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How Mississippi’s Vote Today Could Put Pregnant Women Under State Control | Gender | AlterNet

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How Mississippi's Vote Today Could Put Pregnant Women Under State Control | Gender | AlterNet

some highlights:

….”you may not even have to miscarry for law enforcement to deem you a threat to your embryo and use that as a pretense to detain and control you, as doing so is the only way to “protect” the embryo. If embryos are persons, everything a pregnant woman does she’s doing to the “person” inside her. If you have a cigarette or a glass of wine, they could charge you with distribution to minors.”

“Even after a pregnancy officially begins, many women don’t detect it for weeks. This would mean that a personhood law would turn all women of reproductive age into a class of people who could, in theory, have “persons” inside them, regardless of their actual or perceived pregnancy status. This has infinite potential in giving the state power to restrict the choices and movements of all women of reproductive age, in order to protect the theoretical people inside them.”

“Many activities could, in theory, cause fertilized eggs to die: exercise, working overtime, taking all sorts of medications that aren’t the pill, using certain kinds of products, eating certain kinds of food, studying really hard, juggling a job and a family life. Restricting women from holding certain jobs seen as “men’s work” is a low-hanging fruit should this bill pass. It’s easy to see how this law would be selectively enforced to attack young women and working class women whose choices are already viewed with suspicion by conservatives.”

“Feminists worked gallantly for most of American history to define women as separate human beings, instead of extensions of the men in their lives. This bill undoes all that work by instead defining women as life support systems for existing or even potential embryos.”