GEORGIA 

WENDY TITELMAN CASE, Cobb County, Georgia. Wendy Titelman is the mother of two daughters who wrongfully were taken from her by a Georgia judge September 15, 2000, and turned over to their father after the children claimed he had sexually abused them, and their mother reported this abuse. Their mother was jailed. Months later, the criminal jury was so outraged that after acquitting Titelman, they took it upon themselves to write a letter of complaint to Judge James Bodiford and the responsible District Attorney who had brought the charges. But it was to no avail: in all the time since, Wendy Titleman has not had her children returned to her.
            "Medical and mental health experts confirmed the abuse. And what did Georgia State officials do? Against the girls' wishes, they took them from me and gave them to their father. Because I kept insisting that the Court protect them, the Cobb County, Georgia Superior Court punished me: I have not been allowed to see or talk to my girls since September 2000... a Cobb County Magistrate Court judge told me that I would never win in Georgia because I was dealing with the 'good 'ole boys who would stick together no matter what'... Judge James Bodiford, Judge Bo Wood, GAL Diane Woods, Elizabeth King, Ph.D., Lorita Whitaker, D.A. Patrick Head, the Kennesaw Police Department, and the Cobb County Department of Family and Children Services are directly responsible."
            Wendy has written a book, A Mother's Journal: Let My Children Go! which details the systematic corruption and professional incompetence of the lawyers and mental health professionals involved.

