Mississippi Personhood Amendment

[spoke]

Originally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Okay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later - on a Sunday - thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

- Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

- If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

- You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

- Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

Comments

[rekishi]

*raises hand*
Question. And disclaimer, because I'm European and US law is weird for me and I really don't know better so this is not trolling. ok? ok. also disclaimer: scientifically, this law isn't sound, not that anyone will really care, but I feel I should point that out.

So hmmm

Why does it criminalize birth control? It criminalizes the pill that will abort a fertilized egg (i.e. the one that's effective up to 72 h after, not the so called 'abortion pills', that's a different cocktail), but what influence does it have on condoms and the usual hormonal birth control?

Why does it criminalize miscarriage? Scientifically, miscarriage happens in 90% of the cases because something is wrong with the embryo on a genetic (/chromosomal) level. This would be comparable to someone dying of a genetic disease of some sort.

[spoke.livejournal.com]

Sorry I'm so late replying to this - I haven't been checking my mail at all.

Science isn't even in it - a lot of the people who would vote to pass a law like this are the same people who think that science is fundamentally against religion, so. No one would care about that at all, unfortunately.

It's not even aiming at birth control or miscarriage specifically - it's aimed at saying, "Look, this is a person now! And anything that kills it is the same as murder, and you can be charged for murder on those grounds."

I'm not sure of the exact legal proceedings involved in this, but it does boil down to the fact that say a woman miscarries - some creep could in fact try to get her prosecuted for murder, try to raise doubts that it was a 'natural' miscarriage. And how do you prove that it was a natural miscarriage? Granted that the doctors she'd have been seeing would probably have records useful for that, but you've still added a whole new layer of horror to the life of someone who is already pretty damn miserable at that point.

Never mind that if she really did not want the child, she'd have to go to another state, and if she came back home and someone found out, she'd probably face murder charges anyway.

I have no idea about the condoms and regular birth control, although a law like this can also work as a paving-stone for getting other things passed, and I'm sure there are people who'd love to make them illegal as well.

[rekishi]

Even if you don't care about the science, you'd have to prove with every miscarriage that the embryo or fetus, I don't even know until which week abortion is legal for you guys, is fine. While yeah, people don't think about this, but eventually it will have to come to that and I'm not sure that is enforceable. Also, most women who miscarry in the first couple of weeks don't even know they do or that they were ever pregnant.

How do you prove it wasn't a natural miscarriage? With miscarriage, there's something wrong with the fetus or with the mother (organically). That's relatively easy to prove. Interesting the site mentions ectopic pregnancy, an ectopic pregnancy isn't viable once it ruptures the fallopian tubes (quite aside from the life of the mother at this point, I'm not even talking about the implications of that).

Dont get me wrong I'm not defending this nutjob thing, but this is also anything but waterproof.

[spoke.livejournal.com]

Oh no, a lot of them aim at somehow proving that the mother wanted to lose the child, and thus appealing to the morals (or what passes for them) of the jurors and anyone else involved.

I had not actually looked at the site, the whole thing is incredibly depressing to me.

And no, I hadn't got the impression you were defending it. I just don't know enough about the exact workings of our legal system to be able to respond very well. It is very much a nutjob thing, though, and creepy for me because I know the kind of people whose minds work like this, and they use religion for the thought processes that other people rely on reason and science for.