My own history as an infertility patient is publicly documented, but I don’t usually choose to make it the primary focus of this site. After last week’s Personhood Mississippi press conference, though, I want to get personal here for a little bit.

Because I like to hear people’s statements for myself, I went to that press conference to listen to the Women for Personhood. I left it angry, very angry, and that has only intensified with a few days’ distance. This week’s Jackson Free Press goes right to the core of it:

Sigrest said women who oppose personhood do not speak for all women. “We are the women for personhood, and we want to share our side with you,” she said…. “Abortion is war on women,” [Anne Reed] told the JFP after the press conference. “… Abortion damages a woman in every way–physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually–in every way.”

I am now six years past the day when I held a pregnancy test in shaking hands, blinking through sudden tears to make sure I wasn’t imagining that second line. I write this with my three children clustered on the sofa next to me, and I will never go through infertility again. I have mostly worked through the emotional fallout of this complex failure of simple biology. I am a recovered infertile.

But I haven’t forgotten. Neither has my husband. We are so grateful for what we have, and so aware that we were lucky where others weren’t. Why us, and not so many others? We’ll never know.

I don’t presume to speak for Ashley Sigrest, or Anne Reed, or any of the other women on those steps last week. I never have. The only person I speak for is myself, and here is what I have to say:

You do not get to tell me whether I can become a mother.

Make no mistake: that is exactly what’s at issue here. As our FAQ discusses at length, IVF simply isn’t compatible with personhood. Oh, they may say they’re not anti-IVF, but their legislation, and their campaign literature, and their media statements tell the full story.

Thursday afternoon, one of these Women for Personhood told me, “You know, you don’t have a RIGHT to do IVF.”

Her words made me incandescently angry, but she is technically correct: there is no constitutional right to pursue infertility treatment. There is no Constitutional or legal protection for women and men who simply want to become parents, but who need a doctor’s help to get there.

Remember that, when personhood advocates tell you that their bills won’t override Supreme Court decisions. There are no Supreme Court decisions specifically protecting your access to IVF.

If you are an infertility patient, your only legal protection is that you have privacy rights to undergo any sort of medical treatment you like, as long as it doesn’t violate other people’s rights. Add in embryonic personhood, and everything changes.

Every single national medical organization involved in infertility treatment understands that personhood will effectively end IVF — ACOG, ASRM, RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, and every reproductive endocrinologist in the country. Ask the Oklahoma medical community, or the Mississippi doctors who fought Initiative 26 in 2011.

No “loophole” or “exception” can erase that fundamental conflict. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t understand the medical facts — or they are hoping that YOU don’t.

But infertility patients like me do, because we’ve learned the calculus of heartbreak: 21 eggs become 2 embryos become no baby. Or, if we land on the slender side of the probabilities, six eggs become two brown-haired daughters.

So no, I don’t speak for those Women for Personhood.

But I will not let them speak for me.

Yesterday, Personhood Mississippi held a press conference to announce their plans to file another personhood ballot initiative for 2013 or 2014.

Personhood Mississippi president Les Riley stated that attorney Stephen Crampton, author of the failed 2011 Initiative 26, will be working to draft the new language. The language has not currently been finalized or filed with the Secretary of State, so the new initiative has not yet begun its path to the ballot.

The deadline to appear on the 2012 ballot has passed, and it is somewhat unlikely that the measure will qualify for 2013. Failed initiatives cannot reappear on the ballot for two years, and Election Day 2013 falls slightly before the two-year threshold date. Unless the Attorney General judges that the measure differs substantially from Initiative 26, it will not be allowed on the 2013 ballot.

After the final certification of the ballot language, which takes roughly a month or more from the initial filing date, supporters have one year to gather about 98,100 signatures. Those signatures must be submitted before the start of the legislative session in the year of the election — a further barrier to a 2013 election, since this shortens their signature-gathering period by several months. Again, a 2014 ballot appearance looks more likely.

Regardless of the year, we urge Mississippians NOT to sign any such initiative petition, and not to put our state through another divisive campaign for a measure which will hurt women’s and families’ access to contraception, infertility treatment, and pregnancy care.

The Mississippi Legislature’s committee deadline was this afternoon, meaning that any personhood bills had to be passed by their committee of origin.

We have been tracking four separate proposed personhood bills (HC-61, HC-80, SC-555, and SC-574), as well as three anti-ART bills. As of this afternoon, all seven of those bills are officially dead, and will not proceed further.

Barring extreme legislative dirty tricks, Mississippi personhood is done for 2012. There will be no legislatively-referred amendment on our November ballot.

To our representatives and senators: THANK YOU for respecting the will of the voters. THANK YOU for understanding the consequences of personhood for women and families. THANK YOU for choosing not to push personhood through in 2012!

Mississippi’s HC-80, one of the four personhood bills currently in the Legislature, was discussed in the House Constitution Committee on Friday. It could come up for a committee vote either Monday or Tuesday, and be passed through to the House floor for a full vote.

