Unintended consequences of re-defining personhood

October 27 2011, 8:00am

So, in its effort to completely eliminate abortion (and even some popular forms of birth control), Mississippi has its citizens voting on an amendment to define legal personhood as beginning at conception.  Slate editor David Plotz responds with a rather interesting list of questions that would seem to follow from such a re-definition.  Some of my favorites: 1. If you are legal person at fertilization, does that mean you could drink at 20 years and three months? Could you drive at 15 and three months? Could you vote at age 17, and collect Social Security at 64? 3. Could you get a tax deduction for your dependent embryo? 5. Could you arrest women for smoking or drinking while pregnant? Could the state file a child abuse case against a mother who didn’t wear a seatbelt or otherwise endangered her fetus? 6. Would you be an American citizen if you were conceived in Mississippi but born elsewhere? Could there be “anchor babies” whose parents come to the United States, have sex, and then return home to Mexico for their baby’s birth? 8. What about freezing fertilized embryos? Would that be allowed? And why? If you’re freezing an embryo indefinitely, isn’t that effectively imprisoning it? We don’t freeze people. 11. If a woman eats food contaminated by Listeria and miscarries, could the agribusiness be prosecuted for murder? 13. How would it affect the census? Most all of these are actually genuine issues that could be legally raised if personhood was so re-defined.  Even if you are opposed to legal abortion, this strikes me as a solution that creates far more problems than it solves.   And, while this might pass Constitutional muster with Mississippi voters, I seriously doubt it would do so with the slightly higher Constitutional standards of the US Supreme Court (in part, for the intractable issues raised here by Plotz). Filed under: Politics