From a pro-life news site:
Rep. John Adams, a Republican from Sidney, wants to change that and the legislation he introduced today, House Bill 252, would require the biological father’s consent before an abortion can be done.
The bill would apply to any abortion and would require written consent before it can be done.
Adams told the Daily Reporter newspaper that abortion centers would “need to get consent from the biological father” before the abortion can proceed and he called the measure a “father’s right bill” to protect the interest of fathers who are given no say in the abortion process.
He also said the bill provides for criminal penalties for women seeking abortions who do not obtain consent properly.
“Providing a false biological father would be a first-degree misdemeanor the first time, which means not more than six months and jail, and a maximum $1,000 fine,” Adams said. “And on the second occasion, providing false information would be considered a fifth-degree felony.”
Adams told the newspaper that, in cases when the mother does not know the identity of the father, the abortion would be prohibited.
“There needs to be responsibility for actions,” Adams said. “As someone who is pro-life, this is also an attempt and a hope to keep the two people who have created that child together, and I suppose if you just go back to the simple beginning, there is merit to chastity, and to young men and women waiting until marriage.”
Adams said the bill offers exceptions in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is threatened by the pregnancy.
Even under our current Supreme Court, this law would definitely be unconstitutional, and I doubt it’ll even pass the legislature. But it’s still worth considering, as an example of both how pro-lifers think and of what “father’s rights,” taken to extremes, can mean.
Thanks to Bean for the tip.
The state legislatures float these whenever the composition of the Supreme Court changes, just in case the new justice will decide that while the government cannot prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion, a private citizen backed by government force (criminal penalties? I guess they’re no longer worried about getting moderates on board) totally can.
I wonder why he didn’t include an opt-out of child support for fathers who insist on an abortion but have that choice vetoed by the gold digging harlot. It’s really the only thing missing from the bill. Well, that and the death penalty on the 3rd false consent offense.
I really don’t think that my misanthropy is internally generated.
Honestly, the whole concept is beyond infuriating, but it’s this that takes the cake:
Adams told the newspaper that, in cases when the mother does not know the identity of the father, the abortion would be prohibited.
How can it possibly be burdensome to a man if some woman he doesn’t know is pregnant gets an abortion? If she doesn’t know, then he doesn’t know! How is he affected? (I won’t even bother asking how the effect to him compares to the effect on her, as obviously the cost to women is not something this malignant, misogynist pile of dogshit even thinks worth considering.)
And note, in the same vein, that the objection is placed FOR them—men don’t have to do ANYTHING to count as having exercised this veto power. Someone could force a woman into continuing an unwanted pregnancy through apathy, through inaction, through remaining ignorant of whether any of the women they slept with got pregnant.
With that “no knowing the father’s identity, no abortion” clause, they can force her to have a child without being liable for child support, thus solidly cutting their responsibility off at orgasm while forcing her responsibility to not only go through pregnancy but likely for eighteen years thereafter, if she doesn’t want to go through the emotional wringer of giving a child up for adoption.
And—yeah, no responsibility on their part added by this bill at all, no requirement of payment for the prenatal care and delivery in order to exercise this veto, no clause stating that denial of permission to abort constitutes permission to extract child-support payments from a credit line in their name (which must be kept open, so that the child support gets paid no matter how broke they are, and somebody other than the woman can deal with nonpayment so she doesn’t have to), or anything. He can use her body to give himself a child, or just to fuck around with her if he doesn’t want a child, or demand her body’s labor just by doing nothing.
And the monstrosity of an elected representative that suggested this, of course, has himself guaranteed a lifetime free from ever suffering under the denial of autonomy for which this bill provides.
All of these people fighting abortion claim to do it for “the children”. but using a child explicitly as a punishment for someone else seems just a teensy bit abusive to me. (for all parties involved)
Once a fetus is born it becomes a child. And now these children will have as their life goal to punish their mothers for being non-virginal.
um… yeah. The lack of logic astounds. How do you reason with people who are on a completely different plain of existence.
Kyra:
The bill is ridiculous. But I think you’re missing something about how CS works:
if Jane and harry have sex, and Jane gets pregnant, and Harry is ignorant of Jane’s pregnancy… Jane can still sue Harry for CS after the kid is born. In fact she HAS to sue after the kid is born. Which makes perfect sense (how can you sue for CS when there’s no kid yet?) but which means that Harry gets affected even if he doesn’t know that Jane’s pregnant.
harry can’t be liable for CS without current knowledge of his fatherhood, but he can be liable for CS even if he didn’t have previous knowledge of his fatherhood.
Make sense?
Adams told the newspaper that, in cases when the mother does not know the identity of the father, the abortion would be prohibited.
I can’t work out if it is worse for women who get raped and impregnated and who cannot identify the rapist and forced to have the child by default, or those who can identify them and have to hope their rapist is kind enough to give permission.
(I’m assuming the exceptions for rape will only be for those who can prove they were raped, or the obvious way out is to claim you were raped in a dark alley by an unknown assailant once it’s far too late to gather any evidence)
this kind of law (shall we call it a keep-your-legs-crossed-or-else law?) really puts the lie to the sanctity-of-life argument against abortion.
