opinion
The “Personhood” Distraction
“challenging people to Shape
a Better Future now”
B ernie F oSter
Founder/Publisher
B oBBie d ore F oSter
executive editor
t ed B ankS
advertising Manager
J erry F oSter
account executive
l iSa l oving
news editor
h elen S ilviS
Multimedia editor
d avid k idd
graphic Designer
m onica J. F oSter
Seattle office Coordinator
J ulie k eeFe
S uSan F ried
Photographers
The Skanner Newspaper, established
in October 1975, is a weekly publica-
tion, published each Wednesday by
IMM Publications Inc.,
415 N. Killingsworth St.,
P.O. Box 5455, Portland, OR 97228.
Telephone (503) 285-5555.
E-mail: info@theskanner.com
World Wide Web site:
http://www.theskanner.com
Fax: (503) 285-2900
the Skanner is a member of the
National
Newspaper
Pub lishers
Association and West Coast Black Pub -
lishers Association.
All photos submitted become the
property of the Skanner. We are not re -
spon sible for lost or damaged photos
either solicited or unsolicited.
© 2011 the Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE SERVED.
REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART
WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED.
knowing What’s
important can
change your life!
Subscribe to The Skanner –
don’t miss an issue!
please sign me up for:
q 1 year $74
q 2 year $140
q New Subscription
q Renewal
________________________
name
_________________
address
_________________
city
_________________
State
______
Zip
________
phone
Mail with check or money
order to: The Skanner
P.O. Box 5455
Portland, OR 97228
M
ississippi voters will cast
their
ballots
on
November 8 for or
against Initiative 26, which would
make every “fertilized egg” a
“person” as a matter of law. Many
have rightly condemned this so-
called personhood initiative as an
attack not only on abortion rights,
but also on the ability to practice
widely used methods of birth con-
trol, to attempt in vitro fertiliza-
tion, and to grieve a miscarriage in
private, without a criminal investi-
gation by the state. These are all
well founded criticisms of the
Mississippi measure and its conse-
quences, whether intended or
unintended.
These criticisms, however, fail
to identify another flaw in the rea-
soning of the initiative’s propo-
nents. The proponents assume that
attaching the label of “person” to
fertilized eggs, embryos, and
fetuses necessarily establishes a
legal basis for criminalizing abor-
tion, or even for requiring its crim-
inalization.
Yet, our laws and our legal tradi-
tion have never punished all
behavior that results in the death
of a person. First, our laws have
never required one individual to
give up part of his or her body to
save another person, even the indi-
vidual’s own child. While we
always find admirable, for exam-
F amily
Susan Frelich Appleton
ple, life-saving donations of bone
marrow or kidneys to others, we
have no laws compelling such
altruism even if a person, includ-
ing one’s child, would die without
the donation. Indeed, it’s not a
crime to refuse to perform far less
invasive or demanding actions
although another person’s death
will result. Second, our laws have
absence of a “Good Samaritan”
requirement and the principle of
self-defense. Unlike the reasoning
in Roe, however, these analyses
assume that the pregnant woman’s
refusal to make bodily sacrifices
will result in the death of a person.
In other words, the contested issue
of personhood becomes irrelevant
under this approach.
Apparently, the proponents of
the Mississippi initiative believe
that the criminalization of abortion
follows seamlessly from an
expanded understanding of per-
Our laws and our legal tradition have
never punished all behavior that
results in the death of a person
always allowed causing the death
of another in the exercise of self-
defense, especially in the face of
threats to one’s body.
Both before and after the
Supreme Court decided Roe v.
Wade, several observers pointed
out the relevance to abortion of
these two legal traditions – the
sonhood. They ignore, however,
what it would mean to single out
pregnant women for physical sac-
rifices and burdensome duties not
required of any other class of citi-
zens. Such exceptional treatment
would raise serious equal protec-
tion questions. Perhaps in an
equalizing effort, forced kidney
and bone marrow donations would
become the new regime and the
privilege of self-defense would be
substantially narrowed for every-
one. In addition, equal treatment
would mean that any pregnant
woman who agreed to an abortion
would herself become a criminal,
as an accomplice or conspirator,
just like anyone else who agreed to
a premeditated homicide.
Personhood has never been the
critical issue. The critical issue has
always been whether, as a society,
we trust and respect women’s abil-
ity to make the difficult, even life-
and-death, choices that we allow
others to make when confronted
with either another’s need for life-
saving help or an unwanted attack
on one’s body. Pregnant women,
no less than other citizens, must be
entitled to make such decisions.
Professor
Susan
Frelich
appleton is a nationally known
expert in family law. her research,
scholarship, and writings address
such legal issues as adoption,
assisted reproduction, gender and
parentage, surrogacy, and abor-
tion rights.
