Voters in conservative Mississippi were rejecting a so-called “personhood” ballot measure that would have the effect of outlawing all abortions and challenging the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The proposition on the Magnolia State’s ballot asked: “Should the term ‘person’ include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof?”
With half the vote counted, the measure was garnering only 43 percent of the vote. It was initially favored to pass, but lost support rapidly in waning days of the campaign. A Public Policy Polling survey last week found the state evenly divided on “personhood.”
Groups not usually associated with Mississippi politics — Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union — campaigned against the measure. The Mississippi Medical Assn. and Mississippi Nurses Assn. opposed it at the grass roots level.
Popular outgoing Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, an abortion opponent, declined to endorse the sweeping measure. Barbour said last week on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” that he had “some concerns about it.”
The Mississippi proposal is part of a broad-case effort, launched after Republicans captured control of many state legislatures in 2010, to find ways of restricting abortions.
In very Republican Idaho, for instance, the Legislature voted to ban all abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy, under almost all circumstances.
Mississippi has only one clinic, in Jackson, that terminates pregnancies.