Was Barbour Paid Off By The "Abortion Industry?"

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by Robin Marty, RH Reality Check

November 4, 2011 - 7:30am (Print)

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Image Source

Anti-choice activists who support the egg-as-person movement in Mississippi have a new target -- Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.  Yesterday, the Republican made news saying he was "concerned" with Initiative 26, which would grant legal rights to fertilized eggs.  Now, Prop 26 supporters are accusing Barbour of being wooed by money, not conscience.

Via Huffington Post:

Haley Barbour, the conservative, pro-life governor of Mississippi, surprised and infuriated supporters of the state's anti-abortion "personhood" initiative on Wednesday when he told MSNBC's Chuck Todd that he might be voting against it. The Personhood USA campaign retaliated on Thursday by pointing out that Barbour took campaign contributions from Monsanto and Pfizer -- pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the abortion pill.

"We thought it was really strange that he would oppose this measure, since we have the support of nearly every other politician in the state, both Democrat and Republican. So we did a little digging," Jennifer Mason, spokesperson for Personhood USA, told HuffPost. "We discovered that he has received campaign contributions from the makers of the abortion pill as recently as 2007."

Pfizer makes Misoprostol tablets, one of the two pills taken to end early pregnancy, which would be banned if Mississippi voters pass the personhood amendment at the ballots next week. According to a campaign contributions database, Pfizer contributed $7,000 to Barbour's reelection campaign in 2006 and Monsanto, Pfizer's parent company, contributed $1,000.

Barbour's office did not immediately respond to calls for comment.

Of course, pretty much every politician with any sort of national standing, especially a Republican, has probably received donations from Pfizer.  After all, the drug company is highly invested in making sure that it has advocates in federal and state legislatures who will fight against health care reform, drug price controls, and the like.

But that's not going to stop the anti-choice community from making their accusations.

Follow Robin Marty on Twitter, @robinmarty

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10 comments
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0
littleblue Barbour voted in favor via absentee November 4, 2011 - 3:22pm

Barbour voted in favor via absentee according to CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/04/us/mississippi-personhood-amendment/index....

1
Lifeisbeautiful88 Please study your science November 5, 2011 - 9:13pm
5
goatini Bomberger November 5, 2011 - 9:58pm

and the other one, some dreadful woman like him who also pushes the rape agenda, are living proof that rape pregnancies are best terminated as swiftly as possible. There is no good reason in the world why a woman and her family should be forced to contaminate their bloodline with criminal genes. These two rape defenders and apologists have obviously inherited the criminal gene, as they seem to be utterly sociopathic in their unlawful endeavors to violate civil and Constitutional law, and the human and civil rights of ohers, in their thuggish attempts to promote a Culture Of Rape.

5
Jennifer Starr I'm beginning to think you're November 5, 2011 - 11:37pm

I'm beginning to think you're not a person. You never answer any questions put to you.  You could be a pro-life spambot. 

1
Lifeisbeautiful88 Some eggs are protected under the law November 5, 2011 - 9:13pm
5
LisaC And the "egg-as-person" November 6, 2011 - 6:20pm

And the "egg-as-person" nutjobs have now taken it so far as to argue that there is no such thing as a fertilized egg, only an embryo, and so using the term "fertililized egg" is anti-life bias.

5
colleen I want to thank you for the November 7, 2011 - 1:21pm

I want to thank you for the links, LisaC. I particularly liked the criticism of Fox news by Mr Peters and his "effective example" for demonstrating the specialness of fertilized ova which is to ask the person you're trying to educate:

 

“If a human embryo is just a clump of cells would you be willing to eat a hundred embryos if I gave them to you on a spoon?”

According to him, the reason most people would refuse such a rich source of delicious raw protein is that we all intuitively know that those embryos are sub microscopic people and, thus,  are part of our human community. Which is odd because this moron does not seem aware that a hundred fertilized human ova would be invisible to the naked eye and that anyone with the common sense God gave a mashed potato would run like hell from participation in what he is calling a 'community' .

The 'pro-life' movement seems to think that if they could just express the  humanity of 'the unborn' in sufficiently emotionally loaded terms then women would be willing to have 15 children and devote their short lives to supporting them with wages from Burger King.

5
ProChoiceFerret Grand Slam Special November 7, 2011 - 1:42pm

I want to thank you for the links, LisaC. I particularly liked the criticism of Fox news by Mr Peters and his "effective example" for demonstrating the specialness of fertilized ova which is to ask the person you're trying to educate:

 

"On a spoon, no. But hard-boiled, and served with orange juice and a side of French toast... you're on!"

5
crowepps Anti-life bias? Pfui November 7, 2011 - 1:12am

So using the common parlance of fertilized egg instead of the scientifically correct term zygote is wrong, but using the scientifically correct term fetus instead of the common parlance 'baby' is ALSO wrong?  These people argue out of both sides of their mouths, don't they?

 

The fertilized egg/zygote contains the DNA 'recipe' enabling the embryo to develop into a blastocyst, invade the uterus, grow new blood vessels in the woman's belly to feed itself, become an embryoblast, highjack the woman's thyroid gland and start jacking her blood pressure sky high, begin the placenta and amniotic sac, and then FINALLY begin differentiating at about week three to create the very first cells of what will EVENTUALLY separate into the umbilical cord and eventual 'human being'.  Assuming the recipe wasn't garbled in the process of DNA recombination, of course, and is not instead a moral pregnancy, and that the placenta doesn't fail and detach, and that the woman has enough nutrition in her bloodstream so the parasitic growth can continue.

0
LisaC Welll, they also believe November 7, 2011 - 11:32pm

Welll, they also believe it's okay to call the zygote a "child.". So there's a slight level of consistency there.