Today the state of Mississippi is scheduled to vote on an unprecedented initiative that would grant human rights to eggs at the moment of fertilization, an initiative that, if passed, would completely change the course of the pro-life versus pro-choice debate both in-state and around the country.
Proposition 26, which would change the state Constitution, is causing much controversy among both Mississippi voters and experts on the abortion issue. If passed, the state legislature would be faced with the task of defining the parameters of the vague initiative and, even more impossibly, attempting to implement it at a practical level.
So much room for interpretation is allowed within the wording of the proposal that experts are speculating widely varied, slightly unsettling implications. Hypothetically speaking, under the initiative, someone could sue if an egg does not implant due to birth control, coroners might have to investigate the circumstances surrounding miscarriages, and, at the core of it all, abortion would be rendered completely illegal in all situations.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor and renowned philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson once made a famous argument for the pro-life position with her analogy of the violinist. Simply put, Thompson imagined that if a person were to be kidnapped in the middle of the night and awoken to find themselves attached via tubes to a violinist who would die if they were to extricate themselves, that violinist would still have no right to or claim over the other person’s body simply because of his state of dependency. Thompson’s argument has been used countless times to contest those who claim that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape, and certainly applies to the Mississippi initiative.
What proponents of the initiative do not seem to understand is the degree to which such stipulations are oppressive to women. Proposition 26 more or less states that a woman has absolutely no right to make decisions regarding her own body and if she were to be impregnated, she would be obligated to carry the pregnancy to term.
This antiquated view not only sets back progress for women’s rights about 40 years, but also places an unfair burden upon the state of Mississippi both fiscally and socially. The cost of enforcing a law like the one proposed would be astronomical and financially crippling, especially given the state of the national economy. Additionally, young people would simply leave the state, and this would only be detrimental to the legislature, the financial books and the community as a whole. As such, the passage of the proposal is a long shot, but the mere fact that such a law is in consideration is markedly unsettling.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
