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Doug,

Some of this is getting to the ugliness of the whole abortion issue. It's clear that many believe that a woman has the sole and ultimate constitutional, uninalienable right to decide to have an abortion, whether she is married or not. Forget notification to the spouse that a wife is going to have an abortion. What about the fact that she may have made this decision to abort a child of the father's in a unilateral manner. Does the father not any rights here, especially in the context of marriage? If we agree that he does not legally have any right to participate in a decision to abort a child of their marriage, then why have marriage? Doesn't that concept make a mockery of the very idea of a marriage that joins two equal partners? If a father who is part of a marriage has no rights, then we should just abolish the whole institution of marriage completely. What purpose does marriage serve, if this is what it comes to?

This is not just fodder for academic discussion. What happens in the very real situation that, absent the pregnancy posing a grave threat to the wife, she decides to have an abortion for whatever reason that might be good to her, but the husband doesn't believe in abortion, and more especially abortion of his child? Where does that one go?

The courts have already struck down the idea that the husband is entitled to any say in an abortion decision. Thanks to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he doesn't even have the right to know about it. So, yes, that says a lot about judicial respect for the institution of marriage. And that's the judicial view that the liberal interest groups will fight to protect against Samuel Alito.

As a father, I feel qualified to speak about this issue - yes a father has rights, but he has no right to force his wife to carry a child to term.

What is the point of legislation requiring notification of the spouse? The father cannot force the mother to deliver the baby. He has no control over either her body or the fetus. So, it seems to me, the point of the Pennsylvania legislation was to place an impediment before a legal right. Women would be discouraged from having abortions if they had to tell the father of the child (who may or may not be her spouse) of the decision.

What is the health benefit? What is the legal interest served?

The Gallup poll has some interesting numbers on Alito and abortion:

http://poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=19567

"The public is evenly divided as to whether Alito probably would or would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Thirty-eight percent believe he would, and an equal percentage think he would not, with the rest offering no opinion.

If it becomes clear Alito would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, Americans would not want the Senate to confirm him, by 53% to 37%.

If most Senate Democrats oppose the nomination and decide to filibuster against Alito, 50% of Americans believe they would be justified, while 40% say they would not.

If the Republicans then decide to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations, to ensure an "up-or-down vote" on the nomination, Americans would be evenly divided as to whether that tactic was justified -- 45% say it would be, 47% say it would not."

OK, I gotta go with Stormy on this one...while I understand there may be some instances (abusive marriage, husband missing etc.) where you might not want to let him know you are pregnant, if we are married, then isn't the fate of OUR child a discussion WE should have and not one I should make arbitrarily? I mean what kind of marriage do we have if I can't talk a sitation as serious as this out with my husband? For all I know whatever fears I have about carrying the child to term (financial, emotional etc.) could be alleviated by talking to my husband. Maybe I'm just idealistic about marriage, since I'm single

I'm idealistic about marriage, too -- even after 28 years.

DFL, there was no requirement to inform the father if he isn't married to the mother.

Poll numbers will jump around, at least until confirmation hearings give everyone a clear idea about Alito's qualifications. The filibuster talk is frightening. I hope reason will prevail and nothing so drastic will happen. How much worse does the confirmation process have to get before we see a return to sanity?

Without respect to Alito's merits or lack thereof, let me just make an observation: Either one believes women are entitled to the right of self-determination or one does not. That's what much of the talk about abortion rights and a wide variety of other legal issues boils down to. Pick a side and defend it honestly and forthrightly.

Lex,

I see your point, but that approach would put most Americans in the "does not" camp -- along with the present Supreme Court.

The complicated Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision looked at all kinds of "impediments," including waiting periods, informed consent, spousal notification and fetal viability. The court came down all over the place. The fact is, these factors make a real difference in regard to how people feel about abortion. I mean, how many people would support a woman's "right of self-determination" when she's at full term and near the point of delivering a healthy baby? A few months earlier, many people might look at it differently. Is it unreasonable for our laws should reflect the various circumstances involved?

Dr. Frank,

Well, I am a father of three myself, so I think that I can speak to this subject as well.

You dismissed the idea that a husband can't have any say in the decision to abort his child. Where is it written? I know that the Supreme Court has found the right to privacy in the constitution that gives women the right to have abortion, but how does that right abrogate the rights of the father? Why does the father have no say in this matter? The purpose of a marriage is for a man and a woman to join together to form a union of one. That means that they are equal partners and both should participate in decisions affecting the marriage. And, the birth of children is certainly a matter affecting the family and their marriage. So, show me the law that says that a father doesn;t have a say in this matter.

