MASSACHUSETTS LAWYERS WEEKLY REJECTS PRO-LIFE ADVOCACY

Showing gross disregard for the rights of parents and the unborn, Massachusetts’ leading legal publication refused to publish PLLDF’s letter to the editor. The justification given was that the letter did “not involve a live legal issue, nor is it an analysis of a legal issue.” It claimed to see “no current legal controversy” that is relevant to its readership. When PLLDF requested elaboration about what would be “a live legal issue,” there was no response. Please read PLLDF’s submitted letter and judge for yourself whether we have presented a relevant legal controversy.

Letter to the Editor – Mass Lawyers Weekly – Colbe Mazzarella (Boston)

As the President of the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund and as a mother of eight children, I call upon female and male attorneys to defend unborn human life.

Some commentators have stated that Roe reduced men to onlookers, deprived of their parental interests and rights. One law professor compared the post-Roe man, powerless to protect his progeny, to a slave before the 13th Amendment.

It’s time to recognize that both parents have a right to protect their children, born and unborn.

Since Roe, technology shows that unborn life is unique, 100% human, and has a heartbeat 113 times/minute, just 4.5 weeks after conception.

Since Roe and Doe, Massachusetts courts stifled men’s voices in abortion jurisprudence, despite many US cases finding that men have a constitutional right to procreate.

In 2022 Dobbs stated that there is no bright line when a child moves from nonviability to viability.

So, what can lawyers do to protect unborn human life? We can present cases on behalf of mothers and fathers, request guardians ad litem to speak up for unborn human lives, and pressure governments to defend this most vulnerable class of human beings.

Massachusetts courts might protect unborn human life by considering the dissent in a 1974 SJC case, Doe v. Doe. The majority upheld abortion rights. The dissent said that women’s rights have to be seen in context with other human rights. “To make ‘women’s rights’ absolute is to create a set of rights for women subject to none of the normal limitations of life in human community.”

The dissent weighed conflicting rights and interests, including the “interest of parents in their children even prior to their birth.” One dissenter concluded, “The interests of the mother in this case were certainly significant but they were in large measure temporary. The husband stood ready to assume at birth the responsibility for the care and raising of his child…The wife’s association with and responsibility for the child could have ended at birth…the injury to the husband in terminating the pregnancy is unmistakably palpably permanent…the husband will never experience the satisfaction, the comfort, the affection, or the sense of fulfillment which might have been provided him by the birth and growing up of the child.”

Therefore the dissenters asserted:

(1) The court should consider individual circumstances.

(2) Fathers have fundamental familial rights that are protected by the Constitution.

(3) The father’s rights are as old as civilization itself.

(4) The wife had a duty to the husband to forbear from abortion under the circumstances of a child that was originally wanted by both.

Honest lawyers might disagree about how to start protecting unborn human beings, but there should be no disagreement that we should start – and start now.

Sincerely,
Colbe Mazzarella, Esq.
President, Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund
PLLDF.org