I Am Zygote, Hear Me Roar

Just about a year ago, volunteer pro-life activist Kristi Brown's life revolved around Amendment 48. The amendment, if passed, would have revised Colorado's state constitution to define a fertilized egg as a person, thereby outlawing abortion. While activists in other states had pursued similar initiatives, Brown (then Burton; she recently married) was the first to collect the requisite number of signatures needed for a spot on a state ballot. She worked 12-, 16-, sometimes 18-hour days and collected nearly double the 76,000 signatures she needed. In the days leading up to the vote on Nov. 4, 2008, Brown had 2,000 volunteers in 500 churches working to pass Amendment 48.

But Amendment 48 did not come anywhere near passing. Coloradans voted definitively against the measure, 73 to 27 percent. Which makes it surprising that, a year later, Brown describes herself as "very happy" with the outcome. She remembers the atmosphere at campaign headquarters on the night of the loss as optimistic, almost unfazed by a 46-point margin of defeat. "When we saw the final numbers and realized that we had lost," she explains, "the main thing going through a lot of our heads was: this is a start, and now we need to keep going. One defeat isn't going to stop anything. This isn't the end."

When you survey the landscape a year later, Brown's prediction seems spot on: despite Amendment 48's failure at the polls, it triggered a national push for personhood ballot initiatives. There are now seven state-level personhood groups gathering signatures for 2010 ballots, compared with three in 2008. New campaigns kick off regularly, many with leaders who cite Amendment 48 as their inspiration. They're working under the umbrella of a new anti-abortion-rights organization, Personhood USA, founded a year ago, the day after the Amendment 48 vote, to coordinate all the personhood activism happening across the country. Even in Colorado, there's now a 2010 initiative moving forward with full force. "We have to do it again here because Colorado was a catalyst for the country," says Gualberto Garcia Jones, director of Personhood Colorado. Brown advises the campaign but is mostly focused on finishing her law degree. "If we just gave up after one try, it would be discouraging to the rest of the country."

The idea that life begins at conception has always been at the center of anti-abortion-rights ideology but rarely pursued as a legislative goal. Instead, activists set their sights on smaller, more obtainable restrictions on abortion, such as requiring ultrasounds or parental consent for minors. The personhood amendment can be understood as a backlash to that approach. "We're saying let's get down to business," says Cal Zastrow, cofounder of Personhood USA. "We don't want restrictions. We want to abolish the murder of children, and a personhood amendment does that." The rise of personhood as a political strategy reflects a rising frustration among activists, who say the incremental approach has done little to reduce abortions in the United States.

The personhood strategy grew out of a line in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court decision legalizing abortion, in which Justice Harry Blackmun responded to the argument of the state of Texas that a fetus is a person under the Fourteenth Amendment. "If this suggestion of personhood is established," Blackmun wrote, "[Jane Roe's] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the amendment." So if personhood begins at conception, the thinking goes, Roe falls apart.

In the early years of the pro-life movement, this interpretation influenced the policy approach: nine versions of personhood bills (then termed human-life amendments, or HLAs) were introduced in Congress between 1973 and 1983. But only the 1983 version made it to a full floor vote, and when it failed by an 18-vote margin, the strategy largely dissipated, save for a few activists introducing similar bills in state legislatures. The large, Washington-based groups turned their attention to laws restricting access to abortion. Personhood reemerged as an issue in 2005, when activists in Mississippi pursued signatures for a ballot initiative, followed by Michigan in 2006 and Georgia in 2007. All three failed to gather enough signatures to land on a ballot. By 2008, three more states had active personhood campaigns, and Colorado became the first to land an initiative on a ballot. Now, just one year after its founding, Personhood USA has 37 state-level affiliates, seven of which are already gathering signatures for potential 2010 votes. One recent report estimates that the leading personhood groups have raised nearly $60 million in the past five years.

What caused the recent swell in personhood activism? A generational shift within the movement, experts say. "This is a transition moment," says Ziad Munson, a sociologist at Lehigh University who studies the pro-life movement. "The people leading the mainstream groups started in the 1970s as young activists and are essentially reaching retirement age. As a new generation of leaders comes into the movement, that introduces the possibility of new ideas." In studying the movement, Munson has seen a general shift in power from large groups with powerful connections in Washington, such as the National Right to Life Committee, to grassroots activists, generally younger and less inhibited about pursuing less tested methods. Or, in the case of personhood, a method tested two decades ago but largely new to a fresh generation of leaders.