HELENA — Supporters of a constitutional ballot initiative that would define "personhood" to include unborn fetuses will gather in Great Falls tonight for a personhood conference.
National anti-abortion activists will join a handful of state lawmakers and religious leaders in support of Constitutional Initiative-102, a proposed ballot measure that seeks to ban abortion in Montana by defining personhood as all human beings "from the beginning of the biological development of that human being."
Tonight's conference, which starts at 5:30 p.m. at the Great Falls Christian Center, is the first of three scheduled across the state this weekend. Similar conferences will be held Saturday in Missoula and Sunday in Helena.
Supporters of CI-102 need the signatures of 48,674 Montana voters, including 10 percent of the voters in each of the state's 40 legislative House districts, in order to qualify the measure for the 2010 ballot.
A similar initiative fell more than 18,000 signatures short of qualifying for the 2008 ballot.
