Salon.com > personhood

What’s wrong with drug testing pregnant women

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:43:00 +0000

The New York Daily News' new analysis of the drug testing of postpartum women in New York City maternity wards -- and the neglect proceedings that can follow, often targeting low-income communities -- is a reminder that this intersection of the drug war and creeping personhood isn't limited to red states.

Such testing tends to happen at the discretion of the hospital. "Private hospitals in rich neighborhoods rarely test new mothers for drugs, whereas hospitals serving primarily low-income moms make those tests routine and sometimes mandatory," concludes The News' Oren Yaniv. This is true more broadly. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, "More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test."

How the right plans to overturn Roe v. Wade

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:21:00 +0000

In January, two major events will take place within a day of each other: Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women the right to an abortion, will turn 40, and a president will be sworn in who will likely determine the 1973 ruling's fate. And if that president is Mitt Romney, anyone who cares about access to a safe and legal abortion should be very worried.

Here's what's important to know about the right's plan for Roe: It will be slow, and it will be indirect -- to avoid a backlash -- but the inexorable goal is to overturn it and ban abortion wherever possible. With an eye toward the court's oldest member, women's rights pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, antiabortion activists would be counting on a President Romney to appoint one or more justices who would upset the fragile 5-4 balance that currently maintains the federal right to an abortion. In the meantime, they've been working hard to lay the groundwork to get a case before the Court that would allow justices to revisit, and possibly overturn, Roe.

Personhood Colorado sues to make November ballot

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:12:00 +0000

The Colorado Personhood Coalition is suing to get a measure on the November ballot that, if adopted, would change the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception.

The group announced that it would file the lawsuit in District Court challenging Secretary of State Scott Gessler's ruling that it had failed to come up with enough signatures to land on the ballot, by 3,859.

The Denver Post reports:

"By law, the coalition had 30 days from the Secretary of State Scott Gessler's Aug. 29 announcement to prove to the court it had gathered enough valid voter signatures. However, state officials said, even if they made their case — the ballot certification deadline was Sept. 10 — the proposed 'personhood' amendment to the state constitution, Initiative 46, would have to wait until the 2014 general election."

The coalition said that Gessler "misapplied the laws" when he deemed several thousand of the signatures invalid.

Personhood USA’s second wind

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:40:00 +0000

President Obama is in Colorado today, making his pitch to that swing state's voters in general and, in particular, to women concerned about the gleeful stripping of their rights. (Obama's introduction by Sandra Fluke, whom he called "one tough and poised young lady,” is a helpful reminder of the latter.) His timing couldn't be better: Two days ago, Personhood Colorado delivered its signatures to get on the November ballot for the third time, in a quixotic but potentially electorally significant bid to get a fertilized egg classified as a person in the state constitution.

Colorado, a state containing multitudes -- both Boulder and Focus on the Family -- is also the headquarters of the Personhood movement. Its doggedness is matched only by its uninterrupted failure. This year alone, the movement has tried and failed to get on the ballot in eight other states. Last year, Personhood got on Mississippi's ballot and was trounced. And there's strong indication that the movement is actually hurting its own cause, most recently when Colorado elected Democrat Michael Bennet in the 2010 Senate race after his opponent, Ken Buck, briefly endorsed Personhood.

Who’s winning the abortion war?

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

This was the year politicians and women’s groups started using “war on women” to refer to the Republican obsession with regulating uteruses. So if it’s a war, who’s winning?

The answer, frustratingly, is no one. This year saw the cementing of a consensus that neither side particularly likes: Abortion is still legal, but Republicans are doing an ever-better and more innovative job of making it as odious, expensive and shaming as possible to obtain. Although every side needs a sense of urgency to rally the troops, the good-ish news is that the federal court system helped hold back the tide on the worst laws. And for better or worse, anti-choicers got more honest than they’ve ever been about their hostility to birth control, which is used and supported by the vast majority of Americans.

Broadly speaking, the first half of the year saw Republicans in statehouses passing ever more outrageous laws -- 80 in all this year, more than double the previous record -- followed by a series of judges rolling their eyes and sending them home mostly empty-handed, for now at least.

The anti-choice movement’s shameful Holocaust comparison

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:20:00 +0000

"Saying it's OK to choose is the same thing as saying it's OK for Hitler to choose," says a fresh-faced young man. He's talking about choosing an abortion in "180," a 33-minute movie comparing legalized abortion to the Holocaust that has so far gotten over 1.5 million hits on YouTube, thanks in part to heavy distribution by fertilized-eggs-as-people promulgators Personhood USA.

That's precisely the conclusion Ray Comfort, a mustachioed evangelical pastor and sometime Kirk Cameron collaborator, wants from his eight young interview subjects. And with the help of footage of murdered Jews and fully developed fetuses, it's what he wants his viewers to conclude, as well. The New Zealand-born Comfort, who says his mother is Jewish, is by no means alone in making the equivalence: Mike Huckabee, who supported Personhood USA's failed efforts in Mississippi, has often compared the Holocaust and abortion, saying of Nazi extermination, “educated scientists, sophisticated and cultured people looked the other way because they thought it didn’t touch them." The day before Phil Bryant was elected governor of Mississippi -- at the same time the state's voters rejected the Personhood amendment -- he evoked the Jews of Nazi Germany “being marched into the oven,” because of “the people who were in charge of the government at that time” as an argument to vote for it.

How Mississippi beat Personhood

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:30:00 +0000

If Mississippi can't pass a Personhood amendment, can any state? Those who put major political and financial muscle behind Initiative 26 -- rejected last night by an astonishing 58 percent of the state's voters -- must be second-guessing their antiabortion strategy this morning. Petition drives are underway to get life-at-fertilization measures on the ballot in several other states.

But Mississippi seemed the natural place to go -- the most conservative state in the nation, which also elected Phil Bryant, the Republican lieutenant governor and co-chair of the Yes on 26 campaign, to succeed Haley Barbour as governor. This would be the man who Monday evoked the Jews of Nazi Germany “being marched into the oven,” and who said of 26's opponents, “the evil dark side that exists in this world is taking hold. And they’re saying, what we want you to be able to do is continue to extinguish innocent life. You see, if we could do that, Satan wins." Oppose 26, Bryant argued, and "you’re on the side of the lie. You’re on the side of taking the lives of innocent children.”