The Republican-dominated Missouri House of Representatives passed a “personhood” bill Thursday and sent it to the Missouri Senate, where it seems likely to pass since there are only eight Democrats in that 34-seat body.
The bill would ask voters to approve an amendment to the state constitution to “protect pregnant women and unborn children by recognizing that an unborn child is a person with a right to life which cannot be deprived by state or private action without due process and equal protection of law.” It states that fertilized eggs “have a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry.”
Zygotes, embyros and fetuses have plans for vacation homes and tax havens? Who knew?
If the bill succeeds in getting the amendment onto the ballot and Missourians give it a thumbs up, on paper it would not only ban abortion but several forms of birth control, stem cell research and in-vitro fertilization. But it actually would collide head-on with Roe v. Wade, the 43-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled fetuses are not persons under the law.
Since 2011, lawmakers in 13 states have attempted to pass some kind of personhood statute or amendment. Voters in Mississippi, North Dakota and Colorado have rejected personhood amendments placed on the ballot in those states. Coloradans have done so three times by big margins: in 2008, 2010 and 2014. On the grounds that it was “clearly unconstitutional,” the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down a “personhood” initiative to amend the state’s constitution to define “person” as “any human being from the beginning of biological development to natural death.”
For several years running, the U.S. Congress has failed to pass its own versions of personhood laws: the Sanctity of Human Life Act and the Life at Conception Act.
During the Missouri House debate on the proposed amendment, elected representatives dredged up the usual outrageous arguments:
Rep. Mike Moon, an Ash Grove Republican who sponsored the “personhood” bill, compared the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion, to its 1857 Dred Scott ruling that concluded all blacks — slaves as well as free — were not and could never become citizens of the United States.
“The court got it wrong with Dred Scott,” Moon said Thursday. “With Roe vs. Wade, the court got it wrong.” [...]
“The silence of those who want to protect the unborn is similar to the silence of Germans who stood by and allowed Jewish people to be slaughtered by the Nazis,” Moon said.
Earlier in the week during debate, Rep. Tila Hubrecht created a bit of stir with her creepy and pathetic remark in support of keeping exceptions for rape out of the bill: “Sometimes bad things happen — horrible things, but sometimes God can give us a silver lining through the birth of a child.”
Rancid as that remark was, it’s far from an uncommon view among forced-birthers.
