One Part Of North Dakota’s Bill Defining Life As Beginning At Conception Nobody Is Talking About
Parental rights.
North Dakota’s House of Representatives passed a bill defining life as beginning at conception and being a continuum of growth and development until death. Obviously, that means unborn babies are human beings and citizens and cannot be killed based on the whims of the mother. But something else it means is this: paternal rights over unborn children.
If a child is a human being from the time of conception, then the father of that child has parental rights no? Meaning that the father’s role in that child’s life is no longer simply bystander, at best, or bank account from which to send child support checks at worst.
That’s a good thing.
I don’t think we spend nearly enough time talking about just how much damage we’ve done to our society by minimizing the role of fathers in a child’s upbringing. In relationships that involve children the mothers get all of the choice. They get to choose abortion and the father gets no say. If they decide to keep the child, they get to choose whether or not the dad is around. If they choose not to have him around, he gets stuck footing the bill for child support and other costs.
Is it any wonder, in a situation like that, that a lot of fathers abandon their responsibilities?
We need to recognize that unborn children are, in fact, human beings. And we need to recognize that children need their fathers every bit as much as they need their mothers. I’m not much of a social conservative, but this isn’t about religious dogma or utopian societies. They’re plain, undeniable facts.
