On Sunday I was at the airport, bound for Canberra for this week’s parliamentary sitting. I had meetings lined up with MPs and senators about new abortion polling commissioned by CitizenGO Australia. The research, by McCrindle, found that 58.6% of Australians supported banning abortion at 24 weeks or earlier when the specified circumstances such as serious health risks, fetal disability, sexual assault did not apply, and that 52.6% wanted Australia to reduce the number of abortions even where abortion remains legal.
For a pro-life advocate living in a nation where every State has laws on the books that practically allow abortion on demand right up until birth, those numbers are encouraging that we can turn the ship around.
I had just collected my ticket and walked away from the counter when my phone rang.
It was my wife. She was frantic. She was in an ambulance with our six-year-old daughter, who had collapsed, hit her head badly and suffered a seizure. They were on their way to hospital.
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My mind went straight to the worst. I thought of my own faults as a father; that I had not been there to protect her. And I prayed. It was very simple. Please God, protect my little girl.
I turned around, went back to the counter, checked out of the flight, and made my way to the hospital, cancelling the rest of my trip to keep my mind busy on the way there.
Before I had arrived, I had been told she was stable, and I was relieved beyond words. But nothing beats seeing it for yourself. Walking in and seeing her in the flesh was like adding an exclamation mark to my sense of relief. Several of them, actually.
She was in good form, considering what she had been through: grinning, chatty, eager to play some games. Which we did. We sat together and played noughts and crosses until she was discharged.
The doctors told us to watch her for the next 48 hours and to arrange an EEG and an appointment with a neurologist. We did both yesterday. She is visibly OK; though no one has yet established what caused the seizure. We hope it was a one-off, perhaps a fever from a viral infection. We are still waiting to know.
Sitting there in hospital with her in the wee hours of Monday morning, I wasn’t having grand philosophical thoughts. I was playing a game with my daughter. I was just Dad. And I love being Dad.
I am not Father of the Year. I have spent too much time away from my daughter because of work, though that has eased over the past year. There is an old line that the only people who will remember how much time you spent at work are your children. There is a hard truth in that, and an easier one to nod at than to live by.
The afternoon brought something home to me. The meetings in Canberra mattered. The work that I do defending unborn children matters. But a father’s first duty is not to a cause. It is to a child. And the two are not rivals. They are the same love, at different distances.
A father has a duty to provide for his family, and work is part of how he does that. But children also need his time. They need him to listen, to teach, to set boundaries, to pray with them, to laugh with them, and to be there when they are frightened or hurt. They need to know that when trouble comes, Dad will come too.
A father cannot protect his children from everything. I know that only too well. But he can give them the security of knowing they are loved and that he will stand beside them.
That bond is built in the ordinary moments: a game of noughts and crosses, a ride to school, a bedtime prayer, a conversation when you are tired, and there is something else you could be doing. Those moments may seem small to us. To a child, they are the substance of a relationship. They are how a daughter comes to know her father, and how a father comes to know the person she is becoming.
And they are why the cause in Canberra matters. The unborn child I was flying to defend is somebody’s daughter or somebody’s son: a child who, given the chance, may one day sit across from a parent over a game of noughts and crosses. When politicians argue about weeks and thresholds and exceptions, it is easy to lose sight of the child at the centre of the argument. Every one of us was once small and vulnerable, dependent on the love and protection of others. My daughter is worth far more than a cancelled flight. Infinitely more. So is the life of every child still in the womb, before that child has even been held in a father’s arms.
And while I have reflected here on being a father, I know it was my wife who was by our daughter's side when she needed us most. She held her while she seized, cried over her, and got her to hospital. Whatever I write here will fall short of what she did. Our daughter needed her mother, just as she needs her father. We each have our own place in her life.
Family is where we first learn what it means to belong to other people, to have duties beyond ourselves, to forgive, to make sacrifices, and to love. It is where faith is handed on, stories are told, and children inherit a sense of who they are and where they came from.
The conservative thinker Russell Kirk understood this. He wrote that “family love is more important than material gain”. But Kirk said more than that. He warned that modern life would pull families apart, and he insisted that the real conservative must not merely preach about family love but “devise practical means to reconcile family unity with the demands of modern life”. That is the harder and the truer task. It would be tidy to say the pull was the cause and not the money. The truth is messier: the cause is my work, the work is how I keep my family, and the two are knotted together so tightly that one is always tugging against the other. Kirk’s point is that the knot will not untie itself. You have to arrange your life, because modern life will not arrange itself around your children.
It is easy to treat family as the thing that fits around everything else. Work expands. Appointments multiply. Phones demand attention. There is always another email, another meeting, another cause that needs us. Some of it is necessary; some of it is good. But good things can still take us from the people to whom we owe our first and most personal duties.
A nation cannot stay strong if fathers and mothers are pushed to the margins of family life, or if children grow up believing that everything else takes precedence over them. No government programme can replace the love and guidance of a mother and father. No public achievement can substitute for being present in your own child’s life.
I will return to the work I had planned to do in Canberra. The cause is too important to abandon. But on Sunday, my place was beside my daughter.
For the time we sat there playing noughts and crosses, I was exactly where I needed to be.
“The real conservative seeks to modify or reverse these tendencies by reminding men and women that family love is more important than material gain.” – Russell Kirk
I’m a journalist, former politician, Christian, and campaign director for CitizenGO Australia. My mission is to challenge the media lies, government overreach, and corporate censorship that threaten our freedoms.
