COLUMN RIGHT / PATRICK RILEY : A Dad’s First Duty Is to Protect : How can we deplore absentee fathers, then remove husbands from the abortion decision?

I’m a husband and a father. In recent weeks I’ve been hearing how important I am. After the Los Angeles riots inflicted more damage on American territory than any civil unrest since the Civil War, experts from senators and sociologists to talk-show hosts began talking about responsible fatherhood and husbandhood.

These experts blamed absentee fathers--”studs”--for the violence that almost destroyed a city. Fathers who stuck by their families, who supported their children not just with monthly checks but with daily doses of love and discipline, were the new heroes. It was they who would save their sons, and our cities, from the natural unruliness and aggression of youth. Husbandhood was in.

But now the Supreme Court has reduced husbandhood back to studhood.

In its latest abortion decision, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the court holds that a husband has no right to know that his wife is getting an abortion. She doesn’t have to tell him. His fetus, or offspring, or whatever you want to call him, or her, will be disposed of without his knowledge.

What does that make of my role as a husband and a father? Do I have responsibilities and no rights? Or is “rights” the right word? Don’t I, as a father, have an inborn duty to protect my offspring?

Sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court said no, a no that the court now reaffirms . In Planned Parenthood vs. Danforth, the court made that duty unconstitutional, ruling that a woman’s rights mean that a husband has no say in the abortion of his own fetus.

I know my language is strained here. The spontaneous way of speaking would be to say “his own child,” but you either sanitize your language or risk going widely unpublished. Curiously enough, however, the 1992 Supreme Court departs from the mandatory circumlocutions in declaring spousal notification unconstitutional, for it speaks of the husband’s “interest in the life of the child his wife is carrying.”

But if the court strikes a refreshingly natural note in the phrase “the life of the child,” the rest of the sentence is shockingly discordant when it speaks only of an “interest” in the life of the child. I’ve emphasized the husband’s duty to protect what the court calls “the life of the child his wife is carrying,” and I will go further. I say a husband has that duty toward the child even if--and the court raises this possibility--even if the child is not his.

We all have the duty to protect an innocent, helpless human being when that is in our power. This duty, and the reluctance to meet it, is at the heart of our national drama over abortion. It goes beyond husbandhood and wifehood, beyond motherhood and fatherhood, to what it is to be a human being, what it is to live in society, and how one wins the pearl of great price, self-respect. When “the child his wife is carrying” is not his, this duty touches a virtue that will remain a key to happiness and the maintenance of families and of society itself, so long as men and women remain only too human: I speak of forgiveness, a virtue many of us have to exercise in reading the 60-page opinion of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter.

Beyond the wounds these three justices have inflicted on fatherhood and motherhood, beyond the literally mortal wounds they have inflicted on childhood, they have dangerously wounded our court system. They admit the weak reasoning and unfactual foundations of Roe vs. Wade, the court’s 1973 decision that made abortion a constitutional right, but they reaffirm Roe. Claiming that it was the right decision, albeit made for wrong reasons, they proceed to supply new reasons.

The foundation stone of the court’s new reasoning is “undue burden.” To bear a child can be “unduly burdensome,” so abortion must be a right. But any mother will tell you that motherhood itself is “unduly burdensome.” Most of them never think twice about it, and if they do, it is to take pride in it. The same goes for fathers.

Another new reason advanced by the court to justify Roe and retain abortion is “the fact that for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion.”

Readers can easily, if painfully, recall the economic and social changes of the past two decades. That brings us back to fatherhood, and the diminution thereof. And a diminished fatherhood brings us back, if the experts are right, to the furious destruction of the Los Angeles riots.