“This is the key question as we examine where we have been in the last 40 years and where we are collectively headed,” says Keith Mason, co-founder of Personhood USA. “The video not only helps answer this question, but we also hope it inspires lifelong pro-lifers and activates a new generation to rally in defense of the lives of every human being.”
Launched in 2008, Personhood USA provides support and assistance for grassroots groups campaigning for constitutional personhood amendments and personhood legislation. The group’s purpose is to secure the God-given and natural right to life of every human being from biological beginnings through every stage of development.
In 1973’s infamous Roe v. Wade decision, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case [for decriminalized abortion], of course, collapses.” By filling this hole, personhood laws are on solid legal footing to end abortion and provide protections from emerging biotechnologies including abortion-inducing drugs, human cloning and deadly medical research.
Personhood amendments reached the ballot in Colorado in both 2008 and 2010. Residents of Mississippi are set to vote on a similar measure in November, Amendment 26, that would define the term “person,” as used in the Mississippi Bill of Rights, to “include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”
“Clearly, we see now that the battle for human dignity has expanded to a range of issues all centered around a denial of the most basic of human rights,” Mason continues. “The age-based discrimination perpetrated against the preborn is a 21st century issue that requires a return to very foundations of law and human rights: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'”