I can respect people’s point of view who say “it’s a human being, and to terminate any human life is murder” . . . but why is a fetus less of a human being if it was conceived in rape or incest? why is it any less murder if both the adults who conceived it give permission for the murder?
it makes it so transparently clear that it’s all about controlling women’s sexuality.
marmalade,
I think Adams pretty much spelled that out for us. “I suppose if you just go back to the simple beginning, there is merit to chastity, and to young men and women waiting until marriage.”
Technically he includes “young men” in that, but oddly his law doesn’t include any restrictions on men, like “You must provide emotional and financial support during the pregnancy.”
What about saying that the father’s refusal to sign the consent to abortion also counts as agreement to take full custody of the child if the mother so chooses? It would be completely logical and scare the hell out of a whole lot of people.
“The bill would apply to any abortion and would require written consent before it can be done.”
Uh…they aren’t even pretending to have thought about this, are they? No exceptions means no health exceptions. That’s right, what Ohio needs is a situation where a man can kill a sexual partner by refusing to sign a permission slip!
Felicity,
Pro-lifers have decided that the “health exception” is too broad because it includes mental health, and we all know that mental health is a made-up concept for people who just don’t know how to act right.
Giving the man a veto is too much power.
It would be interesting to see the debate if the bill instead required notification.
“No, I have no idea who the father is.”
Wow John Adams, you’re really making my state look like a cesspool of assholes.
The conservatives are going to spin this off into some story about girls who don’t tell their wonderful, loving boyfriends/husbands about their pregnancies due to the pressures of an evil man-hating feminist cabal. They’re going to pretend like this is ‘helping’ these ‘girls’ and their partners communicate better and make better decisions (which include keeping the baby every time and only keeping the baby every time, because no man would ‘kill’ his own ‘child’). A completely completely disingenuous argument. Women are not stupid. If we’re with a good dude, someone who we know will support us in whatever decision we make, guess what, we’ll tell him, because the way abortions are treated in our culture, people generally need all the support they can get. It’s the more vulnerable people: rape victims, people with abusive or untrustworthy partners, or even people who aren’t monogamous (not necessarily ‘vulnerable’ traditionally, but in this case they are) and don’t know who the father is, who are affected. And that’s just wrong. How does John Adams look at himself in the morning?
This sounds meaningless from a practical standpoint. How would this ever be enforced?
If I hypothetically became pregnant and needed to get an abortion, but had any doubt as to whether my partner would consent, obviously all I would have to do is get some other guy to sign for it instead. There would be no feasible way to prove that I was lying.
There would be no feasible way to prove that I was lying.
DNA testing of the fetus?
Unless the proposed law changes things, currently you can not do DNA testing on anyone without their explicit permission. So if that’s how they’re planning to enforce the law then there are serious privacy issues going far beyond the abortion debate. But the “pro-life” movement always did have an authoritation streak.
I dunno, Dianne, I can see advocates of this bill arguing that the fetus should be assigned a Guardian ad Litem, who could then give permission for DNA testing.
Elusis,
Bingo. I have already heard pro-lifers say that because a woman who seeks an abortion has interests adverse to the fetus’s, the fetus must have a guardian ad-litem to protect its interests, just as we given such GALs to actual born children whose parents are found to be negligent or abusive.
So under this bill….woman says abortion, man says nope, the nope goes? What is man says abortion, woman says nope, what’s the ruling then?
I didn’t think any issue could get me angrier than spousal consent laws….until now.
This is sick, twisted and evil. This rep obviously knows this law, if passed, will be abused by abusive men, and that’s just fine with him. There’s absolutely nothing to prevent a guy from saying “no abortion” just to hurt the woman. Imagine a couple in a bitter divorce.
What happens if I get pregnant, and the father goes into a coma? The bad possibilities are nearly endless.
What if I get raped – and we know how notoriously hard it is to prove rape – guy says, nope, was consensual, and I want the baby – then disappears.
What if I know the guy is going to beat me when he finds out I’m pregnant?
This is a seriously bad and twisted proposed law.
When men have the labor pains, then they can have a veto. Until then, just shut up. It is not your body. And we don’t allow slavery anymore.
Linda,
Watch out … mustn’t make any reference to involuntary servitude when speaking of abortion.
I dunno, Dianne, I can see advocates of this bill arguing that the fetus should be assigned a Guardian ad Litem, who could then give permission for DNA testing.
Of the fetus. But who is going to force testing of the mother and the potential fathers? I suppose there’s some precedent in the paternity suit laws. I’m not sure what that precedent is, though.
Dianne,
Yeah, paternity testing tends to be done with regard to paternity suits more as a defense; if a woman points at a guy and says, “He’s the father,” and especially if she labels him as such on the hospital birth certificate, then he is presumptively the father until he proves otherwise. (Indeed, in most states if someone rolls with that presumption for several years and pays child support and acknowledges himself the father — the kid is now old enough to call him Daddy — then gets suspicious, has paternity testing and discovers he’s not, he’s still on the hook until 18 because he has established himself as the father.) Luckily proving otherwise is now not very expensive.
But it’s not so clearly in a guy’s interest to submit to paternity testing for purposes of an abortion. I suppose if he’s pretty sure he’s the father and he doesn’t want to be on the hook for child support, it’s a good idea to establish that he is the father so he can sign off on her having an abortion. But if he feels convinced that she won’t be trying to raise the kid and tapping him for support, it’s no skin off his nose whether she gets an abortion or not.