Three weeks ago Mississippi’s Initiative 26, or the “personhood amendment,” enjoyed 80+% support. Last week internal pro-life polling showed it was still up by 18 points.

Yet Initiative 26 ended up losing last night 58-42%.

There were two simple reasons for the loss:

  • Abortion industry operatives led by Planned Parenthood and their megaphone, MSM, swarmed into Mississippi during the final days and spread rampant, wild-eyed misinformation.
  • Then there was Gov. Haley Barbour, who voted for Initiative 26 after he vented against it, wreaking untold damage to pro-life support…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIo_9b8MVNY[/youtube]

When such a prominent pro-lifer as Barbour began parroting ridiculous pro-abortion lies such as that mothers with ectopic pregnancies might die if Initiative 26 passed, you knew there was serious trouble.

Inexplicably, Barbour put himself on a whirlwind press junket in the final days to make the other side’s talking points.

Thankfully, pro-life groups that disagree strategically about personhood initiatives, like Americans United for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, stayed out of it this time. AUL’s Clarke Forsythe even went so far as to write a warmly neutral op ed about personhood in the Washington Times.

That is not to say NRLC attorney James Bopp could keep quiet. Bopp opposed personhood in Colorado, decimating pro-life support among Catholic leaders in particular. He was at it again in Mississippi.

The bright side is Initiative 26 enjoyed bi-partisan support.  This is important because Barbour bragged that had Initiative 26 gone through the legislature rather than straight to the people it would have passed, according to CNN:

“If they had come to the Mississippi legislature and said, ‘look, we want to change the constitution and say life begins at conception our legislature would have passed that,” he said….

“We’d all be better off if this had gone through the legislative process instead of trying to change the bill of rights of the Mississippi constitution by the initiative. You would have had hearings, people would have understood it, you would have gone through the conference committee and you would have ironed out a lot of these wrinkles.”

So let’s see that. Let’s hold legislative hearings on how a personhood amendment would impact IVF, ectopic pregnancies, the IUD, and hormonal contraceptives.

Personhood USA’s Keith Mason (pictured left) told me this morning another option might be to retool the wording of Initiative 26 and reintroduce it.

Still fathoming the loss, Keith was nevertheless resolute.

“We are called to be a voice for the voiceless and to plead the cause of the innocent,” Keith said.”Win or lose, we did that.”

It’s still sad to ponder that it was people who call themselves pro-life who sank Initiative 26, not pro-aborts, and this not for strategical differences.

“The number one comment I got was, ‘I heard women would be investigated if they had a miscarriage,'” Keith told me.

Pro-lifers were way too easily duped.

And pro-lifers are also way too amenable to abortifacient contraceptives and to suspending little humans in frozen animation.

[Top photo via The New York Times; bottom photo via GeorgeMcGinn.wordpress.com]

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