Abortion battle at crucial point in Mississippi

The latest battle over abortion rights comes to a head on Tuesday, when Mississippi voters will consider an amendment to their state constitution that would say a human being is a person from the moment of conception.

CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston has more reports that, with religious conviction, Les Riley led the petition drive to put "Personhood" on the Mississippi ballot, which would declare that a fertilized egg is a person.

"You're exactly the same person that you were then. The only thing that's been added to you is time and food," said Riley, one of the state's chief citizen sponsors of the amendment.

Riley, a father of 10 children from Tupelo, says the constitutional amendment is intended to outlaw all abortions, with no exceptions for incest or rape.

"We don't have the death penalty in Mississippi for rape. Why would we punish the rapist's child?" Riley asked.

That position offends Cristen Hemmins, who is with Mississippians for Healthy Families.

"People on the 'yes' side keep saying to me, 'Well, don't punish the baby, punish the rapist.' But what they leave out of that equation is me," Hemmins said.

Hemmins, now married with three children, was raped at gunpoint 20 years ago on her college campus.

"If this had been in place and I had gotten pregnant, I wouldn't have had any options. I would have been forced by the state government to bear a child, which might have killed me, physically, if not emotionally," Hemmins said.

Mississippi's "Personhood Amendment" is part of a national movement to restrict a woman's ability to obtain a legal abortion. Similar efforts are underway in at least 9 other states -- including Florida, Ohio, and California -- to put the issue on the ballot next year.

Dr. Beverly McMillan helped "open up the first abortion clinic" in Mississippi. She said she performed abortion for three years, but had to stop.

"I lost my stomach for it," McMillian said.

She strongly believes life begins at conception.

"It is not ethical to kill a human being because they are inconvenient or unwanted or what we consider burdensome to us," said McMillan, who is the president of Pro-Life Mississippi.

Not all physicians agree with McMillan's position.

"It's going to put physicians in a position of criminal liability, potentially," said Dr. Randall Hines, an infertility specialist.

Hines and many other Mississippi doctors say "Personhood" would bring too much government intrusion, and, they say, it's flawed science.

"Only about 20-percent of fertilized eggs actually go on to become children, so to provide legal rights to all fertilized eggs really is not consistent with what we know about the world," Hines said.

In Tuesday's statewide election, both candidates for governor, Republican and Democrat, say they support "Personhood." Already, the decades-old, anti-abortion campaign here has been successful. There's only one clinic left in the state that provides legal abortions.