When people argue for Initiative 26, they tend to use some of the same arguments (lies) (misconceptions). There's the abortion is bad/abortion is murder argument. This one is hard to fight. I personally don't believe abortion is murder. Yes, I think if someone were to choose to have an abortion at 8 months, that's crossing a line. But, unlike many pro-life activists want you to believe, these late-term abortions do not happen. Elective abortions are usually happening pre-viability, or before 22 weeks into the pregnancy. I'm so tired of pro-life arguments that ignore the facts. And they have to ignore the facts if they want to sway moderate voters; they have to tug on your heartstrings, and tell you that babies about to be born are being murdered, and hope that you know so little about abortion and/or pregnancy that you will believe them. And most people don't know much about abortion or pregnancy (especially, it seems, the people making the laws: see Rachel Maddow's clip, about Mitt Romney's lack of pregnancy knowledge, here [bonus: there are pictures of Oxford's very own Save the Pill Rally]).
Another argument, along the same lines as the first, and often used by the same people, is that criminalizing abortion will reduce the number of abortions. This is not true! As I've noted in previous posts, this personhood amendment, if passed, would make many forms of hormonal birth control illegal. And, as Jack Balkin writes in What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Most Controversial Decision, "Contraception is key to reducing abortion rates: 47 percent of the 6.3 million unplanned pregnancies that occur each year in the United States occur among the 7 percent of women who do not practice contraception." Did you get that, pro-lifers? Almost half of unplanned pregnancies come from only 7 percent of women, those women who do not have knowledge about, money for, or access to birth control. So, clearly, the best way to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies (thereby, I would assume, reducing the number of abortions) is to make birth control harder to come by, with fewer varieties. Oh wait. No that's exactly the opposite of what we need to do. If we want that 7 percent of women who don't or can't use contraception to stop contributing to half of America's unplanned pregnancies, then they need health care. They need access to regular birth control, as well as emergency contraception options. And they need their civil rights as human beings, as women, and as American citizens to protect them both when they are, and when they are not, pregnant.
No matter personal opinions on abortion; this initiative simply does not make legal sense. It's bad legislation, and it's dangerous. As I've said before, giving all the rights afforded a person to a fetus makes no sense; they simply have no need for those rights, because fetuses are simply not capable of the same actions and thoughts as a person. This argument that Initiative 26 is trying to make, the argument that personhood should begin at conception, came up in the trial for Roe, and was addressed even then, almost forty years ago. Justice Blackmun, the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion in Roe, specifically dealt with this. Balkin writes, "Blackmun responded that the fetus was not a person within the meaning of the Constitution, pointing out that in many places the Constitution referred to the rights and duties of persons that would make no sense if applied to fetuses."
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