Mississippi Personhood Amendment

[joenotcharles]

Originally posted by james_nicoll at Mississippi Personhood Amendment
Originally posted by soldiergrrrl at Mississippi Personhood Amendment
Originally posted by twbasketcaseat Mississippi Personhood Amendment
Originally posted by gabrielleabelleat 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

Comments

[miseri]

...this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages.

I find this exceedingly hard to believe, and I suspect that this is merely scaremongering on the part of the original poster. Remember, I've been arguing FOR the personhood of the foetus for a while (hi, I'm The Enemy) and these two issues strike me as being way, way off to left field. The Catholic Church, which has been asserting the personhood of the unborn for as long as I can remember, may see birth control as a sin along similar lines, but nowhere have I seen any suggestion of an equivalency relationship such as the original poster suggests. They are different things, both bad in some eyes, and I dare say there are some who will accept one as good but not the other.

As for the criminalisation of women who have miscarriages ... frankly, that's just laughable.

[joenotcharles]

In a sane country, it would be laughable. However, this is just the latest of several laws that went to legislatures in the several US states which actually do say this. They make it a requirement to investigate every miscarriage in order to determine that it is not actually an abortion, and holding the mother responsible for proving conclusively that it actually was a miscarriage. If this can't be conclusively proven, it is assumed to be an abortion and the mother is charged with murder.

(The Georgia law specifies that there must be, "no human involvement whatsoever," which means that a miscarriage caused by the mother falling down the stairs would also qualify as murder. I'm sure the people drafting the bill didn't intend to criminalize falling down the stairs while pregnant, but that's what the text of the law says.)

This likely would not pass in court, since it conflicts with "innocent until proven guilty", but why take the chance?