With every story about abortion, we hear about the mothers, about women’s rights. However, the news media is missing a big part of the story. What about the fathers? What about the men who actually want their baby to live? Joseph Lee is one such father.
Four years ago, Lee’s girlfriend became pregnant. Both were 22 at the time and felt overwhelmed by the news. Lee’s girlfriend had abortion fixed in her mind and made an appointment at an abortion mill. Due to the laws in Britain, Lee had no legal right to the child. He believed abortion was morally wrong and tried to persuade his girlfriend to keep their baby.
Lee, who serves as the development officer for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in Scotland, was raised Pro-Life. Yet he admitted that he had never been challenged or done anything outwardly Pro-Life. Lee had studied the abortion laws in his country and realized that men really have no rights when it comes to their unborn children. Men had tried and failed in the courts to protect their children from abortion and Lee realized that no lawyer could help him.
“I knew that would be completely fruitless [to hire a lawyer]. So I knew that all I could do really was, first pray about it, and try to persuade her to keep the baby. It was very frustrating,” Lee said. “So I tried to persuade her to not to, but she went ahead and booked an appointment.”
However, by the power of prayer Lee said, his child was saved. A nurse at the abortion mill showed his girlfriend the ultrasound scan, and like many other women who see it, she chose life.
Lee said, “I remember a phone call when she said that she didn’t go through with the abortion that day, and that she saw our child on the scan, looking quite happy, swimming about. She said it just looked like a wee person. I remember thinking, ‘That’s because it is a person’.”
Lee acknowledged that very little is written about the rights of fathers when it comes to abortion.
“It shows that the pro-abortion side has been very successful in making it exclusively a women’s issue, which is completely ridiculous, because I’ve seen from my own experience that women are far more likely to have the abortion if the man’s not involved,” argued Lee.
Abortion laws isolate women because if the father is not involved, the woman has little or no support. The law allows the father to be off the hook and can put pressure on the woman, giving her the feeling that she is on her own and must have an abortion.
Lee said, “He’s vilified for not playing a part in the child’s life, for not supporting him, whereas that’s positively encouraged from the very start of the child’s life. So it isn’t a surprise that we see men abandoning children.”