Kathryn Lopez offers a review of a book that looks like a splendid read. Save the Males, by Kathleen Parker, shows how present day law and culture rips men from their fatherly duty and undermines this component of their vocation to the detriment of all.
Now Kathryn's review offers insights of its own, and I haven't read the book, but she pulls out an excellent quote after a dark scenario:
Parker cites one father’s post-abortion testimony. With no foreknowledge of the abortion, one man writing on a website writes of “nauseating feelings of helplessness and dereliction of duty. . . . ” He displays a deep compassion for the child he will never father and the mother of his child. And even while feeling guilt over being party to “the thoughtless and criminally careless conception of a child” and anger for having no choice over what happened next, he expresses a profound sense of regret that he could not protect his girlfriend from the “violent procedure. . . . Such a cold, soulless, and brutal experience.”
His empathy and decency and depth are a wakeup call to a culture hostile to fatherhood. Parker praises a glorious gift and warns a culture that’s in danger of losing something so strong and good:
Given that men can’t experience pregnancy or the bonding that women experience during those nine months, their emotional involvement in a fetus — Latin for “child,” incidentally — is always a choice of spirit. I’ve long marveled that men can become as involved as they do with something of which they are not physically a part. Or aren’t they? Is it just fanciful for a man to say, “Our child is a part you, part me?” The woman again, decides how men are allowed to feel about their own babies. That men more often than not charge forth to be fathers to their offspring is a gigantic miracle of heart, mind, and spirit that exposes our minimizing of fatherhood for the travesty — and the lie — that it is.
This is where Mulieris Dignitatem comes in:
Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman's womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and "understands" with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the "beginning", the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings - not only towards her own child, but every human being - which profoundly marks the woman's personality. It is commonly thought that women are more capable than men of paying attention to another person, and that motherhood develops this predisposition even more. The man - even with all his sharing in parenthood - always remains "outside" the process of pregnancy and the baby's birth; in many ways he has to learn his own "fatherhood" from the mother. One can say that this is part of the normal human dimension of parenthood, including the stages that follow the birth of the baby, especially the initial period. The child's upbringing, taken as a whole, should include the contribution of both parents: the maternal and paternal contribution. In any event, the mother's contribution is decisive in laying the foundation for a new human personality.
I would submit that the problem isn't the fact that the woman is bridge between father and child, but that she is often a poor bridge, or worse -- an obstacle. To recognise the essential collaborative work between parents, joined by mutual affection in a life-long union, is to give the family the only stability that will serve all of its members.
Also, given the "decisiveness" of the mother's contribution, any man should choose his companions carefully -- especially those with whom the very creation of new life is possible.
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