In June we celebrate Father’s Day
So conspicuous have women become of late, so much an “issue”, or a focus of issues, that pop tends to be forgotten, After all, who is this election year is angling for the “man’s vote”?
No one has started a “masculinist movement”-the Real Man business was never more that adolescent joie de vivre. Yet behind the façade erected by all the feminist hoopla, dad has become more “with it,” more involved in family and in child-rearing, even diaper-changing.
Dad’s role is becoming submerged, it seems-an ironic twist as it was until lately mom’s that was taken for granted. Perhaps the public conscious is only able to accommodate one at a time. We hear continually of the effects of pregnancy on mom, of the after-effects of abortion on mom-but what of the effects on dad?
All of the evidence indicates these effects exist, and are often as severe and as debilitating as those experienced by the mothers. Men, the doctors relate, can nurse infants, through precious few have tried. Men can and do experience “sympathetic” labour pains-though none actually give birth. Men suffer depression, guilt, and their own form of post-abortions trauma, months, even years after the event-though none actually have abortions themselves.
There is, in other words, much more, and much more subtle, commerce between the sexes than s generally acknowledged.
The Medhurst trial brings into focus the case of pop’s role and rights in a novel and unsettling manner.
Although Alex Medhurst lost, the court acknowledged that fathers might in the future have some say in the matter of abortion The case revealed that a legal-and lethal -loophole existed in the gap between the two bureaucracies, legal (the Criminal Code) and medical (the abortion committee).
It is both incredible and bizarre that Mr. Medhurst lost; but his courage, and the decision of the court, should inspire other fathers not simply to give in. Don’t wait till you’re threatened: get cracking now.
Father’s Day is an apt time to recall dad’s role in both family and society.
Let’s hear it for pop!
