A Father's Nightmare...

I honestly don't know what I would do in this case:

Brazilian judge suspends order to reunite boy, American father

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (CNN) -- A Brazilian supreme court judge on Tuesday suspended a lower court's order that would have given custody of a 9-year-old boy to the U.S. Consulate in Rio de Janeiro, where he was to be reunited with his American father.

David Goldman has been fighting for custody of his son, Sean, since the boy's mother took him to Brazil in 2004.

Judge Marco Aurelio argued against taking Sean Richard Goldman from what has been his home for almost five years to the United States "in an abrupt manner."

As opposed to the perfectly normal manner in which his mother took him from his father and fled to Brazil, right Judge? This is insanity, plain and simple. The boy was kidnapped by his mother; taken out of the country away from his father; and held in a foreign land against his father's wishes. The mother died last year, leaving the boy with the man who his mother left his father for in the first place; the man who will now be his guardian.

Now, here's another angle. That boy is an American citizen. He's being held in a foreign country against the wishes of his father, who should have had custody of him when his mother passed away. When are we sending in the Marines to rescue young Sean?

I wouldn't hold my breath...

---

In a different but somewhat tangentially related note, I had a realization when Mrs. G. was pregnant with TheBoy. At pretty much any time in that pregnancy, she could have gone to an abortion clinic and terminated that pregnancy - ended my son's life - and that wasn't a single damned thing I could do about it*. That's a scary thought.

Look, I know the whole "her body, her choice" argument. I don't buy it when it's two consenting adults deciding to have a child together - it's more than just her decision. But in today's America, there's only one person who has the power to take that unborn child's life, and that's wrong. My choice - my choice as the child's father - meant absolutely nothing.

And please, spare us the "womb-slave" crap. When the decision was made to conceive a child, that argument goes out the window. She makes her choice; it becomes something larger than herself. That's what happens. It's a biological necessity that the woman bear the child, and there's nothing the man can do about that fact. When a couple makes that monumentous - and life-changing - decision to procreate, it becomes more than "my body, my choice" - her choice is made.

Yet there are no provisions for the wishes of the father in any of this process.

I make no bones about being pro-life. I concede that there are reasons for keeping abortion legal - very few, mind you - but ever since seeing the ultrasound of my son at some 20 weeks gestation I have been unable to accept it as a "parasite" or "lump of cells" that the pro-choice advocates would like to classify the developing embryo. There's a time and a place for terminating the pregnancy, and that's before it ever starts.

The concept of abortion as birth control should be consigned to the dung heap of history.

That is all.

*At no point whatsoever in either pregnancy did Mrs. G. ever ponder abortion; it's just a thought that popped into my head when I saw that ultrasound. I loved that little person so very much, so completely and thoroughly with every fiber of my being that the thought of anything harming him became the very bane of my existence...