In 1983 the people of Ireland added a fetal personhood amendment* to their constitution by a 2 to 1 margin. In 2018 the Irish people repealed** that amendment also by a 2 to 1 margin. It took two decades to achieve that victory, but what the Irish learned in that process can make victory here a matter of a few years.
What they demonstrated is that putting the issue directly before the voters is a winner if a majority of voters want the government out of their reproductive lives. We don’t have to move the electorate from two thirds opposing reproductive rights to two thirds supporting reproductive rights. We are already there. We don’t have a national referendum but we do have direct voting at the state level.
They also demonstrated that a famous case of forcing suicidal teenagers to complete their pregnancies rallied support for reform. And allowing a miscarrying woman to waste away and die while the medical staff obsessively listens to the “heartbeat” of the dying fetus is even more galvanizing (the case of Savita). These antiabortionist practices increased public support for reproductive freedom.
But even before 2018 Irish victory, in 2011, when Mississippi antiabortionists had attempted to add a personhood amendment to their state constitution, opponents of the amendment demonstrated that even abstract arguments about miscarriage, without actual cases, (among other issues) could win the day.
The Mississippi "personhood" amendment on Tuesday's ballot which would have legally defined human life as beginning at the moment of fertilization failed and by a very wide margin.
Mississippi voters soundly rejected the constitutional amendment, with 58 percent voting "no" and only 41 percent voting "yes.”…..
(Opponents) warned that the amendment raised the possibility that miscarriages would need to be investigated. Besides abortion, some birth control methods would become illegal, they said.
What's more, the personhood amendment threatened to criminalize doctors who provide in vitro fertilization services because many embryos are never successfully implanted but instead eventually destroyed.
(NPR)
In Michigan proponents of reproductive freedom are on the offense, offering up their own amendment;
The group formed in January and is a coalition of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, ACLU of Michigan and Michigan Voices.
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers approved the language. Supporters need 425,059 signatures from Michigan voters by July 11 to make the Nov. 8 ballot.
“A lot of Michiganders are realizing just how in peril abortion access is in Michigan and they’re fired up and ready to fight,” said Ashlea Phenicie, strategic communications manager for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, who’s working with the petition drive. “A lot of our supporters are expressing shock.”
More than 10,000 people signed up to volunteer with the petition drive in the 72 hours following the news leak, Phenicie said. Prior to this week, the group had just 2,000 volunteers, according to Axios.
The conflict is now at the state level, where it will eventually be won on that front. Advocates for reproductive freedom should set a goal of 2024 for achieving Roe equivalent or surpassing protection for a large majority of women in the United States.
Already there is progress.
On Tuesday, a Michigan Court of Claims judge issued a preliminary injunction against the state's abortion law, finding Planned Parenthood is likely to prevail in a lawsuit saying the law violates the state constitution. Under the ruling, the state could not enforce the 1931 law should Roe be overturned. (Detroit Free Press)
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* The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.
** To permit the Oireachtas to legislate for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.
***Constitutional Amendment to: establish new individual right to reproductive freedom, including right to make and carry out all decisions about pregnancy, such as prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion, miscarriage management, and infertility; allow state to prohibit abortion after fetal viability unless needed to protect a patient’s life or physical or mental health; forbid state discrimination in enforcement of this right; prohibit prosecution of an individual, or a person helping a pregnant individual, for exercising rights established by this amendment and invalidate all state laws that conflict with this amendment.