Life begins at fertilization by Personhood USA's Gualberto Garcia Jones

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2011-11-06/personhood-Mississ…

By Gualberto Garcia Jones

Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values.

Using the courts as its instrument, this American elite has emasculated a once independent America.

The Constitution, a document written to prevent tyranny, has, as Thomas Jefferson predicted, become “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.”
No greater example exists of this abuse of raw judicial power than Roe v. Wade, a decision by seven unelected men to impose abortion on all 50 states.

Tuesday, Mississippi will vote on a pro-life constitutional amendment, Initiative 26, that declares that all human beings are persons entitled to the protection of their rights.

Mississippi is a pro-life state, and Mississippi’s leading elected officials are all supporting Initiative 26. This includes the current governor, Haley Barbour®, and both candidates for governor: Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant® and Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny Dupree (D); as well as Attorney General Jim Hood (D), Sen. Roger Wicker® and Reps. Alan Nunnelee®, Greg Harper® and Steven Palazzo®.

This simple amendment has become ground zero in the fight over abortion because it challenges not only the legal foundation of Roe v. Wade— that the child in the womb is a non-person — but also the source of the power that has allowed the liberal elite to reshape America in its own image.

As a result, the people of Mississippi have become the target of an unrelenting campaign of scare tactics and doomsday predictions from abortion proponents.

These scare tactics are exposed by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, which concluded in its legal analysis that Initiative 26 will not ban birth control or in vitro fertilization, nor criminalize lifesaving medical treatment or accidental deaths.

To date, 55 million innocent human beings have been killed by abortion. Tuesday, in the sovereign state of Mississippi, men and women will vote to put an end to it in their state by voting yes on 26.

Gualberto Garcia Jones is a director of, and legal analyst for, Personhood USA, a group that opposes abortion and seeks to establish that the legal definition of “person” begins at fertilization.