Court Opinion

ID: 9720018
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:12:53.237978+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:50:29.503311
License: Public Domain

Hennessey, J.
(dissenting in part). I concur in part with, and dissent in part from, the majority opinion. I concur with the court’s decision not to enjoin the wife from procuring the abortion. To issue such an injunction would have placed this court in an untenable position if it became necessary to enforce the order or punish for its violation.
At the same time, I dissent from the court’s determination that the husband has no legal rights. I would have, while denying injunctive relief, simultaneously declared that the husband has fundamental rights here and that in the circumstances of this case the wife has a duty to forbear the abortion. Justice required such a declaration even though injunctive relief was denied.
The recent cases of Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Doe v. Bolton, 410 U. S. 179 (1973), are central to the issues raised here. It is the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that no laws may prohibit the taking of human fetal life in the approximate first six months of its existence. Abortions may be regulated by law during the approximate fourth to sixth months but only to the extent of requiring safe conditions for the woman. Laws may proscribe abortions during the approximate final thrée months of fetal life before birth. Even during those final three months the laws cannot prohibit abortion when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the woman.
I agree with the dissenting Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that the court in those cases has indulged in an unwarranted interference with the rights of the people to regulate abortions through legislation. Thus, Mr. Justice *565White, dissenting in the case of Doe v. Bolton, 410 U. S. at 222 (1973), wrote: “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.... In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court’s exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.”
It follows that I cannot join the majority of my colleagues of the Supreme Judicial Court in a voluntary extension of the rules of the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. For it is clear that the Wade and Bolton cases are not directly controlling here. Indeed the Wade case expressly reserves, at 165, n. 67, the question now before us of the father’s rights. Further, in the Bolton case, at 189, the court said that a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion is not absolute.
Nor, in my view, are the father’s claims disposed of by any acceptable extension of the basic premises of the Wade siadBolton cases. The Supreme Court has stated in essence that the woman has a fundamental right of private decision to terminate the pregnancy. No right of the fetus is recognized by that court, at least during the first two trimesters.
But the father has rights. They are familial. They antedate the Constitution; they are about as old as civilization itself. They center in a main potentiality of his marriage: the birth and raising of children. Few human experiences have meaning comparable to parenthood. The father’s rights asserted here are surely among the fundamental rights protected by the Constitution.
In the circumstances of the case before us, the father’s *566rights were dominant. The woman’s health was not a factor. She had separated from her husband and did. not want the child because she doubted her ability to care for the child and because she said her husband had indicated to her that he would not support it. The husband wanted the pregnancy to continue to full term and a normal birth. He stated that he would be willing to assume custody, and care for the child, in the event that the wife would not. The wife’s assertions were not supportable by contrast with those of her husband. Thus, justice to her husband, at the very least, required forbearance by the wife.
Having said that, I turn to the unique problem raised by the husband’s prayer for injunctive relief. A majority of this court by the order of March 14, 1974, declined to restrain the abortion. This conclusion by the court is not necessarily inconsistent with the declaration of rights I have urged above. Although the nature of the injunction sought here may be within the general equity jurisdiction of this court (see Kenyon v. Chicopee, 320 Mass. 528 [1946]), it is also true that such relief lies in the sound discretion of the court. What the court is asked to do here is to restrain conduct of an extraordinarily personal and delicate nature. What is involved here are “personal rights of such delicate and intimate character that direct enforcement of them by any process of the court should never be attempted.” Id. at 534. The husband’s claim is unprecedented in our jurisprudence because, until the recent Supreme Court rulings, the wife’s contemplated conduct was forbidden by the criminal law.
It is axiomatic that a court should not enter an injunction unless it is able and willing to enforce it and punish for contempt of it. In any case where personal conduct is restrained, incarceration of the respondent may be the only effective way to prevent a violation of an injunction, or perhaps to punish for a violation. Thus the unseemly, almost unthinkable, prospect arises of the incarceration of the wife to prevent, or punish for, an abortion. This result would be visited upon a woman who was in no way in violation of the criminal law.
Nevertheless, it was of the utmost importance for us to *567state that the wife has a duty in these circumstances to refrain from any intentional interference, by herself or by cooperation with others, with the progress of her pregnancy to a full term and birth. This should have been done in justice to the husband, for the moral force of the pronouncement, and as some clarification of future legal aspects of the marriage. Further, the failure to declare these rights carries the clear, and I believe as yet unwarranted, implication that the Massachusetts Legislature has no constitutional authority to enact legislation requiring the husband’s consent before an abortion may be performed.