It’s time to take action, NOW! Let’s tell the Constitution Committee that we oppose HC-80, and all of the other personhood bills. Ask them to oppose personhood, and not to put the bill through committee this week.

To contact all the members of the Constitution Committee, please use our new Action Alert system:

Send an email to all Constitution Committee members.

Mississippi Rep. Andy Gipson is sponsoring not one but two personhood bills in the Legislature this year: HC-61 and HC-80.

Both bills claim to have exemptions to protect IVF and birth control, and Rep. Gipson has stated publicly that he has no intention of preventing families from using IVF. However, Rep. Gipson’s other sponsored legislation tells a different story.

This session, Rep. Gipson is sponsoring HB-1114, which calls itself the “Embryo Adoption and Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act”. This bill requires that doctors attempt to fertilize no more than two eggs, a measure which would effectively end IVF in Mississippi.

HB-1114 would prevent doctors from cryopreserving embryos for future cycles, because of the substantial risk of damage to the embryo from the cryopresevation process. Not only would that dramatically affect success rates, but it also threatens IVF patients’ health.

Mississippi doctors cannot continue to offer IVF to patients under the restrictions imposed by HB-1114. Families will be forced to seek medical treatment in other states or even other countries.

The doctors, nurses, and medical organizations who treat infertility, and who understand the medical issues involved, know that personhood raises grave concerns for their ability to practice medicine. They know that bills like HB-1114 would prevent them from helping patients build their families through medical treatment.

When you hear that bills like HC-80 “wouldn’t stop IVF”, ask yourself if you know the whole story. Ask yourself if those bills might still impose incredibly severe restrictions that would prevent doctors from treating infertility according to the current medical standards of care. And ask any infertility specialist whether he or she would be able to practice medicine in the face of these laws.

According to a NY Times article on IUDs, IUDs have become dramatically more popular in recent years:

The number of women in America now using an IUD has more than tripled since 2002. In the 12 months ending in August 2011, IUDs accounted for 10.4 percent of contraceptives issued by doctors, up from just 1.7 percent in the 12 months ending August 2002, according to data from SDI Health, a health care research firm.

As of 2008, over 2 million American women use IUDs for contraception. They are safe and extremely effective, because they don’t require any day-to-day effort to use correctly. However, under personhood, IUDs would almost certainly be prohibited under personhood, because of the legitimate potential to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.

Medical evidence suggests that women with IUDs experience between 0.2 and 1.8 post-fertilization losses per year, according to a 2002 paper in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. (That would be between 420,000 and 3,780,000 embryonic “deaths” per year, which is a large number in comparison to the 1.2 million annual elective abortions.)

If we consider that human life and human rights begins at fertilization, IUDs clearly kill a lot of embryonic people. So what happens under personhood to these 2 million women with IUDs?

If personhood prohibits contraception with post-fertilization effects, logically it should also prohibit it for users who have IUDs already in place. After all, we wouldn’t pass personhood and then say that women could have abortions for five more years, so long as they promise to stop at the end.

If you believe that an embryo is a human person with full legal rights at the time of conception, there’s no other choice but to accept that women with IUDs are every bit as much murderers as women who have abortions or women who kill their newborns. After all, if we’re talking about human lives here, surely that takes precedence over the woman’s right to privacy and to continue using the birth control of her choice, whether we’re talking about IUDs or emergency contraception or abortion.

Will women with IUDs in Oklahoma and Mississippi be forced under the threat of legal penalty to have their IUDs removed?

IUDs are just one of the many unanswered questions and potentially frightening implications of personhood legislation.

Starting late last week, Oklahoma voters have been reporting that they are getting robo-calls from Personhood Oklahoma, urging them to ask their legislator to support SB-1433 without amendments. The robo-call goes as follows:

“Hello, I’m Drew with Personhood Oklahoma. Recently in the news you may have heard about the pro-life personhood bill that’s being considered in the statehouse. That’s PERSON—HOOD, personhood. This pro-life bill will ban abortion so an amendment could ruin the bill. If you would like to tell your representative (name)to support a prolife personhood bill without amendment, please call. (number). That is, to tell your rep..(name)…..to support the personhood bill without amendment call (number).”

This is consistent with statements made by Personhood USA, applauding SB-1433 specifically because it wouldn’t be constrained by existing federal constitutional law, and would “end the senseless destruction of human life”.

Sen. Crain has repeatedly told the media that SB-1433 is “just a foundational principle”. Unfortunately, these statements from personhood groups directly contradict Sen. Crain’s assertion. If they, and their legal analysts, believe that SB-1433 will end abortion in Oklahoma by applying existing murder laws from the moment of conception, those same laws can just as easily be used against IVF and birth control.

Oklahoma voters, do you really trust Sen. Crain to tell you the whole truth about what his bill will do? Or will you listen to what the lobbyists and interest groups say when they think you’re not paying attention?

When HC-61 was introduced in the Mississippi Legislature on Monday, personhood advocates and legislators rushed to point out that the bill contained an “exception” for IVF:

This section shall have no effect on and shall not be construed to prohibit: … (b) in vitro fertilization or other methods of assisted reproduction

Sounds good, right? Sounds like there’s no problem with IVF, and those of us who care deeply about infertility treatment have no grounds to oppose HC-61?

