Defining personhood is the latest Conservative effort to thwart women’s right to choose. Sponsored by Les Riley, the amendment redefines personhood as follows:
"The term 'person' or 'persons' shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."
The group linked to this amendment is New Albany based, Personhood Mississippi. The primary opponent of this group is Mississippians for Healthy Families. The amendment has been formally denounced by the Mississippi Nurses’ Association. Their statement can be found here. http://www.votenoon26.org/news/mississippi-nurses-association
Many arguments against the amendment focus on the amendment’s potential ability to inhibit or limit life saving measures and effective family planning. Other arguments focus on pregnancy terminations due to rape and incest.
1. Amendment 26 is a job killer, not a phantom job killer like raising the minimum wage, but an actual job killer. The effects of prohibiting the types of services affected by this semantic warfare will effect every women’s health facility in the state. Facilities may lose funding. The dearth of medical providers may intensify as they leave Mississippi for other states. Other health professionals may be prompted to leave because of closing facilities. In some parts of Mississippi people are forced to drive miles for basic care and travel even further for specialized care. With the adoption of this amendment people may be forced to travel outside the state just to receive care. Considering the poverty that persistently plagues Mississippi this will intensify health disparities among various Mississippians. Non-professional medical staff with limited resources may be forced into unemployment or under-employment due to decreased demand for services and subsequent facility closings. Mississippi, according to the Census has experienced a decrease in the median income. Thee population in some regions continues to decrease. Is increasing unemployment to impose one group’s morals on an entire state responsible during a recession?
2. From and epidemiological perspective it is irresponsible, reprehensible, and just plain wrong…more so than abstinence only education. By inhibiting family planning services this will have a profound on public health facilities that the health of EVERY Mississippian depends on. Many people in this state have very limited access to healthcare as it is. This amendment has the potential to drive small medical establish out of business. Many people in their distaste for family planning and reproductive health care fail to realize its connection with the control of infectious disease. Early detection, prevention, and treatment often coincide with family planning. Many people have a false sense of security when it comes to this because the believe they don’t have sufficient access to people with these infectious maladies. But two diseases in particular, tuberculosis and hepatitis, are contagious and don’t require the same level of contact as other infectious diseases associated with family planning. Considering the people who care for us, our children, the elderly, as well as the people who prepare and serve our food. If infected with tuberculosis or hepatitis and this infection is undiagnosed or treated they have the potential to spread these diseases to unknowing Mississippians.
3. It is an attack on science. Here’s a new law for you. Before you are allowed to write such an amendment you should be required to demonstrate better-than-adequate knowledge of female reproductive medicine, genetics, cloning, and stem cell research. I didn't think I needed to provide an in-depth explanation of pregnancy until I read the paper today.
In many attempts at the opposing of one group’s values upon others religion is touted as the justification to ignore facts. Faith trumps facts, even if you are arguing with a person who’s only faith is in facts.
The word personhood is also connected to Jesus. Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as:
b : the unitary personality of Christ that unites the divine and human natures
4. Jesus was a carpenter, not a physician, not a midwife, not a nurse, not a geneticist; therefore he had no opinion on Stem Cell Research. However if he did do you think he would have said, "fuck the terminally ill”?
5. Give me a chance. I am a person. This is one of the many slogans on banners decorating the Personhood Mississippi webpage. If you are a black person, you have twice the likelihood of dying before one year old (MSDH, 2010). If you are a black male person you have a more than 30 percent chance of being incarcerated and a better chance of bring incarcerated than attending college (Pettit and Western, 2040) See also lifetime likelihood of incarceration. If you are a black female person you constitute 50 percent of all new HIV cases, the lion’s share of which has been attributed to the mass incarceration of African American Males (Johnson and Raphael, 2009). If you are a Delta person you will be born into impoverished communities where any attempt to improve your well being via public policy will be voted against by the very composers and advocates of this very amendment.
List of people who endorse Personhood Mississippi can be found here: http://personhoodmississippi.com/endorsements.aspx
The reason this blog is titled Shut The Fuck Up…Educated People are Talking is because despite the fact that there is a well educated medical community that warns against the passage of such an amendment, people vehemently and vocally support it. Now the cynic in me suspects that this is merely a rouse to attract as many conservatives to the polls as possible to increase votes for Phil Bryant. However, when I read and hear the support for this, its possible that people want this. Similar to the fight over the HPV vaccine and the subsequent rebranding of it as the cervical cancer vaccine, people’s discomfort about sex, as well as their need to police the sex other people are having stands to jeopardize the health of an entire population. If only someone had the cojones to say “Shut the fuck up! Educated people are talking.”
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