Let's not get caught up in the slicing and dicing of word meanings. Let us simply respect individual human freedom.

Nov 15, 2011 -- 8:45PM, farragut wrote:

Let's not get caught up in the slicing and dicing of word meanings. Let us simply respect individual human freedom.

Tell that to the so-called "Right to Life" constituency.

The meaning of terms makes a difference when it's a woman's motivation for having a termination of pregnancy that is used as the basis to actually oppose the availability of safe and legal abortion procedures, to convince the public, at large, to oppose safe and legal abortion by demoning the women who have so-called "elective" abortions because they "didn't want the baby," especially when the such a false dichotomy (acceptable motivation = "non-elective"vs condemned motivation = "elective) is presented as some sort of a priori truth.

The Mississippi referendum was designed to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade.   Some may trust that the Supreme Court won't overturn Roe because Roberts said it wouldn't be, others who've been watching the tactics for 40 years know better.  Fortunately the MS referedum got turned down, probably because people feared men could be prosecuted for negligent homicide.

That Mississippi Ballot initiative was stupid.  Even their pro-life governor thought it was ill conceived.  There is a national "Personhood Amendment" initiative trying to make the rounds and I guess Mississippi was one of the first to take it up.

It seems that some SCOTUS person, whether it was a justice I don't know, said when deciding for an abortion rights argument that, "if a fetus were considered a person that the outcome would be different."  This led to the stupid idea of states individually voting to declare a person a person before they were born.

Stupid, because even if it passed statewide, no state law will ever trump a federal law. Also stupid because "person" is more of a legal designation; persons do things.  Just tacking this designation to an unborn child is a very lame  the lamest attempt to outlaw abortion with semantics.

In Mississippi the medical community came out against it in force and bought beaucoups ads for fear of being held liable for the death of a "person" when treating cancer, or aborting a tubal pregnancy.  Everyone I knew was against it.

Frankly, I think a large number of pro-life people are secretly pro-choice anyway, and given a private ballot, abortion would never be outlawed with any type of wording.  I say this because people, especially in Mississippi, weren't smart enough to know this was a stupid bill.  55/45 with doctors scaring you.  May translate to 50/50 with no fear mongering.   But polls suggest it is like 60/40 for life.  I think some of those 60 are liars.  Who knows how many.