I’m actually pretty excited about this Mississippi legislative bill that would declare every everyone, including a fertilized embryo, a “person” in order to essentially turn abortion into murder, because these morons obviously know nothing about the law of unintended consequences. Here are the arguments I wanna see made in Mississippi if the law passes:
• If I were an illegal aliens, I would get knocked up and stay knocked up. Any child conceived in Mississippi, under that law, would be entitled to all the protections of law, including citizenship. Their mothers can’t be deported because that would deny the rights of the unborn (but legal) child. The embryo would also be entitled to state benefits from the moment conceived. In fact, you could just claim it with a home pregnancy test.
• If an embryo is a human and frozen as part of in vitro, I would open a huge embryo storage warehouse in a remote area of the state. I would then declare all of these embryos, as “people,” entitled to be counted in the census and for purposes of congressional representation. Same with all the pregnant women. Suddenly, maybe a few hundred voting-aged folks will be entitled to several congressmen … maybe even in minority districts. (Wouldn’t it be funny if all the embryos were of white babies, but all the adults voters were minorities? The district would be technically not minority, but the practical political effect would be that it was.)
• If you can prove that a Mississippi resident was pregnant and went to another state to have an abortion, then returned to Mississippi, I don’t see why you couldn’t prosecute that woman for murder.
• Since the embryo is a person, those exceptions pro-lifers are always willing to concede — health/life of the mother, rape, incest — cannot be used. I can’t wait until the daughter of head of the Republican party has an ectopic pregnancy, or a serious condition that makes carrying a baby life-threatening. She can go to jail for saving her own life and see how Daddy feels about it. Or she can die. Her choice.
Welcome to the world of your narrow-minded bigotry, folks.
Perhaps the worst side-effect of this idiotic law is that it will tie up the Mississippi courts, already overburdened with litigation, with even more case load. I feel pretty sure lawyers are already printing business cards touting their services for “unborn class-action lawsuits” and worse. Mississippi like Alabama is reaping the whirlwind as they try to apply over-simplistic solutions to very complex issues.
They get what they deserve.
I agree with Hardy that, as they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind.
However, having come into my own in the ’60s — which saw the introduction of the pill and the publication of more than a dozen feminist best-sellers — I find this law just gross. It is one more effort to stuff women back into the boxes in which our foremothers suffocated for millennia.
Wait a minute. While I agree about Mississippi being overly populated with narrow-minded bigotry, Texas is no damn different. Something here about the kettle, the pot, and being called black. Mississippi needs eons of progressivity to reach 21st century, so does Texas.
The only problem with making political use of extraordinary idiocy in laws like “a fertilized egg is a fully realized person” is that religious bigots and other species of moron are generally inconsistent in the practical application of their own rules.