How would you like your eggs?

Mississippi recently held a vote on an amendment to confer protected legal status to fertilized human eggs.  The amendment was rejected by a majority of 55%.  The state's Republican lieutenant governor — now governor-elect — Phil Bryant, who campaigned hard for the measure was quoted as saying "We're saying this child, once conceived, will have an opportunity to have the same rights as you and I have."

I was struck by that comment as I often hear a similar sentiment from pro-life people – I realize that this is an extremely emotional and to many a moral issue.  I see both sides but where I see a disconnect from the pro-life side is their strident belief that they can control other people and claim they are acting in the best interest of fertilized eggs but once those resulting babies are born I don’t see the same commitment.  What if that fertilized egg turns out to be a ……..

Gay child – Mississippi joined 11 states that passed Gay-marriage bans in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah.  Amendments banning same-sex marriage were passed earlier this year in Louisiana and Missouri. They joined Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Nebraska, whose constitutions define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Black - in Mississippi where age gaps between blacks and whites in Mississippi remain substantial. Blacks in Mississippi earn about 69% of what whites earn at the median, among fulltime, year-round workers, while nationally the figure is 80%. The low earnings of black women are particularly striking: this group earns only 69% of the national median for black women, although black men, by contrast, earn 80% as much as their national counterparts. And trends are not promising, based on the most recent data available: the gap between the earnings of whites and blacks in the state widened over the 1999-2006 period.  Nationally, the gap remained the same. http://www.ihl.state.ms.us/urc/downloads/africanamerican_economic.pdf

Poor….Not to mention that Mississippi is among the bottom five states on 11 of the 22 measures.  That fertilized egg faces a high infant mortality rate at 10.3 deaths per 1,000 live births and a high rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease at 373.7 deaths per 100,000 population.  Other challenges for Mississippi face are a high prevalence of obesity at 35.3 percent of the population, a high percentage of children in poverty at 31.9 percent of persons under age 18, a low high school graduation rate with 63.6 percent of incoming ninth graders who graduate within four years, limited availability of primary care physicians with 81.9 primary care physicians per 100,000 population, a high rate of preventable hospitalizations with 97.8 discharges per 1,000 Medicare enrollees. http://www.americashealthrankings.org/yearcompare/2009/2010/MS.aspx.

Or on a more nationwide view -  

A woman – where Wal-Mart discriminates against its female employees in making promotions, job assignments, pay decisions and training, and retaliates against women who complain against such practices.

Or an illegal alien where children whose parents are illegal immigrants or who lack legal status themselves face “uniformly negative” effects on their social development from early childhood until they become adults, according to a study by four researchers published Wednesday in the Harvard Educational Review. The study concluded that more than five million children in the United States are “at risk of lower educational performance, economic stagnation, blocked mobility and ambiguous belonging” because they are growing up in immigrant families affected by illegal status.

Now I am pretty sure that Phil Bryant is none of the above  ......Just saying…….