Why a Personhood Amendment Is Not Abolition

Executive Summary

A personhood amendment is expected to be put before Missourians this coming session, and abolitionists are being urged to support it as common ground with the pro-life movement, since its central claim, that the preborn child is a person, is true. But a personhood amendment changes the label, not the law against murder. It declares the child a “person” while leaving in place the statutes that treat his slaughter as something less than murder and exempt those who take part in it. God’s law requires the magistrate to punish the shedding of innocent blood without partiality, and that requires changing the criminal code itself. Once the code is changed, the amendment adds nothing that justice needs. Brothers and sisters, let us not spend our labor on the label.

I. What Personhood Is

A personhood measure declares that the legal word “person,” or the legal right to life, includes the child before birth. Colorado’s Amendment 48 (2008), for example, would have provided that “the terms ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include any human being from the moment of fertilization.”^[1] Six such measures went to statewide votes between 2008 and 2018; only one passed.

Table 1. Statewide personhood and right-to-life ballot measures^[2]

Alabama’s Amendment 2 (2018), the only one adopted, declares it the state’s public policy “to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life,” and “to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.”^[3]

Missouri already has personhood language, by statute. Since 1986, section 1.205 has declared that “the life of each human being begins at conception” and has directed that state law be read to give the unborn child “all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”^[4] A personhood amendment would raise that principle from statute to constitution. As the following sections show, rank is not what the 1986 statute has lacked.

II. The Wrong Category

God’s law protects human beings because they bear His image. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6).^[5] “You shall not murder” (Exod. 20:13). The ground of the command is what the child is, a human being made by God, not what any legislature calls him.

“Person,” by contrast, is a legal label, and men define it, extend it, and withdraw it. Missouri law provides that “the word ‘person’ may extend and be applied to bodies politic and corporate, and to partnerships and other unincorporated associations.”^[6] The same label was withdrawn from the preborn in Roe v. Wade, which conceded that if the child’s personhood were established, the case for abortion “of course, collapses,” and then held that he was not a person under the Fourteenth Amendment.^[7] The word is not even confined to mankind; theology uses it of the Godhead and of angels. A category that lawmakers can stretch to a corporation and courts can deny to a child is not the ground on which God rests the child’s protection. To argue on that ground is to accept the premise that his protection depends on what men decide to call him.

III. The Label Does Not Make It Murder

Murder is punished by the criminal code, not by definitions. Missouri’s murder statutes punish one who “knowingly causes the death of another person.”^[8] Abortion, however, is governed by a separate statute that makes it a class B felony rather than murder and provides that the mother “shall not be prosecuted for a conspiracy to violate the provisions of this subsection.”^[9] The 1986 personhood statute has never displaced that scheme, because it was written to yield to it: it applies “subject only to the Constitution of the United States, and decisional interpretations thereof by the United States Supreme Court and specific provisions to the contrary in the statutes and constitution of this state.”^[10] When the statute reached the Supreme Court in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Court declined to rule on it, reasoning that it “does not by its terms regulate abortion or any other aspect of appellees’ medical practice” and “can be read simply to express that sort of value judgment.”^[11] Abortion remained lawful in Missouri for more than three decades after the label was enacted.

Alabama shows that placing the label in the constitution does not change the result. The year after its voters adopted Amendment 2, the legislature enacted an abortion ban providing that “no woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed shall be criminally or civilly liable.”^[12] In February 2024 the Alabama Supreme Court, citing the amendment, held in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine that frozen embryos are children under the state’s wrongful death statute.^[13] Within three weeks the legislature enacted a statute providing that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”^[14] The constitutional declaration stood the whole time; ordinary statutes decided who would be protected.

Even the strongest personhood measure conceded the point. Colorado’s Amendment 67 (2014) would have required that “person” and “child” in the state criminal code include “unborn human beings.” Yet Colorado’s official voter guide explained that new criminal penalties might follow only “[d]epending on how the measure is interpreted and applied by the courts, or whether the state legislature adopts specific legislation.”^[15]

God requires more than recognition. “You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike” (Deut. 1:17). “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord” (Prov. 17:15). Impartial justice means one law of homicide for every human being, born and preborn, with the same prohibition, the same penalties, and no class of killers excused in advance. A personhood amendment does not supply that law.

IV. The Appeal

Personhood is attractive precisely because it is a word both sides can live with. A pro-life legislator can affirm that the child is a person without voting to treat abortion as murder, without disturbing the immunity granted to mothers, and without confronting the abortion statute at all. An abolitionist can affirm it because it is true. The agreement is real, but it is purchased by leaving out the one thing that divides us: whether the law will punish the murder of a preborn child as it punishes the murder of anyone else.

That is the trade we must decline. Common ground that requires us to set aside equal justice is not common ground with the law of God. “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10). Our Lord rebuked those who were careful in lesser things and “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23). The word “person” costs a legislator nothing. Justice is what it is meant to replace.

V. Objections

“If a constitutional right to abortion were repealed, shouldn’t it be replaced with a personhood amendment?”

A brother put the question this way: “The constitution should outline the rights of the people and constrain the state. So if a constitutional abortion right were repealed, wouldn’t it be appropriate to replace it with a personhood amendment, then remove the trigger ban’s immunity for mothers? Would the criminal code even need changes to make clear that preborn humans are humans? I assumed that once personhood is ratified, all the laws on the books would apply to preborn humans the same as born humans.”

