This past January 22nd, the nation celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe vs. Wade decision and the constitutional tenet of “freedom of choice”.
As trumpeted on the National Abortion Rights Action League web page, “The essence of America is the right to determine the course of one’s life, to make one’s own choices and shape one’s own destiny.” Well… that is if you are of the favored gender.
Ironically, the month of January also marks the thirtieth anniversary of another Supreme Court case having to do with reproduction that rarely, if ever, receives any mention.
Just five days prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Roe case, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Gomez vs. Perez. However, unlike in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court elected to rule contrary to the concept of “freedom of choice” by overturning existing state law and ruling that unmarried men are responsible for the financial support of their “illegitimate” children. But rather than the Supreme Court protecting the American ideals of “Equal Justice Under the Law”, as inscribed on the portico of the Supreme Court building itself, the Court may have engaged in something more along the lines of the sinister.
The dirty little secret is that it appears that the Supreme Court may have intentionally delayed the Roe vs. Wade decision until after Gomez vs. Perez so as to facilitate a definition of “freedom of choice” that would be compatible with a specific political agenda.
A Supreme Court case consists of two phases, the argument and the decision. A case is first argued before the Court and the decision is usually rendered four to six weeks later.
Roe vs. Wade was argued before the Court on Oct. 10, 1972 and, after an unusual length of fourteen weeks, a decision was handed down on Jan. 22, 1973. Gomez vs. Perez was argued before the Court on Dec. 6, 1972 and decided on Jan. 17, 1973. The general rule for Supreme Court cases during the 72-73 term found the arguments and decisions to be in chronological order. This presented a problem for the Court.
Had the Supreme Court followed the chronological order of the two cases, a problem would have been created for the Court in its Gomez ruling. How could the Supreme Court set a precedent that would deem a woman’s pregnancy to be autonomous and affirm the concept of “freedom of choice” through a “right of privacy”, but yet render a decision that would assign an unmarried man a financial responsibility for that so-called “autonomous” and “private” affair? Obviously the answer was to delay the decision of Roe vs. Wade until after Gomez vs. Perez.
To compound the issue, the Court had to go through some legal contortions to reach their decision in Gomez. The essence of the Court’s ruling was, “… law denying right of paternal support to illegitimate children while granting it to legitimate children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
This was the classic example of courts perverting law to legislate from the bench. Initially, child-support was not considered to be a “right” of the child, but the sharing of liabilities of two parties involved in a contract (marriage) upon the dissolution of that contract (divorce). No such “right” to support existed beforehand. Inventing “rights” out of thin air is another technique courts use to make palatable legislation that would otherwise be repugnant to the rule of law. As for an “equal protection” issue, there is no statutory law that requires parents within the bonds of matrimony to allocate a specific percentage of their income to child-support.
However, one cannot morally argue against the Court’s ruling in Gomez, being that couples that maintain a sustained relationship, even outside the institution of marriage, should not be allowed to abandon their partners upon the event that a child should be born within that relationship. The problem with Gomez vs. Perez, the Supreme Court ruling that states use to enforce child support laws on unmarried men, is that the law has evolved into a vehicle that is sometimes used to extract a monetary benefit from a man in which no relationship, other than a consensual sexual encounter, existed.
While rape, incest, and the health of the mother are the most publicly touted justifications for legalized abortion, in reality those “justifications” are nothing more than rhetoric. The truth of the matter is that abortion is primarily used as a remedy for a “mistake” or a failure of birth control. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of “Roe vs. Wade” was a judicial exercise that enacted a provision to provide women with an opportunity to relieve themselves from the consequences of sexual intercourse. Abortion rights activists insist that abortion remain a safe and legal procedure because a young woman should not have to suffer the consequences of having her life interrupted with an unplanned pregnancy. Pro-choice advocates insist that women have the option to terminate their pregnancies for any reason without any regards to the wishes of the so-called biological father. Women are to be free to continue their education, enter the job market or concentrate on their careers. Free to travel, purchase a home or automobile, or just avoid the responsibilities of parenthood if they should so desire.
However, the true agenda of the “pro-choice” movement is exposed when those who gallantly rush to the defense of a young lady facing an unplanned pregnancy, idly stand by while the same legislative and judicial systems, that recognize a constitutional tenet of “freedom of choice”, vilify unmarried men as “deadbeat dads” and force them under the threat of incarceration to be fully accountable for their “mistakes”.
While the idea of “freedom of choice” is fundamental to the American tenets of individual freedom, liberty and “the essence of determining the course of one’s life”, the current application of law regarding “the right to choose” is an absurdity that is repugnant to the concepts of both the “rule of law” and “equal protection of the law” and is indicative to the inconsistencies and hypocrisy inherent to liberalism and, in particular, to feminism.
And they say that men just don’t get it. What a joke.
George C. Collinsworth
A liberal’s worst nightmare; a redneck with both a library card and a concealed-carry permit.