HAWAII IDAHO

ILLINOIS LEICHTENBERG-CONNOLLY CASE, McLean County, Illinois. March 31, 2009: "Jack and Duncan Connolly's mother, Amy Leichtenberg, blames Judge James Souk for allowing her ex-husband to have unsupervised visitation with her boys and for her sons' deaths. Now, she and her friends are taking action. 'She knew this was his intentions from the beginning because it was never about the boys it was to hurt her and she told the judge that, she told him and he didn't listen... It is his fault these boys are gone, it is definitely Judge Souk's fault,' Tuley said. 'He single-handedly handed down an order for Michael to have visitations with those boys unsupervised and because of it they're dead.' ..." http://centralillinoisproud.com/common/printerfriendly.php?cid=51522
            More: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-missing-boys-dead-31-mar31,0,3316104.story?page=1 "Amy Leichtenberg worried this day would come, and she begged the judicial system to prevent it. In court documents dating back to 2005, she detailed her estranged husband's threats against her family and fought unsuccessfully to keep him from having unsupervised visits with their two sons..."
            And yet more: http://www.week.com/news/local/42231047.html David Lynch, the local prosecutor is quoted as saying, apologia: "I doubt very much that the judge failed in this case" and "A court cannot stop a visitation unless it finds the visitation would be dangerous to the child's mental, moral or physical health" and "A judge is going to say look at what happened to those two kids. Should I be overly restrictive to a very good parent because they might be that one in 10-thousand or one in 100,000." Somebody please ask Mr. Lynch how the hell he could possibly describe a man with a history of being this much of an abusive asshole toward his wife as a "very good parent".
            This is the crux of the problem. These men are most assuredly NOT "very good parents" and it's time the courts stopped automatically granting men the benefit of the doubt while doubting the credibility and motives of the women who know them best and who also happen to be the people who care the most about the children.
            Oh yes... a psych most assuredly did opine in this case, in the usual way, that Connolly was not a threat to himself or the children. Useless. The same guys who claim women emotionally abuse kids by "alienating" them from abusive men -- and then have little problem removing children from the custody of their mothers -- speciously fret and hand-wring over paternal rights and strained make-believe arguments that the children will suffer some kind of harm if they don't get lots of time with fathers -- and oh, it's all the women's fault because she's not letting him see the children. (It was something else she must have done that provoked his prior abusive behavior against the mother when that excuse wouldn't have worked)...
            "According to the records, a Bloomington psychiatrist found in April 2008 that Connolly was depressed and unable to work because of 'his inability to see his children under normal conditions.' ...a month later, the psychiatrist said in an evaluation submitted to McLean County Judge James Souk that Connolly did not seem suicidal or homicidal. Souk awarded Connolly unsupervised visits." http://www.examiner.com/a-1936148~Court_papers__Ill__dad_violated_visitation_rules.html
            Difficult? It's not that difficult. Listen to the women. Stop granting depressed, obsessive, and/or control-freak abusive men visitation or "timeshare" rights. Listen to the mothers. Listen to the mothers. Listen to the mothers. Stop assuming that the default positions in custody cases are that women are unstable vindictive crackpots, and that men are being unfairly badmouthed. Father's attorney Todd Roseberry is, of course, surprised.
            Good for McHenry County Judge Suzanne C. Mangiamele who took the claims seriously enough that while the divorce case was pending before her, Connolly received only supervised visitation. But why was he getting any visitation at all? The man repeatedly had threatened to kill the children's mother, as well as others. Leichtenberg's attorney, Elizabeth Vonau, said "Everybody knew he was capable of this. There were repeated threats he would harm her, repeated threats he would get back at her and harm the children or take them from her." http://www.dailyherald.com/story/print/?id=282973
            http://cbs2chicago.com/local/michael.connolly.jack.2.972750.html: "Connolly never hurt Leichtenberg or their sons but scared her because he called often, sometimes threatening suicide and other times trying to intimidate her or persuade her to come back to him..." He "never hurt her"? What? Of course he did! He threatened her life and abused her for years through the courts. That should have been enough. These mothers are not vindictive crackpots, and it's not mothers in the news day after day after day who prove they are the lunatics by hurting other people. These mothers are the persons in the world who love the children best and who know the father best. The mothers. Not the psychs, your honors. Really. Women don't keep children from helpful, supportive men who aren't threatening to take custody, harm them physically, harm the children, or harm the mothers' abilities to properly care and provide for their children.
            "Connolly benefited from a system designed to overlook past indiscretions in favor of giving children a chance to maintain relationships with both parents... he bamboozled people. He was cagey and manipulative." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-missing-kids-killed-01-apr01,0,2218136.story
            Giving "the children" a chance? Now they are dead. Let's stop with the euphemisms and pretexts. These are bad laws. Amy Leichtenberg and her children were failed by bad laws that serve primarily to give men rights. Mothers don't seem to be able to "work the system" this way, because they aren't believed, they frequently are the upset attached parent, they often have far less funds to litigate, and it's just a father-lovin' mother-denigrating world. "Leichtenberg spent the last four years documenting what she considered to be dangerous behavior."
            Listen to the mothers. Listen to the mothers. Listen to the mothers. Leichtenberg pleaded -- pleaded -- with the judge. What the f--- did he think she was so worked up about? Did he discount her as some kind of "woman scorned"? She was the one who left Connolly. (Women usually are the ones who leave.) What kind of inherently misogynistic attitude leads people to hold these biased perceptions that they don't even realize they hold. Women beg these judges... out of lunacy? vindictiveness? Hysteria? Weakness of mind? Some kind of pathetic "enmeshment" with the kids? Because they can't handle life? To get those juicy big child custody awards that so often go unpaid anyway? Just another "high conflict custody case"?
            No. That's projecting onto women the motives and thought processes of these abusive men. That's what these MEN believe they would do were tables turned. They believe this way because they are not mothers. And judges often rule as they do because for one reason or another, they just don't like the litigating mother as a person as much as they like the man -- as if this is relevant to what's in kids' interests. It's a mother-hating, woman-disrespecting world. Doesn't help when she's got reason to be stressed, harassed, made crazy and angry. (The court whores of course also will bias toward whoever is the more compliant person who likes them best, i.e. is most willing to pay them, but in the rare case that is the mother, that only tends to correct the pervasive pro-male bias.)
            Your honor, if some litigant who had come before you behaved toward you in the manner this man behaved, threatened your life and so forth, would you be inclined to hire him -- EVER -- to care for YOUR children? Would you be saying "Well, even though he threatened to slit my throat six months ago, and violated restraining orders umpteen times, now he has a job and a rented apartment, so that must mean he's okay; he can have my kids for the weekend." Do the effin' rules of reality change when it's other people? Or is it just that we're too damn enrenched in the delusional ideas of sperm rights and women's wrongs in this world.
            See, at this website WILL HE KILL?
            and BUSTING THE FATHERHOOD MYTH
            and MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT FATHERHOOD
            and REEVALUATING THE EVALUATORS
            OUTRAGE!
            Every week in the news, every week, sometimes every day, men in custody cases and relationship separation cases rape, batter, and kill women and children. It's below the fold on some inside page if at all, if it even makes the news at all. It happens again and again and again and again. (But when the relatively rare mother kills, it's headline news for months.) And don't forget the ubiquitous tittering by the neighbors, duly quoted for "balance" all about what a nice guy, and how he was tormented and so forth. Usually it's written up as if it's an inexplicable snapping, and too often without a whiff of mention of the nearly always-present reality of a history of his being a control freak or depressive and that she left him or threatened to leave him, or to take some of "his" property, or cause him loss generally by breaking up "his family". (That last item, take note, is all about his surroundings and accutrements and possessions. It should not to be understood as "take his children" which is a specious use of faux projection by the propagandists, a pretext for the loss he's actually flipping over.) And in the majority of the rest of those so-called one-in-ten-thousand cases, the ones in which he doesn't kill, he's still battering and abusing her through the court system, for years, over his custody "rights". It's got to stop.
            People are calling for Judge Souk to resign. They should be calling for the ouster of the psychs as well, who mislead courts with snake oil and give them covers to hide behind. Let's pinpoint exactly what the catalyst for this horrible, horrible failure of the court system was. A psych speculation as to risk, an opinion that had no business being uttered in court because psychs just don't have these prediction skills.

