Tough, personal choice place before courts
A miscarriage brought an end to a legal battle that had pro-choice and pro-life forces on edge. Tanya Meyers, a 23-year-old woman from Kingston, Pa., who already has a 2-year-old child, found herself pregnant by her ex-boyfriend John Stachokus.
Ms. Meyers was considering an abortion. Mr. Stachokus went to extraordinary lengths to prevent this from occurring. Last week he petitioned Luzerne County Common Pleas Judge Thomas F. Burke Jr., and won a temporary injunction that prohibited Ms. Meyers from obtaining an abortion.
Another Common Pleas Judge, Michael Conahan, lifted the injunction on Monday rightly reasoning – whether or not one morally agrees – that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose.
Ms. Meyers, according to news accounts, hadn’t really made a choice yet. Obviously as the mother of a toddler she would know both the rewards and demands of child rearing. She had said that she felt that when the time came she would make the right decision. The decision was made for her. Not by a court as her ex-boyfriend had planned, but by providence, God, divine intervention or simply nature (depending on one’s belief) and she miscarried on Monday.
The same day Mr. Stachokus had filed an appeal of Judge Conahan’s ruling with the Pennsylvania Superior Court, which denied it on Tuesday. He had planned, if necessary, to appeal to the state Supreme Court.
It won’t be necessary now for Mr. Stachokus to pursue his case. But some day another Mr. Stachokus will come along seeking to force a woman, against her will, to carry a fetus to term. And the courts will once again need to look at whether the rights of a father can trump those of a mother.
The point can be made that if a woman chooses to give birth the father is required by law to contribute financially to the child’s upbringing. Should he therefore have a finite say-so in whether the baby is born by demanding that a woman have an abortion? Of course not. No one in our society would embrace a lawsuit filed by any man seeking to force a woman, against her will, to undergo an abortion.
Is it really any different then for a man to force a woman to bear a child? Ideally, that is a decision that a couple makes together. But in this case the judicial system was asked to decide. What would you have ruled?