Some of the early anti-abortion reactions to last night’s surprisingly decisive defeat of MS 26—a ballot initiative that would have amended the state constitution to give fertilized eggs legal status as rights-bearing persons under state law—show a movement trying to regroup but unsure what direction to go in once it does.
First we have Keith Mason, a co-founder of Personhood USA, who blames the failure on Planned Parenthood, suggesting that Planned Parenthood misled and confused voters. This response is consistent with the video made for Personhood USA by Lila Rose and Live Action. As near as I can tell, frankly, the response boils down to this: “Here, we recorded some employees of Planned Parenthood—who most of us enjoy referring to as outright liars at every opportunity—saying that it won’t outlaw abortion and why should you not take them at their word in this one specific instance? No, we can’t say exactly why or how it won’t ban birth control pills, but trust us because BABIES!” Anyway, Mason says the fight for zygote personhood will continue in other states.
And then there’s pro-life activist Susan Tyrrell, whose argument seems to amount to this: God says things in the Bible. (Interpretation? Don’t be ridiculous.) The things God says should be the law. Those who don’t agree are part of the kingdom of Satan. Well, look, at least it’s simple and memorable.
But perhaps the most interesting and multi-layered response comes from Americans United For Life president Charmaine Yoest. Americans United For Life has been a bit guarded about personhood measures—not backing them outright (according to the conservative Weekly Standard) but occasioning mostly-favorable editorials like this one.
Yoest, like Mason, suggests that voters’ concerns implications of the legislation were unfounded and based on “half-truths” from the opposition. (Of course, here the difficulty lies in how to address statements like this from the initiative’s own supporters.) But she also consoles personhood supporters by saying that it would not have overturned Roe v. Wade after all, and that the measure was partly about “symbolic appeal”:
This measure would not have led to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but had a symbolic appeal for pro-life Americans. It was not drafted in such a way that it would conflict with Roe… The loss has no immediate implications as the initiative restricted what the government could do, not what individuals could do. The measure would have restrained government actions—government-funded abortions—and not abortions conducted by individuals or enterprises such as Planned Parenthood… In Mississippi, abortion advocates confused voters with the impact, breadth and legal abstractions of this issue, which was vulnerable to attack in part because of its complex legal realities.”
So, to recap: among even staunch anti-abortion activists we see a range of opinion on what personhood initiatives would actually, you know, do. The consoling word within pro-life quarters is that these initiatives are unlikely to hold up to legal challenge anyway and may even have been mostly symbolic. And now the most conservative state has decisively rejected a personhood initiative by a surprisingly wide margin. The Hill’s Sam Baker is ready to call this a “major setback” for the personhood. Time will tell whether anti-abortion strategists agree with him, but at this point one really has to wonder why they would not.