More opinions:
When the Justice System Fails You
Another Family Wiped Out By Dad

INDIANA IOWA

KANSAS 

CLAUDINE DOMBROWSKI CASE, Shawnee County, Kansas. Claudine lost custody of her baby daughter Rikki to Hal Richardson, the man who did this, thanks to Judge James P. Buchele, who refused to permit adequate testimony at trial, shortening it to benefit his docket, and also ordered Claudine to move back to Topeka to live near Richardson, for the sake of their "co-parenting." WHAT?! Richardson is a man with multiple criminal convictions for violent behavior (Battery, Attempted Battery, Battery of a Law Enforcement Officer, Obstruction of Legal Process, Possession of Marijuana and violation of Open Container law), a man who has beaten and raped Claudine multiple times before and after her divorce from him, a man who has threatened to kill her and her child.
            Worse, Judge Buchele also ordered Claudine not to call the police any more without the permission of her case manager. When Judge James Buchele retired, Judge Richard D. Anderson affirmed Buchele's previous orders, including the illegal prohibition on Claudine's being able to call the police.
            But don't blame the judges alone. Stupidity rarely works its evil in a vaccuum. A truly egregious outrage requires that could-be good men do nothing. Guardian ad litem Scott McKenzie deserves a substantial portion of the credit for this travesty. I ask, how in hell can this happen in the United States of America? For more information, also see http://www.kansas.net/%7Efreepress/7-12-01-8.html

KENTUCKY 

KELLY STRATTON, Covington, Kentucky. Two dead; thankfully, not the child or the mother (who was in jail while this happened). But how did this mother of a little girl end up in jail for 60 days for contempt of court, causing her to lose her job and home, and rendering her unable herself to protect her daughter, who was sent into the temporary custody of her (now dead) maternal grandmother? How could Kenton Family Court Judge Lisa Bushelman possibly have given this "father" Charlie Johnson any visitation rights? More importantly, how in hell is it that the law guardian could possibly have had "equal concerns" about the mother's and father's parenting skills?
        "The lawyer had equal concerns about the mother's parenting skills. While the mother had custody, the girl was tardy at least 25 times and absent at least eight times from elementary school. She was late to school seven times in February."
        But the father "was charged with raping a child in 1994 but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of gross sexual imposition", was "also convicted of two counts of theft in 1989, aggravated burglary in 1989, disorderly conduct in 1991 and carrying a concealed weapon in 1991", and had been charged numerous times with domestic violence after violating several protection orders but that those charges had been dismissed."
        "'The youngster needed therapy to deal with her parents' fighting,' guardian Lisa M. Wenzel said in one report." Her parents' fighting? Nothing but a mutually squabbling mother, recalcitrant because a dangerous convicted child rapist wanted his custody rights? How unreasonable of her...
        "But each parent had positive attributes, Wenzel said." How could anyone make this kind of claim unless she were completely incompetent.
        And Judge "Bushelman ordered that both parents would have joint custody... [the abusive, dangerous, child-rapist father] was given visitation three times a week.... [and then] in a May hearing, Bushelman found [the mother] in contempt of court and ordered her to serve 60 days in jail." We could guess why. Visitation "interference"? Failure to supply yet more harassing discovery? Or rudeness to the judge? Step down from the bench, please, Judge Bushelman. Two people are dead, and it appears that you were a catalyst. You are too susceptible to father's rights crap and therapeutic jurisprudence drivel.
        Two people now are dead; thankfully, not the child or the mother. It does sound like the grandmother, hero Betty Hamilton, the mother's mother, may she rest in peace, deserves a statue erected in her honor.

