Not opting out of Father’s Day

In contrast to the dustup over various businesses e-mailing “opt-out” messages ahead of this year’s Mother’s Day, I have to date not been asked whether I choose to “opt-out” of Father’s Day. That bothers me.

Why this unequal treatment? I hope it’s not the result of sexist assumptions that women might be more easily triggered emotionally and, therefore, their fragility demands opt-out protection. I also trust it’s not fueled by sexist assumptions about men either (a) suppressing their vulnerable emotional selves in the name of a free steak dinner or (b) figuring last year’s necktie is due for replacement.

After all, we men are just as vulnerable as women.

On that note, in all seriousness, we must visit an aspect of fatherhood that feminists have foreclosed for half a century but which, hopefully, the Dobbs decision may finally reopen.

Those who take part in the annual March for Life know that, traditionally, the demonstration ended on First Street near the U.S. Supreme Court. For those not quick to beat a retreat to their buses and/or the Orange or Red lines, there was always one last feature: Georgette Forney’s “Silent No More” testimonies on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Forney, active in “Anglicans for Life,” launched “Silent No More” in 2002. Having undergone a 1998 abortion and subsequent post-abortion trauma, she realized two things: abortionists were loudly singing the praises of abortion as a “solution” to women’s problems while post-abortion women generally kept silent. (Today, those same abortionists exhort post-abortion women to “shout your abortion!”) She found that when she spoke of what she went through, women would come up afterwards to say, “Me, too!”

In the ensuing 21 years, almost 7,000 women stepped forward to speak of how abortion damaged their lives. And more than 700 men.

That group deserves our attention this Father’s Day.

On the one hand, abortionists demand men stand up to be “allies” of women to “protect the right to choose.” On the other hand, abortionists would like to continue silencing those 700+ men. “If you can’t get pregnant, you have no voice.”

Well, without those men you couldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Only 700 men? Why so few? Is it because men are unaffected by abortion, in fact recognizing its social benefits (especially by releasing men from responsibility for their paternity?)

It certainly can’t be because of that well-known male attribute of effusively discussing their feelings and reactions.

Or is it because American institutions have told men for almost fifty years it’s none of their business? I don’t mean the abortionists who traffic in unscientific tropes about whom can and can’t speak to the abortion question. I mean the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the legal vacuum created by Roe, states grappled with how to address practical questions in light of the Court’s new strictures. One of those questions was the view of the father of the unborn child. Missouri responded by enacting legislation requiring the father’s consent to obtain an abortion. It framed the law in terms of spousal consent because, back in the 1970s, fathers were usually also husbands.

In Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, the Supreme Court struck down the Missouri law. The Court’s logic has, in my judgment, not been sufficiently derided. Justice Blackmun maintained that because Missouri could not prevent an abortion, it could not “delegate” that veto to a father.

Danforth, I would argue, was the birth of the state inserting itself into marriage and family questions. (The Danforth court also struck down a parental consent for minors restriction on abortion, a limit it would latter insist required “judicial bypass” provisions to circumvent parental objections). The problem is that a man’s marriage and family is not the product of Missouri’s “delegation.” Marriage and family are institutions that preceded the state and are independent of it.

In the wake of Dobbs, it’s time the governmental nose gets poked out from that tent. Not only does it affect the abortion decision, it insinuates itself in various “gender transition” schemes to keep parents out of the picture.

Dobbs’ restoration of legislative power over abortion to the states should lead to states reenacting pre-Danforth-type paternal consent laws. They are scientific: they recognize it took two to procreate. They undermine the atomized individualism of Roe. They bring fathers back into the picture of their families and the consequences of what happens to those families.

The fathers who testify in “Silent No More” vary. Some speak of the loss of their child against their wills, the cruelty of the post-Danforth world that gave a father no say in the extermination of his flesh and blood. Others speak of their complicity in their child’s death, either by their passive negligence or their active engagement, like driving their girlfriend/fiancée/wife to the abortion clinic, only to regret (and maybe share her regret) later.

I haven’t heard concerned corporations asking whether those fathers might be “triggered” by reminders of Father’s Day. Indeed, I suspect those woke corporations would not even dare consider those men had any “right” to feel as they did.

Now, I’m not promoting the individualized suppression of Father’s (or Mother’s) Day: our society needs to be reminded that paternity and maternity are good things, even if we sometimes abuse them.

But, 60,000,000+ abortions later, it’s not just sixty million women whom abortion affected. It’s also sixty million men whose actions were directly responsible for those pregnancies. And while many men may remain unconcerned (recently, I listened to a man on the DC Metro speaking to a woman on the telephone, in the same breath telling her how he could “f- her” and “get some mushrooms and pot at the dispensary just like at a 7-11”), many men also regret what the past half century has wrought.

On this Father’s Day, they should also be “Silent No More!” Their voices—and their votes—are essential to the shape of a post-Dobbs America.