If you agree, ask yourself this one simple question: if HC-61 were to become part of the Constitution, would doctors be able to perform embryo disposition that doesn’t involve transferring them to a woman’s uterus?

If the answer is yes, you’ve just conceded that IVF embryos do NOT possess the “paramount and most fundamental right to life”. If embryos have an absolute right to life which begins at the start of fertilization, surely that protects them from destruction, whether that be pregnancy termination or embryo disposition. Therefore, if it’s acceptable to destroy them, they must not have the same right to life as other embryos in different locations and different ages. This violates the core tenet of personhood, and the provisions of Section 1 of the bill.

If you say that no, HC-61 would prevent doctors from disposing of embryos, you’ve just admitted that this bill has at least some effects on IVF, and violates Section 3 of the bill. Specifically, you’re accepting that it would create a direct legal obligation for doctors and patients to either transfer all live embryos to a woman’s uterus or cryopreserve them (assuming arguendo that cryopreservation would be permitted). That is a direct contradiction of the bill’s own statement that it will have no effect on IVF, because it’s placing a duty on the physician and the patient to perform specific actions as part of the IVF process.

HC-61 contains a fundamental paradox at its core, because it is impossible to protect embryos’ fundamental right to life without affecting IVF to at least some degree. The authors of this bill either do not understand the medical and legal issues involved, in which case they shouldn’t be trying to write it into law, or they are deliberately attempting to deceive other legislators and voters about its effects.

There’s no way to dodge this dilemma, either in this legislation or in the general case. If you think that microscopic embryos are the moral and legal equivalent of people, you must accept that there will be repercussions for IVF. You can argue about whether it would be impossible for IVF to continue under the specific restrictions personhood would impose, but you cannot create a blanket exemption for IVF — nor should you want to, if you truly believe in personhood.

Our belief at Parents Against Personhood remains unchanged: that personhood will inevitably have dramatic repercussions for IVF, and that HC-61′s so-called exemptions will not actually protect patients’ rights to build their families through infertility treatment.

More personhood legislation was introduced today in Mississippi. The measure, HC-61, is sponsored by Rep. Andy Gipson.

HC-61 proposes to place a legislatively-referred constitutional amendment on the November 2012 ballot. The bill has been referred to the Constitution committee, and if it’s approved by the committee, it must receive a 2/3 vote of both houses of the legislature in order to reach voters.

The text of the proposed amendment guarantees the right to life to all people from conception (fertilization) to natural death. It claims it will not prohibit contraception which “do[es] not kill a person”, IVF, and “medical treatment for life-threatening physical conditions intended to preserve life”.

However, we believe that these so-called exceptions are nothing more than a smokescreen designed to fool voters. Neither the intention nor the practical effect of this bill will truly protect contraception, infertility treatment, and pregnancy care. Nor should it, if you truly believe that a fertilized egg is a full equivalent to a born human being, and that it has the same right to life as any other human being.

We’re outraged that this is the SECOND personhood bill filed in Mississippi, a bare three months after personhood was soundly defeated at the polls, and only a week after SC-555 renewed widespread opposition to the measure. It’s frankly disrespectful that our Legislature seems intent on forcing this on voters, when we’ve already made our opinions so clear.

We strongly encourage you to contact the members of the Constitution Committee, as well as your own representatives. Ask the Legislature to respect the people’s decision, and reject HC-61 and SC-555!

Chair: Scott DeLano, sdelano@house.ms.gov
Vice Chair: Jason White, jwhite@house.ms.gov
Nick Bain, nbain@house.ms.gov
Bill Denny, bdenny@house.ms.gov
George Flaggs, gflaggs@house.ms.gov
Steve Horne, shorne@house.ms.gov
Trey Lamar, jlamar@house.ms.gov
Rita Martinson, rmartinson@house.ms.gov
America Chuck Middleton, amiddleton@house.ms.gov
Alex Monsour, amonsour@house.ms.gov
Thomas Reynolds, treynolds@house.ms.gov
Randy Rushing, rrushing@house.ms.gov
Jeff Smith, jsmith@house.ms.gov
Greg Snowden, gsnowden@house.ms.gov
Joseph Warren, jwarren@house.ms.gov

New polling results released today by Christopher Newport University/Richmond Times-Dispatch show a majority of voters oppose personhood:

those surveyed oppose defining life beginning at conception 52-41 percent with 7 percent saying they didn’t know or refusing to answer.

The survey of 1,018 registered voters was conducted Feb. 4-13.

It’s very possible that this poll significantly understates the degree of opposition to Virginia’s HB-1. There has been an incredible amount of media coverage in the week since the survey concluded, and voter often respond to polls on social issues more conservatively than they actually behave.

For example, Mississippi polling on Initiative 26 showed personhood winning 45-44% just two days before the election, when the ultimate result was a 58-42% defeat.

The message to Virginia senators should be clear: Virginia’s voters don’t want personhood.