One Short Week, Two Bad Bills [Proposed]
Over the past few years, the RJ community has been watching the Right’s shift in abortion rhetoric. The forced pregnancy folks went from talking about dead fetuses to focusing on how abortion is supposedly bad for women.
Or so we thought.
This week, two proposed state bills would bring the those fetuses back…with a vengeance.
In Colorado this week, the state Supreme Court cleared the way for a ballot initiative that would change Colorado law to recognize a fetus as a person from the moment of fertilization. That’s right. Before there’s even a pregnancy (which doesn’t occur until the fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining and starts to produce the hormones that sustain it), there would be a person. With full constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. Which makes me think that anything from using embryonic stem cells to having your period could make you at best responsible for a violation of someone else’s constitutional rights and at worst a murderer. Not sure what I mean? As bean at Lawyers, Guns & Money puts it:
If the law were to pass, it would mean no abortion. No selective reduction for women who become pregnant with several embryos through IVF. No stem cell research. And, yes, no menstruation. Because about 1/3 to 1/2 of fertilized eggs fail to implant and are flushed out of the body during menstruation. Which, as Amanda notes, would make “your average tampon a potential scene of negligent homicide.”
Echidne wonders:
And do pregnant women count as two persons if this measure is passed? Do they have to pay for two at theaters and at movies? Do they get double rations in the military? What about a pregnant woman who watches an R-rated movie? Should we punish her for exposing the microscopic American to filth?
Funny, but only because it’s so damn appalling. What’s worse, it’s not unique. Today, the National Partnership for Women and Families reported that a Montana legislator has proposed a similar bill to define person as beginning at fertilization. Rick Jore, the bill’s sponsor, had this to say:
According to Jore, the measure would not directly outlaw abortion but would establish constitutional rights for a fetus or human embryo, so they could not be deprived of “life, liberty and property” without due process of law, Jore said. “There’s been an effort across the nation to go to this strategy in the pro-life arena, to challenge the whole notion of Roe v. Wade by establishing the definition of a person,” he said.
The good news is that he proposed an identical bill last year, and it failed. The bad news is that he got 45 votes in support of it (and 53 opposed). It can’t be that 45 of 100 average Americans think fertilized eggs are constitutional people too, can it? If I’m wrong, we might have even more work to do than I thought.
November 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
It’s hard to believe that many Americans think a fertilized embryo is a constitutional person. I think the problem is that people don’t think through the consequences of their beliefs or actions in that way. Obviously lawyers are going to be trained to do that more, but one of the reasons the Right is so successful is that they freeze-frame on a single image of a fetus, at some given stage of conception (fertilization, third trimester, whatever) and push the woman out of the picture. The polling reflects that technique - people are just responding to an isolated picture of one moment of a pregnancy without reflecting on the implications of that position for their overall ideas. Also, the Montana legislature (or any legislature for that matter) is obviously not the same as a randomized poll of average Americans