From Philly.com
by Michael Smerconish
MICHAEL SMERCONISH, INQUIRER COLUMNIST
POSTED: Sunday, March 23, 2014, 1:10 AM
The facts of the case read like a first-year law school exam:
“Plaintiff and defendant were never married. The parties entered into a relationship in late 2012 and defendant discovered she was pregnant in February 2013. Shortly after the parties discovered that defendant was pregnant, plaintiff proposed to defendant, and she accepted. In early summer 2013, or September 2013, defendant ended the engagement.”
Only this was no hypothetical.
Steven Plotnick went to court seeking, among other things, the right to be present at the birth of his daughter. The child’s mother, Rebecca DeLuccia, had objected to his presence. The dispute was argued the very day of the delivery, with the mother participating by telephone from the delivery room.
New Jersey Superior Court Judge Sohail Mohammed ruled in favor of the mother, and last week, his precedent-setting written opinion was released. That the Muslim judge sided with a woman in a case with a gender dispute might come as a surprise to some of his previous critics.
Where the state common law had nothing on point, Mohammed wrote a thoughtful and pragmatic 23-page opinion that drew on U.S. Supreme Court precedents Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, while finding that a pregnant woman’s right to privacy is paramount. While noting that the father’s interest in the birth was “laudable,” Mohammed wrote that “any interest a father has before the child’s birth is subordinate to the mother’s interest.”
Given that the mother had been recently hospitalized for the health of the fetus, Mohammed wrote that a father’s unwelcome presence would present a practical concern that “could cause additional stress on the mother and child.”
“There can be no question that any mother is under immense physical and psychological pain during labor,” he wrote, “and for the state to interfere with her interest in privacy during this critical time would contradict the state’s own interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.”
If Mohammed’s name sounds familiar, it is probably because his nomination sparked some of the more memorable of Gov. Christie’s plain-speaking. Christie named Mohammed in 2011 amid concern by a few that the India-born Muslim American would seek to impose sharia law.