Read the rest online at
www.theskanner.com
The gOP: Trying to Hijack the White House
P
resident Obama and national
and GOP officials agree on
one thing: The battle for the
White House in 2012 will likely
again come down to who wins the
handful of election deciding bat-
tleground states. At the top of that
list are Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin,
North Carolina and Virginia.
These are the states that have
swung back and forth between the
GOP and the Democrats for the
past quarter century. Florida
arguably and very dubiously put
George W. Bush in the White
House in 2000. Ohio did much to
put Bush back in the White House
in 2004. In 2008, both switched
party hands, and along with the
other three Wisconsin, North
Carolina, and Virginia did much to
put Obama in the White House.
The GOP is bound and determined
to make sure that doesn’t happen
again in 2012. It has for the most
part dumped the crude stuff to sup-
press votes that got a lot of media
attention, a slew of legal chal-
lenges, and stirred public outrage.
That included making sure there
was an absence of polling places
in minority neighborhoods, ballot
and vote machine irregularities,
using lists of foreclosed homes to
challenge voter’s residences, rigid
time lines for filing voter applica-
tions, the lack of information, mis-
information or deliberate disinfor-
mation about voter registration
forms and materials. Courts ruled
that these blatant and naked efforts
to torpedo minority voting were
illegal, and Democratic Party offi-
cials were vigilant and aggressive
in challenging these ploys.
But the GOP has gone back to its
dirty campaign playbook and
found a rash of new schemes to
insure that as many voters that are
page 4 The Portland Skanner november 9, 2011
t he l aSt
W ord
Earl Ofari
Hutchinson
most likely to vote Democrat and
for Obama stay home on Election
Day in the must win states. This
time around they have powerful
the bandwagon and require iron-
clad proof of identity. Florida and
Ohio are among those states.
North Carolina came within a
hairs breath of passing a similarly
restrictive voter ID bill. The bill
was vetoed by the state’s
Democratic governor. The cover
excuse for this vote suppression
scheme is that this is a bona fide
measure to prevent voter fraud.
This flies squarely in the face of
several studies that debunk the
The GOP has gone back to its dirty
campaign playbook and found a rash
of new schemes to insure that as
many voters that are most likely to
vote Democrat and for Obama stay
home on Election Day in the must win
states
new weapons to try to pull off
their voter scam with GOP gover-
nors and GOP dominated state leg-
islatures in the driver’s seat in the
states that Obama won in 2008.
The GOP state officials have
expanded the scheme that they
unveiled a few years back and that
is the rigid requirement that voters
produce a government-issued
identification, such as a driver’s
license, a passport, or a state or
military ID card as proof of their
identity to be eligible to vote.
Months before the 2008 election,
the Supreme Court upheld
Indiana’s rigid voter registration
law that required such proof. Since
then nearly twenty other states
require either photo or non-photo
IDs. Other states have jumped on
myth that tens of thousands of
mostly poor, ineligible black and
Latino voters flood the polls and
illegally skewer the vote total
toward the Democrats. Estimates
put the number at more than 20
million possibly eligible voters
that through lack of time, money,
or access to documents were
unable to get the required ID
proof.
GOP officials in the two key
election deciding states, Florida
and Ohio, didn’t stop at requiring
hard-nosed voter ID proof. Both
states knocked out voting on
Sunday before the election. In the
absence of any employer paid time
for voting on Tuesday, Sunday
voting was a huge boost for black
and Latino voters. Both states also
radically shortened the early vot-
ing time frame from 14 days to
eight in Florida and from 35 days
to 16 days in Ohio. Black voters
accounted for nearly one out of
five of the early return voters and
nearly one of three of the Sunday
voters. Latinos accounted for near-
ly one out of five of the Sunday
voters. In North Carolina, more
than half of blacks voted early.
Obama also got a huge election
shot in the arm from students and
other youthful voters. A number
of states now prohibit the use of
student IDs as voter eligible proof.
In Wisconsin, students now must
have a new student ID with a two
year expiration date to be eligible.
In Virginia, Governor Bob
McDonnell’s Republican-con-
trolled State Board of Elections
proposed tightening rules that
make it easier for election officials
to disqualify absentee ballots for
even the most trivial mistake such
as a misspelling on a signature.
GOP officials have not scrapped
the old tried and true methods of
voter suppression. They include:
district gerrymandering, tighten-
ing felon bans, skimping on the
number of polling places and
machines in mostly black and
Latino neighborhoods, stationing
police at the polls, and challenging
citizenship papers where they can
get away with it.
The GOP vote suppression
schemes are aimed at one thing
and one thing only and that’s to
hold onto the White House or in
the case of the 2012 election
hijack the White House from
Obama.
Read the rest online at
www.theskanner.com