LOUISIANA MAINE

MARYLAND 

AMY CASTILLO, Montgomery County, Maryland. Amy Castillo, a pediatrician, and primary parent to three small children (Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 2), twice was denied her motion to restrict Mark Castillo's visitation rights. Not only that, she was fined for "visitation interference". Her children are dead now, murdered by their father in a hotel room in Baltimore, March 31, 2008. "A long-running custody battle..." "Amy Castillo filed for a protective order in December of 2006 and claimed Mark had threatened to kill their children to make her suffer. She requested that the order be permanent but a judge denied the request saying there was no evidence of abuse." You can find the case records at http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp

        PROFESSOR JOAN S. MEIER'S ANALYSIS IN THE WASHINGTON POST

MASSACHUSETTS MICHIGAN MINNESOTA MISSISSIPPI MISSOURI MONTANA NEBRASKA 

NEVADA 

FAMILY COURT JUDGE NICHOLAS Del VECCHIO, accused child molestor, sex harasser, and all-around creep in Clark County, Nevada. The outrage is that it took the Judicial Discipline Commission almost two years to investigate, getting its first complaint in May 2006, and not filling charges until March 2008, all the while this man remained (and apparently as of March 23, 2008, remains) sitting on the bench, deciding family law cases  (of all things), and being a member of his county's domestic violence taskforce. The child molest complainant is herself a lawyer. With charges like this someone please explain why this man was not removed immediately from this particular position of authority pending completion of an investigation? Or at least moved into some other court where he wouldn't have been potentially able to sympathize with other men accused -- falsely or not -- of being child sex perverts!!!? Has the world lost its marbles? For more information, see http://www.lvrj.com/news/15474581.html and http://www.lasvegasnow.com/global/story.asp?s=7846463

NEW HAMPSHIRE NEW JERSEY NEW MEXICO

NEW YORK

GENIA SHOCKOME CASE, Poughkeepsie, Duchess County, New York. On Thursday, May 5, 2005, Yevgenia Shockome, a pro se battered mother seven months pregnant, who already inexplicably had lost custody of her children to her abuser three years before in Judge Damian J. Amodeo's Duchess County Courtroom, was jailed on Mother's Day weekend for objecting to Amodeo's order permitting the father to move her children (whom she has not been able to see for months) to Texas. Apparently, Amodeo got ticked off because Shockome called him a "liar" in response to... her perception of what I guess we would call "bullshit" if it emanated from someone other than a judge? Amodeo previously had given custody to the children's father despite indications of the father's dysfunctional and stalker-like behavior. That original decision was of dubious merit in the first place. This latest act by the judge seems inexcusable. The hearing transcript does not seem to support these sanctions. Was Genia rude? Maybe she was! She also was unrepresented, upset, and with child-protective pregnancy hormones cursing through her body. In any event, absolutely none of her behavior in court should have had any bearing whatsoever on what was in her children's interests.
            Incredibly, Judge Amodeo sits on New York State's Matrimonial Commission, which is supposed to help improve the way family courts function. Amodeo touts the following credentials: Member, NYS Matrimonial Commission, 2003 to present; Member, NYS Parent Education Advisory Board, 2001 to present; Member, NYS Universal Case Management Committee, 1999 to 2001; Member, NYS Committee on Automation and Technology for Judges, 1993 to 1996 Member, NYS Judicial Institute Committee, 2000 to 2002; Member, P.E.A.C.E. Advisory Committee, 1994 to 1999; Member, 9th Judicial District Committee to Promote Gender Fairness in the Courts, 1990 to present; Member & Past President [1986-1987]; Dutchess County Bar Association, 1968 to present; Member, Dutchess County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, 1989 to present; Member, Dutchess County Criminal Justice Council, 2000 to present ;Member, Dutchess County Juvenile Justice Task Force, 2004 to present; Member & Past President, Hyde Park Rotary, 1968 to 2004.
            What's Judge Amodeo doing involved with all these domestic violence, parenting education, and "gender fairness" committees? Doesn't seem to jibe with this case, and looks suspicious. We need judges who engender actual respect, not ones who jail pregnant immigrant mothers whom they've admitted to traumatizing, which causes the litigants in turn -- because of the judge's own inappropriate behavior or decisions -- to lose respect for and confuse this honorable office with a man who happens to wield its power.

