What's Different About Mississippi's Personhood Amendment? →

“It encroaches on uncontroversial issues. The amendment’s definition of “personhood” is so all-encompassing that it politicizes birth control, miscarriages, IVF, and other medications and procedures that are, as of now, pretty unobjectionable. Some forms of birth control, like the IUD and the morning-after pill, work by preventing implantation, not fertilization, so by its own logic, the amendment would disallow them. It would open up any miscarriage to criminal investigation: Did she have too much to drink one night? Was she confiding in a friend about not wanting a child? Paradoxically, it would also limit the options of women desperate to have a child through in-vitro fertilization. The procedure involves attempting to implant at least one fertilized egg out of many, meaning the remaining embryos are frozen or discarded. Using fewer eggs would drastically reduce a woman’s chance of pregnancy.”

Come on now Mississippi. You don’t want to go down that road.