Personhood Advocates Take Hopeless Crusade To Wisconsin

Less than a month off of their monumental failure in Mississippi, people who want the legal definition of “person” to be changed to include zygotes have decided that their next great battleground is The Badger State. This is a stupid idea that will never work.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal, last week, a Republican state legislator introduced a bill to amend the Wisconsin state constitution to redefine “person” as “every human being at any stage of development.” Additionally, the phrase “all people are born equally free and independent” would be changed to “all people are equally free and independent, which removes the pesky need for birth. (I’d love to see a legislator suggest to a women who is 8 months pregnant that the 6 pound fetus living inside her abdomen and siphoning her nutrients is “independent.” But I digress!)

The bill’s framer, Andre Jaque, says that what’s important is that all fetuses are respected, regardless of the circumstances of conception. You hear that, pregnant rape victims? Quit being so selfish!

Like Mississippi’s craptacular Initiative 26, the measure would outlaw all abortion in all cases and threaten the legality of some birth control and IVF procedures. And like Mississippi’s Initiative 26, this stands a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.

The state’s constitution is amended via a three step process. In order for cheesehead zygotes to count as “persons,” a majority of both houses of the state legislature would have to approve the measure. Then, the measure would have to be voted on again, after the state’s next general election, so a presumably new set of legislators would have a look at it. Then and only then would it be put to a popular vote, where it would lose.

Wisconsin may have elected Koch brothers pawn Scott Walker to be governor, but it’s also the state that saw hundreds of thousands of people rallying around the State Capitol over several weeks this past winter in protest over loss of collective bargaining rights. It’s the state of Paul Ryan, but it’s also the state of Tammy Baldwin, one of the most liberal members of the entire House of Representatives and the first openly gay non-incumbent elected to the US House. The state hasn’t gone red in a Presidential election since 1984, for Pete’s sake.

But by all means keep chasing those windmills, Don Zyxotes.

Anti abrotion lawmakers propose constitutional amendment to extend personhood to embryos [Wisconsin State Journal]