Articles / The "Personhood Bill"

This is a video of an interview with an author who wrote an article for an online magazine called Orion. Orion’s mission is to inform, inspire, and engage individuals and grassroots organizations in becoming a significant cultural force for healing nature and community.  When I first read this article, and then saw this video, the author touched my heart on so many levels that I wanted to share this with you -our readers, who can understand and empathize with her remarkably well written article about infertility, natures response, and the evolution of how women in our culture have thought about it.

"A LARGE PART OF THE PRESSURE and frustration of infertility is the idea that fertility is normal, natural, and healthy, while infertility is rare, unnatural, and means something is wrong with you. It’s not usually a problem you anticipate; from the time we are very young, we are warned and promised that pregnancy will one day happen. At my support group, someone always says how surprised she is to be there." "Perhaps imagining ourselves as parents is not only the expression of a biological drive, but essential to understanding the scope of our lives, who we are and who we might become." here is a link to Belle Boggs' original story written for Orion Magazine.

-this is a post from resolve.org  In the U.S., 2007, a new concern arose. RESOLVE learned that a group had collected sufficient signatures to put a proposed new law -- a "ballot initiative" -- before the voters of Colorado. This ballot initiative, called Amendment_48, would amend the definition of "person" in the Colorado state Constitution to "include any human being from the moment of fertilization." Thus, from the moment the sperm penetrated the egg inside a woman's body or, in the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF), in the laboratory, the resultant microscopic cell or cells would have "inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law." ...We undertook to research and consider in detail how this very fundamental change to Colorado's Constitution would apply to IVF as it is practiced to the standard of care in this country. The results of this analysis staggered us. We soon realized that if embryos were, for the first time in this country, accorded all the rights of full human beings, then any loss of embryos in the course of IVF could, presumably, be tantamount to murder.

The "personhood amendment" posed a serious threat to the ability of people with infertility to obtain mainstream, long-established treatments to help them have a family. The Colorado personhood amendment failed at the polls in 2008 and again in 2010, by a 3-to-1 margin.  But the movement to pass personhood bills and initiatives has only grown since then. RESOLVE has battled to protect infertility patients against personhood ballot initiatives and legislation in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas.  

So far, we have been successful, but this threat continues to grow. "Personhood USA," the group that promotes personhood measures, has announced 10 more states where it has started personhood campaigns for 2012, and has started petitions in all 50 states.  Fighting these personhood measures has become one of RESOLVE's major activities. RESOLVE opposes all Personhood initiatives and urges all Americans to VOTE AGAINST any anti-family legislation as it undermines access to safe and reliable infertility medical treatments. Click here to read RESOLVE’s Policy Statement on Personhood legislation, which includes a full explanation of how Personhood legislation and/or Amendments will impact people with infertility. -find out what's happening in your state and this "Personhood Bill" here