Today, I breathe a sigh of relief for the people of Mississippi; Amendment 26, or the ‘Fetal Personhood Amendment,’ as it’s being called, did not pass. The amendment sought to grant human rights to—I don’t even know what to call them, as ‘fetus’ seems, to me, to suggest something fetus-y, so I’ll go with—fertilized eggs. That anyone would think this is a valid idea makes me want to jam a wooden spoon into my brain and whirl it around, but that 45% of voters supported it is outrageous.
Mind you, I’ve got nothing against fertilized eggs and wish them all the best, but suggesting that they’re human, when they’re about as aware as the kleenex I just blew my nose on, is a little ridiculous. And the implications for birth control are terrible. Condom breaks? Aw shit, guess you’re having a baby. Got raped? Too bad; here’s a kid you might not want to compound whatever trauma you’re already feeling. Made a drunken mistake? Well, this’ll learn ya…
What blows my mind is that ‘pro-life’-ers claim to be compassionate and empathetic—enough to fight for a little lump of goopy-egg-stuff—but do not, in fact, act compassionately towards the grown human beings who’s lives would be thrown into turmoil by the birth of an unwanted child. Possible humans matter more than the ones who are living and breathing next to you on the bus in the morning, serve you your coffee, or smile at you in class? Seriously? Who are these people? How are there enough of them to comprise nearly half a state?
But enough with the common observances. What really gets my goat is that this debate is centred around the definition of ‘life.’ This seems to be a common fall-back: but it’s alive, waah. Yes, it is alive. I won’t contest that living matter is living matter. But are you going to stand outside and picket when, say, people mow their lawns? Didn’t think so. If there is to be a definition of personhood, it has to be based on more than just ‘life.’
I realized the other day, when I was speaking with a woman who lost a child in the third trimester, that there is a moment when a fetus becomes more than a fetus. Then I recalled that when my cousin was talking about her ultrasound a few weeks back, the word she and I both used to describe what she had hanging out in her uterus was ‘babies’ (she’s pregnant with twins). This, I think, is maybe enlightening.
It seems to me that a baby becomes a baby, a little person, when it enters into the social sphere as such: when we start to love it, or care about it, or feel something about it that makes us turn it into a person. Some people, I think, bring a ‘child’ into being even before it’s conceived, some do it months after, some at birth, and some on a random Tuesday afternoon, while they’re watching Oprah and feel it kick.
That is to say, I don’t think there is any one universal moment were we can say bam, it’s a person, give it some rights. At least not while it’s setting up shop in somebody else’s body—when it starts crawling around and stirring shit up on it’s own, fair enough. Of course, as a society who likes things uniform for everyone, we find this unpractical, but, dammit, sometimes things are indeed impractical and individual.
Of course, you could say, but I love this woman’s hypothetical baby. I’m bringing it into being. That’s fine, but as my grandpa would say, love is an action, not a statement. And the hypothetical love of some assbag who’s never going interact with that child or stay up helping with its homework isn’t worth a hell of a lot. That moment of love has to come from the person who’s acting out the love. First and foremost, some woman has to say, I love the idea of this little fucker enough to let it mooch off me for nine months, sit on my bladder all day, and then shoot it out of my vagina. (And, certainly, there’s nothing wrong with not loving the idea of a kid enough to do that—I know I don’t.) You can’t say, I love this little fucker enough to take away your right to your body and make you shoot it out of your vagina and then pay some tax dollars to educate it or whatever—you take it to school though, or find someone who will.
So, love and action from the person carrying around the baby, seem, to me, to be pretty important factors in initially establishing personhood. And just fertilizing an egg doesn’t give us that. Accordingly, I think we have to accept that there’s no one universal moment when we can say ‘Woot, person,’ because life is, after all, individual.
