Personhood amendment’s slippery slope

Mississippi will vote on the personhood amendment Tuesday. If passed, “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

(How would you vote on personhood? Submit your response to On Faith’s poll here.)

Here’s what it also means, for those on both sides of the abortion debate: According to the logic of the Mississippi initiative, anyone who destroys a fertilized egg will be guilty of taking the life of a ‘person.’

Let’s think about that. Terminating a pregnancy at six weeks has always been murder to their way of thinking. But with this amendment, we’re talking about something much more subtle, much more severe: If you take a morning after pill, if you use an IUD, if you end an ectopic pregnancy, if you find that the fetus is severely impaired and terminate, if you destroy an embryo that was created through in vitro fertilization, you would be guilty of murder. If you terminate the fetus to save the life of the mother you are making a choice and therefore committing murder. If you are the victim of rape or incest and you terminate, that too would be murder.

Attorney Brad Prewett, executive director of the “Yes on 26” campaign, was quoted as saying “It’s an opportunity for people to say that we’re made in the image of God.” And the founder of Personhood Mississippi said, “We’re just going to the heart of the matter, which is this: Is this a person or not? God says it is and science has confirmed it.”

There it is. The law of the land, which gives women the right to choose, is being challenged for religious reasons.

I’ve never been able to square the fact that so many of those who are in the pro-life movement are also pro-death penalty and have no problem with war. Some have even murdered people who are pro choice. Murder can be punishable by death. So if one follows that reasoning, everyone who takes a morning after pill, uses an IUD or any of more conventional ways of terminating a pregnancy could be on death row.

There are a number of people who support the amendment, like Haley Barbour and Richard Land, who get nervous about using words like murder. Barbour is concerned about the issue of ectopic pregnancy and Land would not prosecute the women involved in ending a pregnancy. He also says that is why we have crimes that are called manslaughter.

But you can’t have it both ways. Abortion is always premeditated. You can’t call it murder and then say that the women should not be punished. Land wants to punish the doctors. Why only the doctors? The idea of not punishing a woman for deliberately cooperating in the murder of her own child is ridiculous and infantilizing. Oh, the girls just don’t know what they are doing and shouldn’t be held accountable?

When you take this issue to its final conclusion you have to see how insane it is to categorize the issue and to make absolute rules. A majority of Americans believe that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances. Only 20 percent believe abortion should be illegal under all circumstances. Even the most ardent anti-abortion activist gets squeamish when you talk about the death penalty for abortion.

I was fascinated when Sarah Palin was given standing ovations by anti-abortion women for admitting that she contemplated abortion, then rejected it, when she found out she was carrying a fetus with Downs Syndrome. But she believes abortion is taking a human life. Would she have been received as favorably had she admitted that once her Downs Syndrome Baby was born, she contemplated killing him? And yet, what, in her mind, would be the difference? Taking a human life is taking a human life.

Many are outraged that their tax dollars go to programs which teach contraception. But what about those whose tax dollars go toward executions or war? Aren’t their objections equally legitimate?

Jessica Valenti, in a recent article in the Washington Post’s Outlook section, told horror stories of women who were denied control over their own bodies. One was forced to have a C-section against her will. Another, who was waiting for a heart transplant and was told that having her child would have killed her, was forced to travel to another state to end her pregnancy. As Valenti points out, at some point pregnant women who do not take folic acid, or had a glass of wine or a cigarette, could be put in jail. And a bill was proposed in Virginia that would require a woman to report a miscarriage within 24 hours or face a year in jail. In perhaps the understatement of the year, Valenti calls this kind of thinking a “slippery slope.”

The scariest thing about this slippery slope is that it is driven by religion in a country founded on the principles of separation of church and state.

Those who are anti-abortion often quote the Bible to back up their points of view. But here’s one that twists those views in knots:

In Genesis, God makes a covenant with Noah. God says, “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed: for in his own image, God made humankind.”

Is this the sort of draconian, literal reading of Scripture that supporters of Mississippi’s personhood amendment really want to see made law? That whoever sheds the blood of a fertilized egg, “by a human shall that person’s blood be shed”?

 | Nov 7, 2011 3:43 PM