have an abortion, lose custody of your children (and the war onwomen continues apace)

[niyad]

Have an Abortion, Lose Custody of Your Children


Divorce is often ugly, especially when the couple have children to parent. However, one custody fight in New York recently went beyond the pale in terms of viciousness when the man’s lawyer demanded that his ex-wife be questioned about an abortion she underwent and how it could have affected her ability to raise her children.

According to the New York Daily News, Eleanor Alter, the divorce lawyer for Manuel Mehos, obtained medical records from ex-wife Lisa Mehos stating that she had an abortion and asked the judge in the case to allow her to question the woman about the procedure.
The attorney justified the questioning, saying, “[T]his is a woman who complains that she’s under great stress only caused by Mr. Mehos. I would be the first person to acknowledge that having an abortion, especially a two- to three-month late abortion, would be stressful.”

Emily Jane Goodman, Ms. Mehos’ lawyer, found the questioning offensive. “I think the very idea of the potential of using, against a woman in a custody case, the fact that she may have had an abortion sets women’s rights and the rights of choice back in a way that I can’t imagine this court would want to be associated,” she said.
The judge disagreed and allowed Mr. Mehos’s lawyer to question Ms. Mehos about the termination.

Allowing a woman’s abortion to be used in a custody battle, regardless of whether it occurred before or after the divorce, is an absolute new low when it comes to the idea of shaming women for choosing not to carry a pregnancy to term. The idea being presented is simple: A good mother would never seek out an abortion, so if she ends a pregnancy, she must be an
unfit one. According to Guttmacher, over 60 percent of those who have abortions already have children. The idea that every one of them is somehow a bad mother, or should feel as if she were one, is laughable. In fact, many say that it is for their families, and the benefit of the children who they have given birth to and are caring for, that they seek an abortion in the first place.

. . . . .

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/have-an-abortion-lose-custody-of-your-children.html#ixzz2gNv9iia1

[awoke_in_2003]

1. How did the lawyer get the medical records?...

This should not be allowed- we are a fucked up country.

[Jim Lane]

2. I had a similar result in a personal injury case.

My client had been injured because of defective building maintenance. As is customary in such cases, we didn't limit our claim to the physical injuries but added the psychological ("loss of enjoyment of life" is the usual term).

Whenever a plaintiff claims injuries of any kind, the defendant is entitled to explore possible alternative causes. In our case, the judge allowed the defense lawyer to present evidence of the plaintiff's prior abortion, and to argue to the jury that it was wholly or partially responsible for the psychological issues that she was asserting.

The Mehos case is different. The husband's attorney said that the wife was "a woman who complains that she’s under great stress only caused by Mr. Mehos," which would open the door to evidence about other causes of stress. The weakness in that argument is that I don't think a divorce proceeding would normally include a claim for damages for stress; that would have to be a separate action.

The care2 site that's linked in the OP imputes a different rationale: "The idea being presented is simple: A good mother would never seek out an abortion, so if she ends a pregnancy, she must be an unfit one." That's a gloss by care2, completely unsupported by the underlying news story.

That story gives the impression that the relevance wasn't so much the abortion as the pregnancy:

The judge sided with Alter (the husband's attorney), noting that Lisa Mehos had previously testified she had never had any men over to her New York apartment. “I do find it to be relevant. The children were in her care at the time,” Sattler said.

Lisa Mehos, 38, then testified that she became pregnant after a one-time fling with a longtime friend at his place.

This leads me to think that the argument was: She had an abortion, therefore she'd gotten pregnant, therefore she had sex with a man, therefore this man might have been visiting her when the kids were there so that they were "exposed" to him (and, presumably, to this promiscuous conduct). That's a pretty tenuous line of reasoning, but it's unfair for care2 to raise a strawman of "anyone who gets an abortion must be an unfit mother."

Incidentally, if anyone cares, my case ended well. The jury returned a very low verdict for my client. Jury verdicts are often reduced if deemed excessive by the trial judge and/or the appellate court, but the power runs both ways (although rarely exercised). We successfully argued that the verdict was unreasonably low, because the jury had been improperly influenced by the evidence about her abortion and by other factors. On that basis we got the damage award increased -- the only time in my career that I've seen this happen.

[niyad]

3. interesting that you did not add the part about him sleeping with prostitutes (plural)

or about the abuse:

Lisa Mehos wasn’t the only one to be embarrassed in court — she testified that her ex-husband, who heads a bank in Texas, had tearfully confessed to her that he had cheated on her dozens of times with prostitutes.

The Mehoses were married for six years and divorced in October 2011.

Asked for comment afterwards, Alter — who represented actress Mia Farrow during her ugly custody battle with Woody Allen — said she thought it was "disgusting that anything having to do with children would be done in open court with a reporter there."

The Mehos have made headlines before.

Manuel Mehos, 58, whose name appears as John Mehos in the divorce filing, was arrested earlier this year for allegedly hitting his ex in front of their kids. The criminal charges were later dropped when the DA's office said it didn't think it could prove the case. He maintains she got her black eye from a Botox injection, a claim she said was "ridiculous."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mother-abortion-fare-game-custody-case-judge-article-1.1466743#ixzz2gQS8bd4p

[Jim Lane]

4. Are those parts relevant to the admissibility of the evidence about the abortion?

A lawsuit (even a divorce proceeding) isn't about deciding who's the Hero and who's the Villain -- although, in my experience, litigants often think it is.

If the rules of evidence, properly applied, allow the husband's lawyer to introduce evidence about the abortion, then she can introduce it -- even if her client slept with prostitutes (plural), or for that matter even if he bought some guns and killed a bunch of people.

[niyad]

5. since this is a custody issue, one would think it would have relevance.

[Jim Lane]

6. Relevance to custody is not the same as relevance to the admissibility of the abortion evidence.

The issue raised in the OP is whether the husband's lawyer should have been permitted to introduce evidence about the abortion. There's no suggestion that the prostitution evidence was excluded. I omitted the prostitution stuff because it didn't relate to the issue I was addressing.

Of course, admitting either piece of evidence depends on invoking a particular view of morality -- sex is permissible only with one's opposite-gender spouse -- as being relevant to custody. I have my doubts about that whole assumption. If the husband sometimes visits prostitutes, or if the wife sometimes has nonmarital sex in her house behind closed doors while the children are elsewhere in the house, are the children actually harmed? In today's courts, though, I would guess that either of these points would be deemed to be a factor weighing against that parent in the custody fight. (The inquiry is supposed to be about the best interests of the children. Therefore, such a character attack should be considered only to the extent that it reflects on the person's fitness as a parent. You would have to argue that the husband has a view of women as sex objects and will impart that view if he has any role in raising the kids, or that the wife engages in casual sex and will set an example of promiscuity if she has such a role. Whatever validity there may be to either argument, I suspect that this type of evidence is more powerful for its prejudicial effect, i.e., painting that spouse as a bad person.)