NORTH CAROLINA 

NATALIE GIBBONS CASE, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Judge Nathanial P. Proctor apparently believes sexual freedom should reign in the bedroom. He's the judge who a while back struck down North Carolina's sodomy statute.
            Well, we're all for "sex positivism" and privacy for consenting adults too, even ones who get turned on by the idea of fucking animals -- but we do NOT think it's okay for a father to be watching pornography while in his bed with his two little kids (a boy, age 9, and a girl, age 10). Judge Proctor professes to not think so either. But then he wagged his finger at Dad -- who, notwithstanding proof otherwise, continued to deny that it even happened -- and refused to assure the childrens' safety and well-being. When their mother, Natalie Gibbons, understandably horrified at what has been going on when these children have been in the custody of their father, and baffled at the complete refusal of the state to protect her children in the way the state would have if some other man -- or even their mother -- had been in bed with a little girl and a little boy watching porn videos, and did not want to turn her children back over into their father's unsupervised custody, Judge Proctor responded -- by throwing the mother into jail.
            Demand that this man be removed from office. His priorities are very confused -- to put it as politely as we can and refrain from speculating as to why he's more protective of abstract notions of privacy and adults who like buggery and bestiality, than he is of two children.

NORTH DAKOTA OHIO OKLAHOMA OREGON PENNSYLVANIA RHODE ISLAND SOUTH CAROLINA SOUTH DAKOTA TENNESSEE TEXAS UTAH VERMONT VIRGINIA WASHINGTON WEST VIRGINIA WISCONSIN WYOMING

||||| Child Abuse Links and Information

||||| Misplaced Blame and Simplistic Solutions
DC's Joint Custody Presumption, by Margaret Martin Barry

||||| Protecting Battered Parents and Their Children in the Family Court System
by Clare Dalton, 37 Fam. & Conciliation Courts Rev. 273 (1999)

||||| "Friendly Parent" provisions
by Margaret Dore, Esq.

||||| Judge Gerald W. Hardcastle on joint custody and judicial decisionmaking
Family Law Quarterly, Spring 1998 (32:1)

||||| Attachment 101 for Attorneys
Implications for Infant Placement Decisions by Eleanor Willemsen and Kristen Marcel

||||| Custody and Access: An NAWL Brief
to the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access, March 1998 (Canada)

||||| The Case Against Joint Custody
Ontario Women's Justice Network

||||| Joint Custody -- the Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
by liz

||||| What the Experts Say
A Review of the Scholarly Research on Post-Divorce Parenting and Child Well-being.

||||| Myths and Reality
from the FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children

||||| Understanding the Batterer in Visitation and Custody Disputes
by R. Lundy Bancroft. 

||||| Spousal Violence in Custody and Access Disputes
Recommendations for Reform, Nicholas M.C. Bala et al.

||||| The Truth About Joint Custody
by Trish Wilson -- Don't call it "Shared Parenting."

||||| Friendly Parent Provisions
by Trish Wilson -- What's Wrong With Them

||||| The Abuse of Custody
an interview with attorney Ruth Lea Taylor

||||| Custody Order or Disordered Custody?
by Joan Braun -- Law student article with research cites published in BC Institute Against Family Violence Newsletter

||||| The Psychological Effects of Relocation for Children of Divorce
by Marion Gindes, Ph.D., AAML Journal, Vol. 15 (1998), pp. 119

||||| Testimony Against a Presumption of Joint Custody
Women's Law Project

||||| The Father's Rights movement
by liz

||||| The "Responsible Fatherhood" movement
by liz

||||| "Parental Alienation" - Getting it Wrong in Child Custody Cases
by Professor Carol S. Bruch

In response to the PBS Series Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories, fathers' rights activists have proved the the points made in the program by their loud and heckling campaign, including attacking an abused mother and child who were featured in the program, in an eerie media brawl that is metaphoric in and of itself for what happens in these court cases. Read more... And more... Also, periodic stuff that cross my desk "in the news"..."

