Well, hello there. I’m finally crawling out from under this rock I’ve been hiding under for a few months. Between experiencing life as a new mother (I gave birth to Edmund Charles at the end of July, he’s cute), my husband going to sea, visiting my parents in Seattle for extended periods of time while my husband is at sea, and other odds and ends, I haven’t had much time to follow the news, read blogs, or much anything else but walk the dogs and try to figure out what is possessing the evil baby swing (I need an old priest and a young priest . . . ). So here goes.
A friend of mine posted this article on Google+ today and it caught my attention. There is a proposed amendment to Mississippi’s state constitution to define personhood as beginning at the moment of conception.
Though the text of the amendment is simple, the implications if it passes couldn’t be more complex. If approved by Mississippi voters on Tuesday, it would make it impossible to get an abortion and hamper the ability to get some forms of birth control.
Because the amendment would define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights, it could have an impact on a woman’s ability to get the morning-after pill or birth control pills that destroy fertilized eggs, and it could make in vitro fertilization treatments more difficult because it could become illegal to dispose of unused fertilized eggs. This could lead to a nationwide debate about women’s rights and abortion while setting up a possible challenge to the landmark Roe v. Wade case, which makes abortion legal.
Outside of the whole debate of whether or not this should be enacted into law, the whole thing that has always baffled me is the idea of separating personhood from humanity. It has never made much sense to me. Why on earth would we arbitrarily decide that at some point a human is all of a sudden a person and at some point they are not, unless it’s to ease the guilt of killing them? Is there any time when it’s really okay to just go ahead and deliberately kill an innocent human being? Personally, I think that separating personhood from humanity is a very bad idea in the first place.
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What bugs me about this piece (and many others on this subject) is that human women do not have “fertilized eggs.” We are not chickens or ducks. When a sperm and egg unite a new human being is created. Call it a blastocyst, embryo, fetus or baby. It’s not a fertilized egg. We don’t lay eggs and sit on them for 9 months waiting for them to hatch. The use of the term “fertilized egg” is a device to strip the new and growing human being of its humanity so that it makes it easier to justify the killing. It has the added merit of making the person who uses it ignorant. Probably never paid attention in elementary school science classes.
I agree with both of you, Deborah and Joanne!
The comments on the CNN article really, really bug me! There is a lot of ignorance out there, but what really bugs me is a character like MedStudent85 who bandies about his/her supposed scientific credentials and then claims that there is a “scientific consensus” that life does not begin at conception, and then goes on to claim that “In fact the scientific and medical community pretty much agree that during the blastula and morula stages, there is NOT human life there.” In fact, as you know, precisely the opposite is true, so it is hard to imagine that this character isn’t engaging in deliberate misinformation. Unfortunately, none of the other commenters has the knowledge to properly challenge this character, so from the perspective of an uninformed reader he/she manages to appear reasonable.