It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the difference between constitutional and statutory law. A constitution is the state’s founding law. It establishes the government, limits its powers, and secures rights, and in Missouri it can be amended only with the approval of the voters. Statutes are the ordinary laws passed by the General Assembly and signed by the governor. The criminal code, including every law against murder and assault, is made of statutes. A constitution can forbid the state to deny a right; it is the statutes that define crimes, fix penalties, and say who may be prosecuted.

That is why the assumption does not hold. A constitutional definition of “person” does not rewrite statutes that separately define abortion, make it a lesser offense, and shield mothers from prosecution. Missouri already shows this: its courts have applied the homicide and assault laws to unborn children when “the unborn child’s mother was killed or assaulted by another person,”^[16] yet abortion itself remains under its own statute and its own lesser penalty. Alabama proves the same thing at the constitutional level: its amendment stood while the legislature granted immunity to mothers and then to the IVF industry. Removing only the mother’s exemption from the trigger ban would still leave abortion a class B felony rather than murder.

So the criminal code must be amended directly, to say that killing a preborn human being is murder under the same statutes, with the same penalties, and with no exceptions or blanket immunity. And once the code says that, the personhood amendment adds nothing that justice needs.

“Isn’t personhood a foundation for abolition?”

The foundation is already laid. God laid it in Genesis 9:6, and Missouri’s homicide statutes already stand ready to be applied. Missouri has had the personhood label since 1986, and nothing has been built on it. What is missing is not a foundation but the will to apply the law of murder to the preborn.

“Abolition bills use the word ‘person’ too.”

They do, and there is no contradiction. An abolition bill uses “person” inside the criminal code, attached to the homicide statutes, so that the word determines whose killing is murder and who may be prosecuted for it. A personhood amendment uses the same word as a declaration standing apart from those statutes. The word is not the problem; leaving it unattached to the law of murder is.

“Isn’t recognition better than nothing?”

The choice is not between recognition and nothing. It is between a label and a law that does justice, and the legislators who could refer the one to the voters could enact the other. Recognition that leaves the killing lawful is not a down payment on justice. It is what we are offered in place of it.

VI. The Simple Alternative

The alternative is a simple bill that criminalizes abortion as murder. It would apply Missouri’s existing homicide statutes, including first- and second-degree murder (Mo. Rev. Stat. §§ 565.020–.021), to every preborn human being from fertilization, with the same penalties that protect anyone else; it would repeal every provision that exempts abortion or treats it as a lesser offense; and it would make no exceptions and grant no blanket immunity, leaving the circumstances of each case to be weighed as in any other homicide. Everything personhood promises comes from that bill. Nothing personhood promises can be delivered without it.

VII. Conclusion

Brothers and sisters, we agree on who the preborn child is. The question before us is whether we will ask the magistrate for a word or for justice. God has already told us what He requires: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Prov. 24:11). A label rescues no one. Let us ask for the law of murder to be applied equally to every human being, born and preborn, and let us not settle for less.

Notes

1. Colorado Amendment 48 (2008), proposed Colo. Const. art. II, § 31; Ballotpedia, “Colorado Definition of Person Initiative, Amendment 48 (2008),” https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Definition_of_Person_Initiative,_Amendment_48_(2008). ↑

2. Certified results. Colorado Amendments 62 and 67: Colorado Secretary of State, Abstract of Votes Cast for the 2010 and 2014 general elections. All others: Ballotpedia (notes 1 and 3, and its pages on Mississippi Initiative 26 (2011) and North Dakota Measure 1 (2014)). Percentages are of votes cast on each measure. ↑

3. Alabama Amendment 2 (2018); Ballotpedia, “Alabama Amendment 2, State Abortion Policy Amendment (2018),” https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Amendment_2,_State_Abortion_Policy_Amendment_(2018). ↑

4. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.205.1–.2 (L. 1986 H.B. 1596), https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=1.205. ↑

5. Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). ↑

6. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.020(12), https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=1.020. ↑

7. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 156–58 (1973), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113. ↑

8. Mo. Rev. Stat. §§ 565.020.1, 565.021.1(1), https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=565.020; https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=565.021. ↑

9. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 188.017.2 (L. 2019 H.B. 126), https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=188.017. ↑

10. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.205.2. ↑

11. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, 506 (1989), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/492/490. ↑

12. Ala. Code § 26-23H-5 (Act 2019-189, § 5). ↑

13. LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., Nos. SC-2022-0515, SC-2022-0579 (Ala. Feb. 16, 2024). ↑

14. Ala. S.B. 159 (2024 Reg. Sess.), enrolled, § 1(a), https://alison.legislature.state.al.us/files/pdf/SearchableInstruments/2024RS/SB159-enr.pdf; signed by Gov. Kay Ivey Mar. 6, 2024 (Mike Cason, “Gov. Kay Ivey signs into law bill to protect Alabama IVF services,” AL.com, Mar. 6, 2024). ↑

15. Colorado Legislative Council, 2014 State Ballot Information Booklet (Blue Book), Amendment 67, ballot title and “Estimate of Fiscal Impact.” ↑

16. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 188.026.2(5) (legislative findings), https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=188.026; see, e.g., State v. Knapp, 843 S.W.2d 345 (Mo. banc 1992) (involuntary manslaughter). ↑