The personhood movement began six years ago in Colorado. It was started by a 21-year-old
law student there and she had this idea that she should help pass a law that would add
unborn fetuses to some of the protections that everybody else gets. And basically this
was driven by her belief that life begins at conception, and therefore any unborn fetuses
should have the exact same protections that she has under the law. And she got this onto
the Colorado ballot. It did not succeed. It failed. But now here we are six years later
and there have been five separate personhood ballots, all of which have subsequently also
failed. It's shown that this strain of the pro-life movement is not really having success
at the ballot box that these generally considered to be more extreme measures, which could potentially
ban abortion, they could ban in vitro fertilization, are not a way for the pro-life movement to
win. The pro-life movement has been really successful with more incremental regulations.
They passed 205 separate abortion restrictions since 2010. That's more than the last decade
before that. But when you look at these giant, sweeping personhood amendments, these ones
that would say life starts at conception or add what they would call unborn humans to
the criminal code, those are not succeeding, and two more defeats in North Dakota and Colorado
last night suggest that they're not going to be having much traction in the future either.
I think pro-choice groups are generally very happy with what happened in North Dakota and
Colorado. They were very worried particularly about the North Dakota amendment passing and
it failed by a pretty wide margin. So I think that's reassuring to pro-choice groups. However,
there will probably be dozens more abortion restrictions that will pass in 2014 with the
state legislators who are just being elected into office, and that they're certainly by
no means in the clear, that they have a rough battle to fight in the years ahead.