If we conclude that a father's only value is as a sperm donator, then marriage has no value to this society. And, if there is one thing that a wife could do to wreck a marriage, I would think that making a decision and having an abortion without the husband's knowledge would be the one.

I read a statistic today that was startling. It was reported that fully 1/2 of the children in this country go to bed every night in a house with only one parent, the mother. This speaks volumes to the trend that men and fathers are becoming irrelavent in our society, so this may be the outcome of woman having the sole rights to making decisions on abortions and children in general.

Ask any education expert about what the biggest problems with children today might be, and they will tell you that many of them suffer from the lack of parental influence. As our society passes the 1/2 mark and increases, will the problems of children get any better. It's just my opinion, but if our society continues down the road of making men irrelevant, it will encounter some very rough road.

Sorry, Dr. Frank, I can't abide by your decree that husbands don't have rights in matters of their own children, especially regarding the life of their children. If that's what the answer will be, the social problems of this country will become intolerable.

Well, Doug, the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause says what it says. And if you accept that clause, then you accept that women have the right to self-determination. And if you accept THAT, then you have to accept that that self-determination will sometimes take the form of decisions you disagree with, wish they hadn't made and believe may well be to their and society's detriment.

Kind of like decisions you and I probably have made on occasion.

As for what a majority of Americans and a majority of the Supreme Court believes, a majority of Americans think human beings were created in their present form roughly 6,000 years ago and a majority of the Supreme Court has upheld the convictions of people who were later found to be innocent. Certainly there's value in what majorities think, but sometimes the facts -- or the Constitution -- simply say something totally at odds with what they think. (Or, as Stephen Colbert put it on an episode of "The Daily Show," "Jon, the facts are biased.")

Moreover, one function -- indeed, duty -- of an independent judiciary is to protect the rights of minorities against the "tyranny of the majority." Such behavior frequently has been mislabeled as "judicial activism" by constitutional illiterates.

Even in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court didn't see it that way, which is why it allowed that the state has varying interests in the protection of the fetus according to the court's trimester system. In PP v. Casey, it threw out the arbitrary trimester ruling in favor of viability as a determiner of the state's level of interest -- or ability to interfere in the woman's right of self-determination.

Lex,

You brought up the 14th amendment, so it is fair game for discussion here. Let's review what that amendment stated as regards equal protection:

"SEC. 1. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

You are hanging your hat on this clause as providing a woman the right of self-determination in all things, including abortion. However, if you chose to use this legal reference to support a woman's right to abortion, then how do you reconcile that unborn children are being deprived of their life, without due process of law? I'm sure that you will argue that an unborn child is not a person, but you would get substantial disagreement from many people on that opinion. So, isn't the unborn child being deprived on their rights under the equal protection clause?

When I originally posted under this strand, I did not intend to get into a discussion of the legality of abortion, but rather a discussion about the rights of the father in making that decison.

I know for many that this is merely an academic matter for discussion, but to many the topic of abortion is a life and death matter. Roe v. Wade was a court opinion, and to many it is not settled law that is sacrosanct from change.

I disagree with the premise that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause mandates legal abortion on demand. It says what it says; it does not say what it does not say. This was an amendment that was passed to deal with the issue of equal rights for African Americans in the post-Civil war period. That was the contemporaneous understanding of the clause as it was written and enacted, rooted in a century of legal tradition. Women did not even have the right to vote when it was enacted.

Many women would object to the premise that legal abortion on demand is necessary for their "self-determination"; and to the subjective notion that it is necessary to take a life in order to have a life.

Dr. Frank,

You asked what the benefits would be of a woman having to notify her husband of an abortion decision. What are the benefits of a woman being discouraged from having abortions if they had to tell the father of the child, who happens to be her husband? The one answer that I can think of is that it might save the life of an unborn child. If such notification and discussion discourages a mother from killing her own innocent child, isn't that a benefit to everyone and society? Is there any reason we shouldn't stop one of the greatest slaughters of innocent human life in the history of this country?

Why do we feel that it is acceptable to kill a child (person) before it is born, but it is a punishable crime one day or one month after the child is born? I, for one, can't morally reconcile that.

Stormy, I'm one of those moral primitives who believes that the rights of the already-born might, in some circumstances, supersede the rights of the pre-born, who are not identified in the Constitution as having rights. (I support the death penalty under certain circumstances, too, so at least I'm consistent in my disregard for the sanctity of life.)

Or you can look at it this way: Legal abortion MIGHT infringe on the rights of the unborn. ILLEGAL abortion DEFINITELY infringes on the autonomy and rights of the already-born. Add to that fact all the practical objections to a legal ban on abortion (e.g., the rich will still get abortions) and I think the least-bad position for society to take is that abortion ought to be safe, legal, accessible and rare, a position I was enunciating a long time before I'd ever heard of Bill Clinton.

