Last night, Mississippi voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative to redefine fertilized eggs as people. As of Wednesday morning, the measure stood defeated by a margin of 58% to 42% with nearly all precincts reporting. This is a surprising result. On the eve of the vote, most observers expected the measure to pass.

November Sidney Award winner Irin Carmon takes a closer look at how Mississippi beat Initiative 26 in Salon. Grassroots activists, including rape survivors, doctors, parents by in vitro fertilization, and members of the clergy joined forces with national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. It probably helped that a PersonhoodUSA spokesman predicted on national radio that Initiative 26 would ban the birth control pill.

As underwhelming as their performance was last night, this is a high water mark for the egg-as-person movement. If you can’t declare a fertilized ovum a full-fledged human being in Mississippi, you can’t do it anywhere in America. Similar proposals were defeated by 40-point margins in Colorado in 2008 and 2010. Undeterred by the overwhelming evidence, PersonhoodUSA has vowed to introduce similar measures in Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Nevada and California in 2012.