Daddy Justice

By Brenda Huerta

If you are female, there has been at least one time in your life in which you had, unfortunately, walked into a restroom in time to see a mother pull off a dirty diaper from her screeching child. And if it had occurred to your eight year-old self as it did to me, the unanticipated flashing would have been enough to convince yourself that you would indeed not ‘pee your pants’, and you would have walked right back out. The point of this is that, although we may not notice them all the time, there have always been baby changing stations in women's restrooms. The same cannot be said for the men's room.

We all know that life is tough. There will always be unexpected obstacles and hardships thrown at you. Whether it's a betrayal, a sudden divorce, or even an unprecedented death, if you are a single father left alone, you can forget about having the luxury of a baby-changing station at your disposal. It is widely known that the diaper changing, caregiving, and feeding used to be the sole responsibility of the mother. Today, we know that's not the case. With the roles fathers and mothers play in a child's upbringing having changed so much over the years, you would think that the community would change to accommodate their new needs as well. Instead, we are left with single fathers having to change their newborn children on park benches or department store fitting rooms. And common sense helps to conclude that a father cannot simply waltz into a women's restroom in order to change his child unless he wishes to be pepper sprayed and purse-beat fifty two times. It is a situation in which the male cannot win. And as someone who has a brother who is a single father, this sexist injustice is very personal. I can vividly recall the times when my brother, my niece and I would be out, and I would be forced to take her into the restroom to change her. Had I not been there, my brother would have probably been forced to change her in his car or in public, which is hardly practical . How can we expect single fathers, let alone single teenage fathers, as was my brother, to fulfill their responsibility if they aren't even granted the proper tools to do so?

In the past year, light has been shed upon this issue and has thus helped in the creation of the BABIES Act, passed by Barack Obama. The Bathrooms Accessible in Every Situation Act requires that both men's and women's restrooms contain baby changing tables in the United States. It is laws like these that I believe are needed in other places around the world in order to allow fathers the opportunity to rightfully care for their children.