"Personhood" is on the table tonight in Mississippi. Amendment 26 - being voted on even now, for a few final hours - will potentially define a "person" under the laws of the state as any fertilized human embryo from the moment of conception.
Leave aside, for the moment, the idea that any birth control method that prevented implantation (i.e., "the pill") might be rendered illegal - or the implications of that for women who take it for iron-deficiency anemia, metrorrhagia, cyclic breast pain, ovarian cysts or any of the other non-contraceptive uses for progestin. Leave aside the idea that IVF could be effectively labeled as mass murder, unless patients elect to do a full Duggar and take every last little embryo to term. Ignore the ridiculous spector of miscarriages being investigated as potential crimes (which has, in fact, previously been proposed in Georgia).
There's another potential consequence to Amendment 26, one that its backers don't seem to have considered - and I think, while there's still time for the tide of votes to turn, someone ought to point it out to them.
Read on . . .
"Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know?" - Britney Spears
So let's say an embryo is a person. A zygote is just as human - with just as many rights and just as much ethical value - as the guy sitting next to you on the bus, or your child playing in the backyard right now. A freezer full of embryos outweigh a kindergarten class - and if you could only save one in a fire . . .
Now say you happen to move to the tiny Mississippi town of St Gabriel, on the banks of Old Man River itself, a former agricultural town that's now a nest of chemical plants. It's quaint, friendly . . . and, under the new law, one of the murder capitals of the state.
Back in the 80's, local pharmacist Kay Gaudet began analyzing the rates of miscarriage in the town. Over the course of three years, the town - at the time, home to a mere 2,100 people - was home to some 75 miscarriages among 63 women. One woman who lived in the shadow of a benzene plant had four in a row. By Gaudet's numbers, the town had a miscarriage rate of something like 30%.
That's a lot of dead persons.
"If ever we had proof that our nation's pollution laws aren't working, it's reading the list of industrial chemicals in the bodies of babies who have not yet lived outside the womb." - Louise Slaughter
A University of North Carolina study in 2001 found that living within a mile of agricultural areas where pesticides were used could up the risk of miscarriage by 40% - 120%. Another study, by UC Davis, found that the manufacture of computer chips raised miscarriage risk by 40%, through exposure to ethylene-based glycol ethers. Bisphenol A has been linked to miscarriage, as has carbon monoxide, commercial herbicides, and a host of other chemicals byproducts.
It's one thing to talk about "increased asthma risk", or a spike in cancer rates, or the like. Those are the kinds of health impacts that the average person hears, but that are too long-term, too abstract, to spur action. That's why we still have to fight those wars against the deregulators, who count on the damage being too obscured by dull statistics to look like a Clear and Present Danger to Joe and Jane Citizen.
But an industry letting out a toxic cloud that made dozens of people drop dead where they stood . . . now that's real. That's something no Republican, no matter how crazy, could try to defend publicly. And that's exactly what pollution-induced miscarriages are, under the, ahem, "logic" of Amendment 26.
How many industries in Mississippi - agricultural, chemical, technical - are potential killers? If Amendment 26 passes, how high is the potential body count? And how will its supporters deal will the fallout?
"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson
It's tempting to think that Christian Conservatives and other anti-choicers would have to suddenly become anti-pollution crusaders. That they would have to burn the corporate interests that bankroll them so frequently, and so well (burning fossil fuels - particularly in a large scale, like coal plants - also spikes the odds of miscarriage. Hello, Koch brothers).
But they won't, of course, because there isn't an ounce of ideological consistency among the backers of Amendment 26. A miscarriage is murder if the mother smokes, but not if she breathes the fumes from a coal plant. It's cause for investigation if the pregnant 19-year-old loses her baby, but if the cause seems to be benzene in the groundwater . . . well, nothing to see here.
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means." - George Bernard Shaw
They're out to pass this, not because they believe in personhood, but they believe in stopping abortion, and birth control, and anything else that smacks of sexual liberation, especially for women. But if Ziggy the zygote being a full-fledged person ever starts to gore their ox, however, we'll all get to watch a masterpiece of ideological origami to sidestep it. Their ideology is the wind, and it blows in whatever direction suits them, moment to moment.
We can't make them be consistent. We can't make them be sincere. But if this horrendous amendment passes, we can point out when they're not. Loudly. Publicly.
We can make them squirm. Every. Damn. Day.
For the zygotes.
Update:
On second thought, screw the zygotes. Personhood soundly defeated in Mississippi. Once again, the American Taliban is surprised by the vast gulf between what they think the majority want and what the majority actually wants - like, oh, the right to use birth control and get in-vitro fertilization.
So I guess the polluters are off the hook. Poisoning the post-born isn't nearly as big a deal.