birth?
I think that people of both sexes, other than the mother, are living in some judgemental ivory tower that allows them to simply sleep well at night with their own beliefs. They sleep with some warm and fuzzy feeling that they have done some good for the day, by their definition of good. They may arise and see a new day, a new challenge, and a new place to force their opinion on someone else.
The mother may not share that same day to day definition of good. The warm and fuzzy’s may have moved on, gone to another tree to hug, another whale to save. The mother may be lost, nowhere to go, no help at hand. The people that required her to have the child have moved on. The righteousness of those that enforced the birth is not replaced by their responsibility for the birth; the mother is alone.
A woman’s body is not simply a baby factory and a fetus is not simply a judgemental belief;
it is an ongoing reality that, ultimately, the mother must bear… or not.
