How Mississippi's Vote Today Could Put Pregnant Women Under State Control

[Brewman_Jax]

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejust...e_control/

From the article:

Quote:Tuesday’s ballot initiative in Mississippi regarding a constitutional amendment that would grant fertilized eggs legal personhood is polling right down to the wire, with 45% of Mississippians favoring it and 44% opposed. Gender influences opinion on this initiative somewhat, with men favoring it by six percentage points and women opposing it by four percentage points. Race and party affiliation has even more influence, with Democrats and African-Americans registering around 60% opposition to the amendment. This suggests that the racial and class-based aspects to this amendment that have passed national attention aren’t passing the attention of Mississippi voters, and hopefully fear of this law will be enough to keep personhood for fertilized eggs from becoming law.

Most of the national attention to this ballot initiative has focused on the potential effects it could have on access to abortion and birth control, as supporters of the personhood amendment erroneously claim that hormonal birth control works by killing fertilized eggs. (All forms, including emergency contraception, work by preventing ovulation.) These are very real concerns, of course, but not out of the ordinary for an anti-choice movement that spends most of its time trying to restrict access to contraception and abortion. The personhood represents an even more disturbing shift rightwards, because if it’s passed into law it will turn women of reproductive age into a criminally suspicious class whose privacy will be invaded and basic rights ignored, all with the pretense of protecting this new class of “persons”. If this law passes in Mississippi, women who have miscarriages could be facing the handcuffs, and pregnant women could very well lose basic freedoms to a state that uses the fetus in their bodies as an excuse to control them.

And the women who will be most affected will be those who are already targeted routinely by law enforcement: poorer women, young women, and women of color.


...

There are still people that don't like the fact that all people have basic rights. This is supposed to be the 21st Century and there are those that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.

[jaxx]

Passing this would be a blow to women like we haven't seen since the dark ages. It, in effect, also curtails birth control.....the freaking creeps who don't want to pay for kids to have the basics want more born into poverty and need. A mass of cells is not a person. OMG this is so ridiculous, and so like the fringe to push it. It's appalling.

[SeattleGirl]

(11-08-2011 10:47 AM)jaxx Wrote:  Passing this would be a blow to women like we haven't seen since the dark ages. It, in effect, also curtails birth control.....the freaking creeps who don't want to pay for kids to have the basics want more born into poverty and need. A mass of cells is not a person. OMG this is so ridiculous, and so like the fringe to push it. It's appalling.

It fits right into their ideology, doesn't it? Women are property at best to them, and they don't care what effect their laws would have on those women.

Unless of course, a woman they know needs birth control or an abortion. I'd bet that they'd run over anybody and everybody to get said woman the services she needed if it came to that.

[Brainwreck]

So what is new with these people? It has been a war on women from the start. That is why there always seem to be more men than women waving ugly signs outside of family and women's clinics. If anyone wants to get a glimpse into the world the GOP would like for us, I suggest they read Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale," if they haven't already. The life for women she was fictionalizing is not so far in the future if the 'fundies' have their way.