Personhood Amendment in Mississippi Judith Jarvis Thomson's Term Paper

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Personhood Amendment in Mississippi

Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay "A Defense of Abortion" and the proposed Mississippi Constitutional Amendment

In Mississippi, a bill that advocated an extreme position on abortion rights was submitted to voters. It was ultimately rejected, despite the fact that Mississippi is a very conservative state. The constitutional amendment would have declared a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, not only equating abortion with murder under the law, but also making certain forms of birth control illegal (Eckholm 2011). It would have made using birth control, including IUDs and morning-after pills, which operate by detaching the fertilized embryo from the mother's womb, a legal for of murder.

Previous regulations of abortion placed restrictions upon when and where women could get abortions, or created parental consent laws. This amendment simply stated when life began: at fertilization. Even embryos in fertility clinics could be destroyed, according to the law, because the stored embryos would have been considered persons (Eckholm 2011). This would have complicated matters for fertility clinics, which would have been forced to store embryos indefinitely, and virtually every fertility treatment results in the death of some embryos. Theoretically, while potential unwanted life might be brought into being because of abortion, creating wanted life in through IVF treatment would become so complicated, would-be parents could not make use of such technology, at least not with ease.

The law seemed clearly designed to instigate a challenge to Roe v. Wade's allowance of abortion early in a woman's pregnancy.

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However, according to a fertility specialist, the law was not simply unconstitutional but also unsupported by biology: "once you recognize that the majority of fertilized eggs don't become people, and then you recognize how absurd this amendment is" (Eckholm 2011).

The difficulty of 'drawing the line' of when human life begins is always problematic. Although technology has given us the means to preserve human life born at younger and younger states, it has also shown the tremendous natural 'waste' of fertilized life at its earliest stages through organic bodily processes. In Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay, "A Defense of Abortion," the author provides some light to understanding the heated debate over abortion. In the essay, which predates the Mississippi amendment by more than thirty years, Thomson deconstructs some of the most common arguments of pro-life activists. Their first, most….....

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