Personhood Amendment in Mississippi Judith Jarvis Thomson\'s

Personhood Amendment in Mississippi

Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay "A Defense of Abortion" and the proposed Mississippi Constitutional Amendment

In Mississippi, a bill that advocated an extreme position on abortion rights was submitted to voters. It was ultimately rejected, despite the fact that Mississippi is a very conservative state. The constitutional amendment would have declared a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, not only equating abortion with murder under the law, but also making certain forms of birth control illegal (Eckholm 2011). It would have made using birth control, including IUDs and morning-after pills, which operate by detaching the fertilized embryo from the mother's womb, a legal for of murder.

Previous regulations of abortion placed restrictions upon when and where women could get abortions, or created parental consent laws. This amendment simply stated when life began: at fertilization. Even embryos in fertility clinics could be destroyed, according to the law, because the stored embryos would have been considered persons (Eckholm 2011). This would have complicated matters for fertility clinics, which would have been forced to store embryos indefinitely, and virtually every fertility treatment results in the death of some embryos. Theoretically, while potential unwanted life might be brought into being because of abortion, creating wanted life in through IVF treatment would become so complicated, would-be parents could not make use of such technology, at least not with ease.

The law seemed clearly designed to instigate a challenge to Roe v. Wade's allowance of abortion early in a woman's pregnancy. However, according to a fertility specialist, the law was not simply unconstitutional but also unsupported by biology: "once you recognize that the majority of fertilized eggs don't become people, and then you recognize how absurd this amendment is" (Eckholm 2011).

The difficulty of 'drawing the line' of when human life begins is always problematic. Although technology has given us the means to preserve human life born at younger and younger states, it has also shown the tremendous natural 'waste' of fertilized life at its earliest stages through organic bodily processes. In Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay, "A Defense of Abortion," the author provides some light to understanding the heated debate over abortion. In the essay, which predates the Mississippi amendment by more than thirty years, Thomson deconstructs some of the most common arguments of pro-life activists. Their first, most commonly-articulated argument is that the fetus is a life because it is impossible to say when life begins. Thomson says it would be absurd to argue that every acorn is an oak tree with the same properties. Although it is difficult to draw a line in the sand when life begins, that does not mean we have to go to the moment of conception for fear of drawing the line too soon, and depriving women of their rights. Thomson says that one cannot argue that an acorn is a tree, and that all forms of potential life are persons.

The second argument is that the fetus' right to life outweighs the women's right to her own autonomy. This is also problematic -- who is to judge the suffering a woman bears while pregnant? Would this argument be equally valid if a woman was pregnant for three or ten years? Thomson uses an example of someone being compelled to give up their mobility, against their will, to preserve the life of another human being. We would regard this as immoral (for example, even if someone is a match as a potential organ donor, they cannot be compelled to risk their life under the knife and donate their kidney according to the law). Thomson argues that her analogy is relevant to the abortion because even if a fetus is a human person, a woman should not be compelled to preserve that life. The right to life does not include the right to someone else's body against her will.