Tonight Mississippi voters are facing the most galvanizing and dangerous anti-choice amendment that we’ve seen all year, one that would go to historically unprecedented lengths in order to redefine what actually constitutes a human being. What they decide will have untold ramifications for women’s health and the fight to preserve Roe vs. Wade.
This amendment to the state constitution, known as Initiative 26, would classify “personhood” as beginning at the moment of fertilization—and by doing so, would effectively outlaw most forms of hormonal birth control, abolish IVF and other infertility treatments (including stem cell research), and stand to position mothers who had suffered miscarriages or stillbirths as potential murderers, forced to testify to their innocence in a court of law. Anyone else getting insanely apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale vibes yet?
Let’s delve a little deeper here. It’s no secret that Initiative 26 will criminalize abortion (even, it should very much be noted, in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother was in danger!) Personhood USA has been quite clear from the beginning that the heart of this bill aims to eliminate birth control entirely, by classifying it as abortion. The science behind such a classification is absurd at best—and widely refuted by the ob/gyn community—though that doesn’t matter much to many in the extreme anti-choice community who have been actively trying to accomplish that goal for over a year now.
However, this measure also poses outsize risk to pregnant women who aren’t initially seeking abortion and want nothing more than to deliver a healthy child.
Jessica Valenti, author, activist, and founder of Feministing.org, writes in a Washington Post op-ed of the risks she faced when she was diagnosed with preeclampsia and HELLP, a life threatening condition, while pregnant with her daughter.
“The people who attack reproductive rights are turning a blind eye to the impossible choices families have to make together, instead callously insisting that it’s lawmakers who know what’s best for women, not women themselves.”
If she had gotten sick a few weeks earlier, Valenti writes, and was suddenly confronted with the impossible decision of whether or not to abort the pregnancy, the last body that should have had anything to do with her decision is the federal government.
A similar “personhood” bill failed twice in Colorado, but Mississippi is much more conservative, with one of the highest infant mortality (and teen pregnancy!) rates in the country.
As Frances Kissling, a Catholic feminist and president of Catholics for Choice for 25 years wrote in the Washington Post:
“A fertilized egg in Mississippi, should it be born, has one of the worst prognoses for a dignified life in the United States. What will that fertilized egg, once it is born, discover about how Mississippi treats persons?
The state ranks last among all states in health and third for the highest rate of diabetes and high blood pressure. It has the lowest per capita personal income and an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent. It is the last in academic achievement. More than 1 out of 5 people live in poverty. The state is second in the nation in terms of the imprisonment ratio (749 prisoners per 100,000 people.) If you are black, your chances of dying at birth or shortly thereafter are pretty high: fourteen out of every 1000 black infants (6.8 for whites) born die in childbirth or the first year of their lives. Your mother is more likely to die delivering you than mothers in 44 other states. If fertilized eggs could be afraid, surely the thought of being born in Mississippi would be traumatizing.”
It’s equally difficult to deny the religious elements of this debate. Mississippi resident Scott Murray’s comment on this issue is reflective of the right-wing rhetoric as a whole: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.”
Stephen Hannabass echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “We’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”
Lt. Governor Phil Bryant, the GOP nominee for Governor and poll favorite, went so far as to compare the initiative to a holy battle of good and evil, exclaiming: “The evil dark side that exists in this world is taking hold. And they’re saying, what we want you to be able to do is continue to extinguish innocent life. You see, if we could do that, Satan wins.”
Make of that what you will.
Current Governor Haley Barbour has said he’s in favor of the amendment, though he indicated concern over what it would mean for women with ectopic pregnancies. Johnny Dupree, the Democratic candidate for Governor—and the first black candidate since Reconstruction—also supports the measure. Only one of Mississippi’s legislators, Deborah Dawkins, has come out against Initiative 26, telling the Huffington Post that her fellow Democrats “are at a different place in their life, they’ve got to have a job.”
The Mississippi State Medical Association, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have all spoken out against 26. Even National Right to Life and the Roman Catholic diocese aren’t backing the measure—albeit out of fear that Personhood USA will go too far and actually undermine their quest to overturn Roe vs. Wade and eliminate public support in the process.
Even if the amendment does pass (and it will be close, with 45% of Mississippi voters supporting the measure, 44% opposing it, and 11% undecided) it will face almost immediate legal challenge, likely ending in front of the Supreme Court.
In Irin Carmon’s excellent Personhood expose for Salon, Cristin Hemmins, an outspoken anti-Initiative 26 activist, who survived a horrifying rape and carjacking in her twenties that left her unable to physically or emotionally have children for many years, details her efforts to contact Johnny Dupree’s office and voice her outrage over his support of the amendment.
She says that she’d gotten a call from Dupree only after repeatedly contacting his office.
“Dupree reiterated that he opposes abortion but thought there should be some provisions for rape and incest victims. Moreover, he said, his daughter had had an ectopic pregnancy and eventually had a child through IVF, both situations potentially impacted by Personhood.
‘I said, ‘I don’t understand, if you’re for all these things … why are you voting yes?’
Hemmins recalled. [Dupree] said, ‘I’m starting to see that there are issues … I’ve said I’m going to vote yes and it’s too late to go back on it now. It’d destroy me politically.’”
Later, she notes, “All of the nation and people around the world are waiting to see how we vote … and whether Mississippi is going to reinforce all the negative stereotypes that most people have of our state. Are we going to vote against our interests again? Are we going to be the backwards idiots they think we are? I really think we’re going to prove them wrong.”
Let’s hope.
UPDATE: The AP is reporting that voters have rejected the Personhood amendment by 58% to 42%. More on this to come.
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Michelle Koufopoulos
Michelle Koufopoulos is a writer, editor, book lover and tea enthusiast. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year studying at Oxford University, being indoctrinated into British culture while working on her novel set in Paris in the 1920s. She writes regularly ...
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