Personhood amendment shows differences within pro-life movement

Abortion rights supporters cheering over the defeat of the “personhood” amendment in Mississippi tend to see last week’s vote as a clear-cut setback for those who disagree with them on this hottest of hot-button issues.

“The pro-choicers won handily,” Amanda Marcotte wrote in Slate. “I wonder if the Mississippi ‘personhood’ and Ohio union votes reflect an electoral shift in a more progressive direction,” tweeted New York Times columnist Nick Kristof. “Here was overreach by the right-to-life movement,” wrote Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.


Yes, more than 55 percent of voters in one of the reddest states in the country rejected the amendment, which says life begins at fertilization — and could have outlawed certain forms of birth control and in-vitro fertilization. Only, those who identify themselves as “pro-life” are the ones who voted the thing down; that’s who lives in Mississippi. (Two-thirds of Mississippians identified themselves that way in the most recent Pew Research Center poll two years ago.) As the Biloxi-based SunHerald.com reported, “doubts raised by prominent conservatives, religious leaders and doctors” had a major impact on the vote.

This was a family fight, in other words — a difference of opinion among those who identify that way, over both strategy and theology, because not everyone with moral qualms about abortion has those same concerns about birth control. According to the Pew poll, only a third of those who identify as “pro-life” believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

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