Lex,

We can agree to disagree, agreeably, but I can not accept that children that are not yet born are sub-standard. You conclude that the unborn are not mentioned in the Constitution, so I assume that you don't consider the unborn as "persons".

The Constitution within the Equal Protection Clause provides equal protection in the application of laws to all persons. The Constitution does not stipulate whether a person is born or unborn. So, to consider the unborns' rights inferior to the already born just doesn't make sense. The equal protection clause says that all persons should received equal treatment under the law, not that one person's rights are superior to others.

Finally, even if some of the already borns' rights should supercede those of the unborn, they should never supercede an unborn's ultimate right to life. No person's rights should ever be allowed to trump the right to life of an innocent unborn person. An unborn is a person with the gift of life. No one, including its mother has the right to take the life of her child, regardless of its birth status. I can never believe that the framers of the Constitution intended to grant the right to abortion of an unborn person. If you can find it in the constitution, I'll accept it.

Stormy, you make clear what you believe but never offer any substantive reason why anyone else ought to believe what you believe.

Of course there's no right to abortion, per se, in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. That doesn't mean no such right exists. Consider the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." (On the other hand, that's not proof that such a right DOES exist, either.)

Here's a question for you, Stormy: If abortion could be ended by means other than a legal ban, would you accept that outcome? Or do you think a legal ban is essential in and of itself?

In general, I tend to take the position that the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to limit the free exercise of will of any adult who is living here and now. That position might make me morally right, morally wrong or morally ambiguous depending on the context, but at least it's philosphically consistent and, I would argue, runs the least risk of infringing on the rights of other people living here and now.

It would seem to me that since in the majority of states that a fathers,(sperm donor as it seems in some cases) consent must be obtained before a child can be surrendered for adoption by the mother, either through a voluntary surrender or through a court hearing that the court could or would not make any ruling in regard to non-notification abortion. It may be a bit of a stretch to some but it would appear that the fathers rights are being trampled on. I believe the only overriding factor, for most states, in notification in cases of adoption or mother surrendering rights at birth of a child is in cases involving rape, incest or the courts inability to locate the father. Why should it not be the same in cases of abortion?

Because it's a private medical issue, mrp.

Because abortion and adoption are two different things, one of which does not impinge on a woman's desire to make decisions with respect to the medical health of her own body.

William Saletan addresses the Casey issues at http://www.slate.com/id/2129321/. You need not oppose Alito's position in the case to find problems with his reasoning.

Lex has said it right, and better than I ever could, as usual.

But I am disturbed by the very concept that Stormy seems to be espousing, that I, because I am the fathe rof the unborn child, have the ability to force the mother to go through 9 months of childbearing, a (probably) painful birth, and the lifetime responsibility of motherhood, just because I say she should.

It's not at all my decision. Would I want to have a say in my wife's decision? Yes. I would hope she would talk to me, and I believe she would.

But it's her decision. And if we ultimately disagreed in what to do, am I supposed to lock her in her room and force her to bear a child?

If I object, can I expect a court to do the equivalent of that?

Again, I ask - what is the point of the legislation, other than to place a mandatory legal impediment in front of a woman's choice?

So Stormy, you

So I'm curious about DFL & Lex's views on responsiblity versus authority... If you have no say in a decision, are you truly bound by the implications of said decision?

Why does the pro-choice side always have to take the secular fundamentalist side? There are many positions to the abortion debate, but the only 2 that get any airtime are the far right: no abortions, ever, even if the life of the mother is on the line or the far left: elective abortion at any time, with no restriction (your water breaks, and you still have a choice: Planned Parenthood or Women's). Sure, most of America supports the right an abortion in some form, but by the same token, the United States & Canada are the only barbarians in the world that allow elective abortions well into the 3rd trimester. Even the enlightened Dutch & French don't allow elective abortions after week 24. So people ask where is a middle ground. I've heard 'viability' put forward as one means test and in the absence of any other, it makes sense to me. But then again, I guess I'm a women-hating fundamentalist that wants to drag us all back to the stone age.

By the way, why is that a 17 year old girl cannot receive an aspirin administered by her school nurse, but laws that require parental NOTIFICATION (note not permission) so abhorent to the secular fundamentalist crowd?

I fail to see how acknowledging that women who are fully self-determining may make decisions I personally disagree with constitutes a "secular fundamentalist" position.

For that matter, what the heck is a "secular fundamentalist" position?