Mississippi #26 Defeated

A message from Feminist Majority Foundation:

We did it! With your help, the Feminist Majority Foundation made a big difference in Mississippi and pro-choice forces won BIG! Thank you for your support!

While the state went Republican and voted for many candidates who supported Initiative 26, the state constitutional personhood amendment that would have given full rights to fertilized eggs, we defeated this dangerous initiative 58% to 42%.

Our campus organizers were on the ground working with hundreds of Mississippians, the statewide coalition against Initiative 26, Mississippians for Healthy Families and the only remaining clinic providing abortion services, the Jackson Women's Health Organization. With your support, we organized on college campuses throughout the state with Students Voting No on 26, a statewide campaign affiliated with the Feminist Majority Foundation. Our national organizing team, on-the-ground with student organizers and scores of volunteers who organized thousands of students on the major campuses. Our signs and stickers, which read "Vote NO on 26, Save Women's Lives" were everywhere. As the campaign drew to a close, we had to keep printing more of our NO on 26 leaflets!

Initiative 26 was an outrageous attempt to endanger women's health and privacy. It would have banned all abortions, access to emergency contraception, and even some forms of birth control pills and IUDs, and may have made it possible to investigate miscarriages as murder. Although starting from behind, as soon as the public learned of the harmful impact, we soared in the polls probably picking up more than 40% of the vote in the last two weeks. We had strong support among African Americans, young voters, women, and apparently at the end, support among Republican as well as Democratic voters.

Our big win in Mississippi shows that pro-choice forces can win ballot measures anywhere in the United States. Right now the anti-abortion and anti-birth control extremists say they are moving to put a similar measure on 6 state ballots in 2012. We must and will be ready. We have won anti-choice state ballot measures in South Dakota, Colorado, and California in 2006 and 2008; in Colorado in 2010, and now Mississippi in 2011. We are on a roll. We can and must continue to win for the lives of women and girls.

Thank you for standing with us in Mississippi. We couldn't have done it without you!

For women's lives,

Eleanor Smeal
President
Feminist Majority Foundation