Home

ACLU, Planned Parenthood File Challenge to Personhood Initiative

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 20:06.

On Thursday, November 12, 2009, the ACLU of Nevada, along with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU’s national Reproductive Freedom Project, filed a challenge to the “Personhood Initiative,” a measure which seeks to amend the Nevada Constitution and could interfere with personal medical decisions, including some fertility treatments, all abortions, and some forms of birth control.

The ACLU of Nevada has spent years protecting the initiative process as fundamental free speech, ensuring that the rules are fair and applied evenly to all initiative petitions, regardless of the message. When the Personhood Initiative was filed this November, seeking to reduce fundamental reproductive rights for women, we did some hard thinking about the various civil liberties principles at play. The Initiative seeks to ban all access to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, and would likely also ban many common forms of birth control, medical research, and fertility treatment. There is no question that the protection of women’s health, privacy rights, and reproductive freedom are of the absolute highest priority to the ACLU and our membership. On the other hand, we defend access to the ballot regardless of proponents’ viewpoints and will continue to do so.

In reviewing the actual language of the petition and the description of effect, the ACLU of Nevada came to the decision that an initiative proponents’ right to access the ballot box comes with an equally important responsibility: to let voters know the consequences of what they’re voting on. The actual text of the Personhood Initiative is 14 words long, adding to the constitution the language that “In the great state of Nevada, the term ‘person’ applies to every human being.” As written, this initiative’s meaning is unclear and does not mention abortion, let alone birth control or fertility. It is only through proponents’ media statements that we know their main goal is the criminalization of all abortions.

The right of women in Nevada to access reproductive health care is protected both by the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade as well as an earlier initiative passed by Nevada voters in 1990. The initiative’s description of effect is equally misleading and vague, defining human being as any one “possessing a human genome” and claiming to protect all life genome “without discrimination as to age, health, reproduction method, function, physical or mental capacity, or cognitive ability.” In addition, the petition description says that it “guarantees” that no one will be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law” but also states that it “prohibits state intrusion in end of life decisions.” It is therefore also unclear whether the amendment would increase an individual’s right to control end of life decisions or if it would conversely require State intervention before a living will could be effectuated. Further, because the language is so confusing, the Initiative could affect numerous provisions of the Nevada Constitution and affect literally thousands of laws. The wide breadth and confusion would mean that courts would be clogged with cases addressing its effects for years – which would cost the taxpayers money.

Because the Personhood Initiative involves misleading language on a matter affecting, and potentially jeopardizing fundamental human rights, the ACLU of Nevada decided to work in collaboration with Planned Parenthood USA and the National ACLU in filing a lawsuit challenging the Personhood Initiative. While we always have and always will endeavor to ensure that the initiative process is open and fair to the public, we also recognize the duty of ensuring that Nevadans know when they are being asked to strip away their own fundamental rights. Our litigation against the Personhood Initiative seeks to do just that: inform voters of the unpredictable, extreme, invasive, and unwise consequences of a vote for “Personhood."

Additional Resources
All content copyright © 2010, ACLU of Nevada