Editorial 11.12, December 2009, by Deirdre Helfferich Menstruating Murderesses & Terrorist Taxi Drivers Twenty-five-year-old Christopher Kurka, of Eagle River, is at the center of one of the stupidest Alaska initiatives to be certified by a lieutenant governor in Alaska history, and there have been some doozies in the state’s fifty years. I’m talking about the Personhood Initiative, of course. This sort of thing is one of the reasons that I view fundamentalist right-wing Christians like these with such disdain: they are beyond medieval in their attitudes (“quickening” was the standard then). Kurka explained to KTUU reporter Rebecca Palsha that he wants the initiative to pass “so the unborn will be recognized as a person just like the rest of us.”(1) He makes no bones about this as an attempt to get around Roe vs. Wade; as he said to the Anchorage Daily News: "So, basically, what we're doing here is if we say that we recognize the unborn as persons, then a woman's right to choose or a right to privacy doesn't matter [just like] she doesn't have a right to kill her child after it's born."(2) The text of the initiative reads:
In other words, a microorganism would be a legal person, “just like the rest of us.” It is important to note here that not all legal persons are actually human beings: corporations, for example. This has had a serious impact on the rights of natural persons. What sort of impact would the conferring of legal personhood to a first-trimester Homo sapiens have on the rights of the rest of us, particularly of women? Ironically, the initiative summary issued by the state includes the disclaimer that “This bill would not amend or repeal existing state law regulating abortion, but could impact some areas of the law, including criminal law, to extend rights and protections prior to birth.” So—does this mean abortion would be legal, except that women and doctors could be prosecuted for murder if an abortion was performed?(3) The problem here is that a human zygote is not a person—it is a potential person. An embryo is not a person—it is a potential person. At eight weeks, an embryo is termed a fetus, but even a fetus is not yet a person—although after about twenty-three weeks of gestation, some few can survive outside the womb—with a lot of help and a lot of luck. (And even then, the survivor is usually physically damaged, with grim long-term health issues.) The Kurka initiative avoids the question of fetal viability as the point at which personhood obtains (a standard often used as a dividing line in the abortion debate), and would slap us with a legal requirement to equate the possible with the actual—a very dangerous confounding of what may be real with what is real. Moreover, this is a religious viewpoint of personhood (informed, I suppose, by the idea that ensoulment occurs at conception and that ensoulment is equivalent to personhood—not beliefs universal to all Christian sects, not to mention those of other religions, or of atheists). It’s the idea that potentiality, or possibility, could viewed as legally the same as actuality, or reality, that is the real stunner, though. Now, I know that physicists have posited that all possible worlds exist (the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics), but legally speaking, we are in one world, and a person cannot be convicted and jailed for a possible crime against a potential person. At least, not yet. (That’s still only the province of science fiction, such as in the movie Minority Report, where the company PreCrime detected crimes before they happened and arrested the potential criminals.)(4) Should this initiative become a bill, and should that bill become law, then potentially, any menstruating woman would be guilty of possible murder against a possible person—every single month. Remember—the potential is equivalent to the actual. The principle that this initiative is based on is obviously nonsensical. Perhaps its supporters can’t see that when human identity is involved, but what about when applied to a potential legality—such as the initiative itself? It is a potential law. So, according to this logic, it or any other initiative petition is exactly the same as one that is put on the ballot and passed. Or a potential winner of an election has the same right to govern as an actual winner of an election. In the many-worlds interpretation, this holds true, somewhere. The Alaska Civil Liberties Union and Vic Fischer are suing the state to stop the petition process for the initiative, saying that it should never have been certified, and that it could lead to legal consequences that at the very least could tie up the courts with all sorts of nonsense, such as women tried as murderers for having a miscarriage. (Kurka, of course, deems this ridiculous, yet people use the law for harassment all the time, and unjust laws are all over the place.) As the Ms. Magazine Feminist Wire pointed out: “[It] would threaten not only abortion itself, but IUDs, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization clinics, and stem cell research.”(5) While I doubt that the more extreme interpretations of this initiative would be considered by a court, it is still worth noting that 1) attitudes change over time, and 2) American law is all about precedent. This initiative would create a very dangerous precedent. Unfortunately, it is merely a step to an extreme of the legal continuum we have been on for some time: we have laws now that allow possible criminals (which could be anybody) to be treated as probable criminals: racial profiling, for example. A potential criminal looks like so; therefore, a person who looks like so is probably an actual criminal and must be treated as such. It allows a government to treat its citizens all as potential terrorists and so invade their privacy with surveillance cameras, warrantless wiretaps, FISA warrants to find out what they are reading and gag the recipients (because, of course, somebody reading about blasting techniques could be a terrorist—or a miner), etc. It is the kind of thinking that assumes guilt by association: the taxi driver who picks up a suspected terrorist is seen as guilty of terrorism himself. The USA PATRIOT Act, with its clause permitting the detention of suspects based solely on their ethnicity or religion, for example, is in the extreme of this mentality in which possible=probable. An accusation of guilt becomes confirmation of guilt. This is tangential to the initiative at hand, but shows the parallel degradation of the meanings of actual, probable, potential, and possible that is already in criminal and anti-terrorism law. Yet these laws still don’t go as far as potential=actual. If passed, the initiative would make basic human rights meaningless, and dehumanize women of reproductive age such that legally, they would be mere vessels to their potential offspring. In effect, the rights of the potential person would weigh more than the rights of the actual person—a gross injustice. “Persons are persons, no matter how small,” wrote Dr. Seuss, and I agree. Size doesn’t matter. But to claim that a blastula has the personhood that I do merely because we share the same genome is ludicrous, and disregards logic, reality, and plain common sense. 1. “Initiative underway for ‘legal personhood' status for fetus, “ KTUU report by Rebecca Palsha, Thursday, October 29, 2009. 2. “New fight develops over rights of fetuses. ABORTION ISSUE: Lawsuit filed to keep initiative off the ballot,” by Sean Cockerham, Anchorage Daily News, November 28th, 2009. Available on line at www.adn.com/news/government/legislature/abortion/story/1031558.html. 3. “Initiative challenges abortion rights. 'Personhood' measure sponsor must collect 32,734 signatures,” by Pat Forgey, Juneau Empire, Tuesday, November 3, 2009. See also the legal review of the initiative, State of Alaska Attorney General file No. JU2009-200-798, available on line at the Juneau Empire’s site, www.juneauempire.com/documents/110309/abortion.pdf, 8 pp. 4. But then, there are such things as the Future Attribute Screening Technologies, or FAST, project, from the Department of Homeland Security: see “Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions,” by Liliana Segura, AlterNet, posted December 9, 2009, available on line at: www.alternet.org/rights/144443/homeland_security_embarks_on_big_brother_programs_to_read_our_minds_and_emotions/. An earlier article on this topic appeared in New Scientist, “Can a government remotely detect a terrorist's thoughts?” by Paul Marks, August 10, 2007. 5. “Legal Challenge of Alaska Personhood Initiative Filed,” Ms. Magazine Feminist Wire, November 30, 2009. | ||
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