The above cases are outrageous. However, around the country, similar incompetents and opportunists are making egregiously inappropriate decisions in "ordinary" cases too. The very same bad laws and bogus ideas that culminate in occasional outrages are at work in both. It's just that we see them more clearly when it's an extreme case. But the disease still is in there festering, even when it only causes a "minor" illness: impoverishment, or years of "conflict," or unhappy children... It would be a mistake to consider the outrageous cases above as isolated aberrations, unexpected miscarriages of justice caused only by bad men and women who individually can be identified and removed from power. Because, if you look around the world, you will see in country after country and culture after culture, that women and children are subjugated and ill-treated as a matter of course. So it's normal. And so these cases are merely the expectable periodic lethal manifestations of an epidemic infection. Just as religious fundamentalism and extremism are the expectable occasional outcome of inculcating notions of fantasy as the truth into young children's magical-thinking impressionable minds. And while women and children are at the bottom of the hierarchy of power (or have none at all and derive identities and power from the men they are attached to), there also is a hierarchy of status among men... all the way up to the sovereign. Our system of government was supposed to eliminate this but it didn't do that, mostly because it deliberately left intact systemic inequality among different kinds of people.

What has been happening in family law over the past two or three decades indeed appears to be nothing short of insanity. But at the core it's really not so insane as you might think. Some of the more identifiable symptoms of the disorder currently manifesting in family law jurisprudence include joint custody, parental alienation theory, supervised visitation centers, "therapeutic jurisprudence," ridiculous claims about the evils of "father absence" and second parent attachment "needs" of children, the anti-divorce marriage movement, draconian child support enforcement unrelated to contractual marital commitments, unwed father rights and responsibilities, and all the rest of the misogynistic crap that has cropped up fairly recently from a variety of sources. These sources include the backlash against motherhood by liberal sex-positive egalitarians and male-identified misguided feminists; the movement against perceived socialistic entitlements by pro-capitalism libertarians and conservatives; the clampdown on unhusbanded motherhood and women's reproductive and contractual autonomy by the religious right; and the suck-suck-suck capitalistic self-interested (and expectable) bottom feeding by the mental health industry, as well as other professionals and intellectuals who enjoy making fortunes on those who are captive in the system by meddling in it -- from GALs, to ADR practitioners, to researchers, to custody evaluators, to lawyers, to therapists of all kinds.

The one theme in common is "father's rights." What's that? [You bashing Daddy again, liz?] No. This isn't about being fair to daddy. It's not even about real daddies or men at all per se. Or money. Or greed. Or immorality... It's about a vast ideological and only semi-conscious tide of converging forces which at the core all have something similar, a thousands-of-years-old way of looking at and ordering the world that is called "patriarchy." It's about the reimposition of patriarchal controls over women, reproduction, children... Pandora, Lillith, Eve, Vashti... and securing the loyalty of men to the sovereign. One way or another. As women gain autonomous bargaining power and control over their reproducing bodies in one way, controls over them are sought in another way. As one ideological interest group identifies and successfully removes one kind of disability from women (usually because doing so concurrently furthers some other interest they have), another is placed in some other way to balance that. One way or another, all the seemingly diverse ideological groups, with all their different individual and group interests have this one interest in common. And many, if not most of the individual actors in these groups simply see and believe as they have been taught in their identification with one or another patriarchal group jockeying for power, whether it be religious, or ethnic, or political, or racial... And they don't really see what's at the core: keeping control of vast numbers of human resources on the rungs below by those on the rungs above in the hierarchies of power. All the way to the various sovereigns, for whom (or for whose propaganda and abstract rheroric), human beings have been harnessed as labor to yield up their one life and even march off to war and die. But, you know... male warrior hand-to-hand combat is obsolete these days, and we don't have to do stuff any more the way it was set up thousands of years ago...

See the big picture -- and if you're unwittingly supporting even a little part of it as you counterproductively rail against another part, then get this: you can't straighten out one side of a crooked rug while you're standing on the other. Life, liberty and the pursuit of property will not ever belong equally to women until women equally are permitted to use, bargain with, and make their way in the world with the same control over all of the parts of their own bodies and all of their talents and everything they can produce with those -- and that production includes their children -- with the same degree of freedom and enforceable contractual rights that men have vis a vis their own bodies and what they are able to do with them.

"Equality" under the law means that WHEN men and women are the same in all ways, the law will treat them that way, and that when they are not, the law will not default to what is characteristic of "man" as the standard. Thus, "equality under the law" means more than merely consideration of each person as an individual. It also means that that "consideration" will not be cast in terms of standards and rights that can attain only to non-gestating human beings. The law will not determine what is "reasonable" with reference solely to what would be "reasonable for a man;" the law will not determine what is "just" by reference solely to what could be "achievable by someone who cannot gestate;" and the law will not ignore reproductive differences between mothers and fathers where they do indeed exist and have effect. -- liz