North Dakota bill part of growing personhood movement

The defeat of a personhood initiative in Colorado last November did little to stop what is becoming a nationwide movement, with seven states considering bills or initiatives that would provide legal protection to all persons from the moment of conception, reports Baptist Press.

The bills and initiatives are unique in that none of them reference abortion, even though all of them take aim at the legal reasoning behind the infamous Roe v. Wade ruling.

The latest victory for the movement came Feb. 17 in North Dakota, where the state House passed a bill, 51-41, that says for the purposes of interpreting state law, "a human being includes any organism with the genome of homo sapiens." No state legislature had ever passed a personhood bill. Montana's Senate Judiciary Committee considered Feb. 19 a bill that says a person is "a human being at all stages of human development of life, including the state of fertilization or conception."

Pro-lifers in Mississippi -- one of the nation's most pro-life states -- are expected to begin a personhood petition drive soon. A drive already has begun in Oregon.

Legislators in Maryland, Alabama and South Carolina also are sponsoring personhood bills.

The new movement comes months after Colorado Amendment 48, which would have defined a person as "any human being from the moment of conception," failed at the ballot, 73-27 percent. It was the first time in the nation's history that voters considered a personhood law.

Keith Mason, who helped lead the pro-Amendment 48 campaign, said it was a bad year for a pro-life initiative to be on the Colorado ballot, particularly with a Democratic tide sweeping through a somewhat left-leaning state. He notes that the amendment received nearly 600,000 votes, and two years earlier, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter was elected with 780,000 votes. Amendment 48's margin of loss, he says, was an anomaly.

The Colorado initiative was the idea of 21-year-old Kristi Burton, who became the face of a campaign that garnered 103,000 valid signatures to place it on the ballot, significantly more than the 76,000 that were required.

"I'm not discouraged in the least about the vote and how it came down here," Mason said. "We didn't win on the ballot in November, but even though we didn't win, it worked. Putting the vision in people's heart to restore personhood rights to the preborn is what I believe the direction the pro-life movement has to go to actually see an end to abortion."

The day after the election, Mason and fellow pro-lifer Cal Zastrow helped launch Personhood USA, an organization that seeks to promote pro-life bills and initiatives nationwide.

New iPad POLL! VOTE NOW! Will you buy new iPad?

TAGS: USA personhood movement moment of conception abortion pro-life human being personhood bills

[02/24/2009]

Print Version