Following the trend set by South Dakota, the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill to ban abortions throughout the state. As it heads to the Senate, the bill bans abortion in all cases except rape, incest and mothers endangered by pregnancy. Breaking the law leads to a $5,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
The bill is a poor and blatant attempt to challenge the Roe v. Wade decision and an even poorer attempt to legislate morality. Ludicrously, according to The Picayune Times, the law is essentially already on the books. If the state wants to challenge Roe v. Wade, it should simply attempt to enforce the old law.
In fact, the old law may be a better choice for a court battle than the new law. According to The Clarion-Ledger, at least two representatives, Rep. Joey Fillingane of Sumrall and Rep. Deryk Parker of Lucedale, expressed religious motivation for their support. “God knew us before we were ever conceived,” Parker said. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a federal court viewed the school board member’s statements about their religious views as relevant to determining whether a policy violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishing a church. Fillingane and Parker’s remarks open up the possibility that the bill may be ruled as establishing a religion. Regardless, the ban should be struck down in court.
Abortion bans are outlandish, moralizing laws. The government only has the right to interfere with one person’s private business to protect the rights of another, so the legitimacy of any abortion ban rests solely upon the idea that a fetus is a human being.
While no one has effectively established fetuses as alive in the sense a conscious, thinking, born human is, generally abortion opponents take it as a matter of faith. If they are right, abortion is murder and thus already illegal.
Treating abortion and murder as separate acts implicitly denies that the fetus is a human being and thus possesses any rights, including the right to life. The justification for the ban reduces to the moralistic “because it is wrong,” which alone is never reason for a legal ban.
In short, abortion bans are unconstitutional privacy violations because they give fetuses an “other than human” legal status in a system already uncertain on the definition of human life.
The only reasonable and constitutional method of criminalizing abortions is to extend the legal definition of a human being. Of course, this leads to the still unresolved question of when life actually begins, but this is the central question in the abortion debate.
Also, the legal ramifications of treating fetuses as legal persons are considerable. If a woman miscarries, is she guilty of negligent homicide? Do zygotes get Social Security numbers and citizenship at conception? Will mothers have to report conceptions and receive a “conception certificate?” What will be the punishment for failing to do so? Since identical siblings all arise from the same zygote, how many lives are lost if it fails to implant in the uterus wall? Can I claim an unborn child as a dependent? In our over-litigious society, who is responsible for the death of a fetus? What if the mother’s life is at jeopardy? What about rape? The list goes on and on.
As thorny as these issues are, they may be resolvable. Instead of petty, inconsistent, hypocritical moralizing-if sin was criminal, we would all be in jail-our lawmakers undertake and complete the titanic task of creating a legal system where life is unambiguously defined and fetuses are viewed as human beings, the driving force behind abortion remains: unwanted children.
It sounds harsh, but people do not have abortions for fun or profit. Their particular reasons vary, but generally because they do not want or cannot take care of a child. Both of these situations are unacceptable-we accomplish little by protecting a fetus before birth and letting him suffer or die from neglect or poverty.
Of course, these are situations children face today. The first and best step in dealing with abortion is to create robust social services and adoption systems that guarantee children without loving, competent parents do not suffer. This is no easy task and will undoubtedly be extremely costly.
We also must educate the populace on methods for preventing pregnancy, thus reducing the number of potential abortions, and reducing the stigma of being pregnant while single, teenage or any other time when public disdain might make hiding a pregnancy via abortion seem like a better option.
The House is attempting to claim that abortion is tantamount to murder, but the price of such a murder is only $5,000 and one year in jail. Even its own law is inconsistent with the claims for passing it.
Instead of following political fashion and re-passing poorly conceived legislation simply to force a court battle that they should lose, they should be working not only toward a consistent legal system with a clear and acceptable definition of human life, but a government that ensures that all children have someone to want and love them.