Personhood Ohio has submitted the necessary signatures to begin an official citizen-led initiative for a fetal personhood amendment. This amendment will define the words “person” and “men” to “apply to every human being at every stage of the biological development of that human being or human organism, including fertilization.” A fertilized egg would become, legally, a human person.
At the press conference announcing the success of their signature drive, one of the presenters is scheduled to be Jason Storms, of Missionaries to the Preborn—an organization which features, on its website, a video comparing an abortion provider to a sniper who is running around killing children at an elementary school; which describes abortion clinics as “death camps” and a clinic employee as “one of the crazy women;” and which adopts militaristic language like “regiment” and “brigade” for its local groups. On the Personhood Ohio website, meanwhile, there are implications that God’s curse resides upon Ohio as long as abortions happen there, and that “sooner or later, judgment will fall on a land that sheds innocent blood.”
The director of Personhood Ohio is Dr. Patrick Johnston, who also founded the Association for Pro-Life Physicians and the Alliance to Reform Education Funding (a group of people who are generally suspicious of public education funding, if not opposed to it in principle); who according to his own bio “dreams of a Christian nation;” who delivered this speech at a Tea Party event in Zanesville; and who authored The Revolt of 2020, a novel which begins with an explosion that kills thousands of pro-choice activists including the President of the United States, and a subsequent persecution of sincere and honest Christians. “The soil in America,” said Johnson in the press release announcing his novel, “is ripe for the seeds of revolution.”
But, you know, at least these folks don’t want fertilized eggs to be dehumanized.
As you may have surmised, the activists behind Personhood Ohio are fairly confident in their position. Again, from their website:
One of the most convincing passages proving that the preborn had full human status is found in Exodus 21:22-24. The passage says that if a man carelessly injures a pregnant woman and she has a premature delivery, yet no lasting harm follows to the mother or the child, he shall be punished for his carelessness as the judges determine. However, if the mother or child are injured or killed, then “life for life.” God mandates the same civil penalty for those who would kill the preborn as for those who would kill the born: “life for life.” Preborn human beings are children to God, and the intentional killing of innocent human beings at any stage of existence is unlawful and criminal—His Word is clear.
Oh dear. Perhaps it’s silly of me to expect nuance given all the extenuating circumstances. But leaving aside, for the moment, the need to actually make a hermeneutical case for the claim that a compilation of ancient texts is also an instruction book for 2011… no, in this case it is actually not clear. You wouldn’t know it to read this translation—in which what happens to the fetus is translated as a “premature delivery,” presumably resulting in a live birth—but that translation is contested. Some biblical translators believe it is more truly rendered “a miscarriage.” (The bit about “no lasting harm follows to the mother or the child” is actually an interpretation on the part of those who claim that the Bible is clear.) To the best of my knowledge—and I am no Hebrew Bible scholar—the Hebrew is something like “the baby comes out but no harm follows,” which some people interpret as meaning that the mother miscarries but is herself unharmed; and others interpret to mean that the baby is born premature but is unharmed. So they get in discussions, as people do about Bible translations, in which they marshall evidence consisting of other instances where the same verb is used, and what it meant in those instances, and what reading fits best in the overall context of the passage and text.
Personhood Ohio is free to enter that conversation and to try and build the most compelling case possible, but simply acting as though your interpretation is what the text really says does not make it so, particularly in this instance where there is an established and ongoing debate about how to translate the passage. To say nothing of the fact that it makes you look pretty vulnerable in your insistence that “His [sic] word is clear.”
