MEMPHIS -- The online video features idyllic snatches of Tennessee daily life: guitar players, old barns, church socials -- and the official Tennessee welcome sign, glimpsed through the window of a car passing over the state line.
But then there is a strategically placed, and purely fictional, detail: The welcome sign announces Tennessee as "Your Abortion Destination."
The video was designed by abortion opponents here who believe that Tennessee has for too long been a Bible Belt outlier due to a state Supreme Court decision in 2000 that ruled that the state's constitutional guarantee of a right to privacy includes the right to an abortion. Over the years, the ruling has served as a partial bulwark against the wave of abortion restrictions that have swept other conservatives states.
Now, anti-abortion forces are trying to change that at the ballot box by passing Amendment 1, which states that nothing in the Tennessee Constitution "secures or protects" a right to abortion.
Two other states, Colorado and North Dakota, are also trying to restrict abortion this Election Day with so-called "personhood" ballot measures, which would extend extra rights and protections to the unborn. Colorado previously has voted twice against versions of the measure.
In Tennessee, the ballot fight has taken center stage this political season, and abortion opponents are buoyed by the Democratic Party's poor chance of recapturing the governor's mansion. The party's challenger to incumbent Bill Haslam, a Republican, is Charles Brown, a retired construction worker and political neophyte best known for his suggestion that Haslam be strapped to an electric chair.
"When there's no real candidate to vote for, it's hard," said Rebecca Terrell, the executive director of Choices, a clinic in Memphis that offers abortions, in acknowledging that abortion-rights forces face a hard time getting out the liberal vote.
Haslam has voiced his support for Amendment 1, as have many members of the Republican-dominated state government. Supporters say the amendment would allow legislators to bring the state in line with the rest of the region. The Tennessee health department says that 23 percent of women who received abortions in 2013 lived outside Tennessee.
For a woman in the fast-growing city of Southaven, Miss., for example, the trip to Mississippi's sole abortion clinic, in Jackson, is three hours by car. Mississippi law requires women to undergo counseling, and a 24-hour waiting period, before an abortion may be performed.
But the same patient can be at Choices, one of two Memphis abortion clinics, in 20 minutes. Tennessee requires no special counseling and no waiting period.
"Should Tennessee be the abortion capital of the Bible Belt?" Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention, said in a post on Twitter last month.
Abortion-rights advocates reject such characterizations, noting that even with the 2000 ruling, legislators have enacted abortion regulations, including a 2012 law mandating that physicians who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a local hospital.
They also argue that the percentage of out-of-state patients fails to account for Tennessee's geographic setting. It is surrounded by eight states whose residents often travel to places like Memphis for all kinds of services.
The 2000 ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought against the governor at the time, Don Sundquist, by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. The court ruled that "a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy is a vital part of the right to privacy" under the state's constitution, making any regulations of that right subject to a rigorous "strict scrutiny" standard. Both abortion-rights advocates and anti-abortion forces agree that it created a level of protection for abortion higher than that afforded by the federal courts.
In the ruling, the state court also struck down three abortion-related provisions: a required two-day waiting period, a mandate that only physicians may give informed consent to an abortion patient and a requirement that all abortions after the first trimester be performed in a hospital.
Anti-abortion campaigners have been trying to undo the ruling for years. They were helped along by the election of a wave of conservative, anti-abortion candidates to the state Legislature in 2010. These members, in 2011, helped Amendment 1 garner the two-thirds supermajority necessary to put it on the ballot in the next election for governor.
A Section on 10/26/2014