2011 has been a banner year for abortion opponents. Thus far, 87 state laws restricting abortion have been enacted, the most in any year since Roe v. Wade and more than double the previous high. But one rogue wing of the pro-life movement sees no reason to celebrate: the budding “personhood movement,” which wants to turn abortion into homicide by methodically amending state constitutions to define conception as the beginning of a person’s life.

This November, Mississippi votes on the personhood issue by popular referendum. The results will gauge whether the movement is a powerful new front or a fringe strategy destined to fizzle. Regardless of how Mississippi votes, however, the personhood movement is worth tracking for two reasons. First, it’s sparking a debate among pro-lifers about the efficacy of the movement’s traditional, incremental approach. Second, by challenging Roe’s premise outright, the personhood movement is seeking out a legal conflict that could well make its way to the Supreme Court.

IN THE 1970s and 1980s Republican Senator Jesse Helms and several other die-hard pro-lifers made a regular habit of proposing federal personhood amendments. None of them reached the floor of Congress for a vote. In 1988, Ronald Reagan issued a presidential proclamation that declared the personhood of each American “from the moment of conception until natural death,” but his statement contained no legal implications. What was already a marginal movement in the ’70s and ’80s, meanwhile, disappeared almost entirely in the ’90s. After the Supreme Court decided the 1992 landmark abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey—which upheld the essence of Roe but also gave states the right to discourage women from having abortions at any stage of fetal development—the pro-life movement focused on restricting abortion, rather than banning it outright. Post-Casey, state abortion restrictions have done their job: According to the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate has dropped 29 percent from 1990 to 2005, after a decade of stability in the ’80s (a 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation found that state-level restrictions were a leading factor in the drop during the ’90s).

Five years ago, however, a small group of Michigan activists, unsatisfied with such small-ball strategies, revived the personhood movement on the state level. Michigan’s personhood amendment sparked an unlikely, intra-pro-lifer debate: Facing heavy opposition from Michigan Right to Life, the group that originally sponsored the amendment chose not to file the signatures it had gathered. Indeed, it has since become clear that not all pro-life groups are on board with the personhood movement. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum called personhood a “gimmick” and a “waste of money.” James Bopp, a renowned pro-life attorney, has argued that bringing such challenges before pro-lifers achieved a majority on the Supreme Court could simply give the current court the power to bolster the pro-choice language of Roe.

The Michigan effort was nevertheless successful in setting off a chain reaction of personhood voter initiatives. In 2008 and 2010, personhood amendments managed to get on the ballot in Colorado, but both failed by approximately 70 percent to 30 percent. At least ten more such amendments have failed elsewhere in the last five years, either because they couldn’t win a popular vote in state legislatures, didn’t obtain enough signatures to qualify for a popular referendum, or were ruled unconstitutional by state courts. But whereas traditional pro-life groups have played major roles in quashing personhood amendments in other states, none have publicly criticized the current effort in Mississippi, which is slated to become the second state to vote on the issue this fall. (The ACLU and Planned Parenthood have mounted a legal challenge against the vote that is currently being reviewed by the state supreme court. If it upholds the lower court’s decision, Mississippi votes on personhood; if it doesn’t, it’s off the ballot.)