Colorado’s Weld County Board on Monday renewed a 2010 policy that prevented county health clinics funded by the federal Title X women’s health program from dispensing Plan B emergency contraception to their mostly young and low-income patients.
Rep. Amy Stephens — a Colorado Springs Republican who once worked for evangelical powerhouse organization Focus on the Family — argued Tuesday against an anti-abortion proposal that would have made providing emergency contraception to victims of rape and incest a Class 3 felony.
When Weld County commissioners decided to stop providing emergency contraception to county patients, concerns rooted in anti-abortion politics trumped scientific facts and testimony provided by the county’s medical chief, according to documents obtained by The Colorado Independent.
Lori Stodghill was 31-one years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.
A controversial and unreported move by the Board of Weld County Commissioners to stop dispensing emergency contraception has forced low-income county health department patients to seek the drugs at the scant number of non-profit clinics in the area.
After two GOP Senate candidates saw their campaigns implode when they made controversial comments about abortion and rape, Republicans like Sen. John McCain have been asking their party to just shut up about abortion.
Americans voted to reelect President Barack Obama tonight, giving him four more years to work to expand the economy and drive down stubborn unemployment numbers. Throughout the long campaign, voters told pollsters they favored his steady demeanor and, in the end, embraced his vision of a government that sought to prioritize middle class opportunity, in part through a federal tax policy that asks the top earners in the country to pay the same rates they paid in the Clinton years, when the U.S. economy boomed.
Pete Lee has served one term in the Colorado House, and as a Democrat from conservative Colorado Springs, he is a marked man. He calls himself a moderate, but he supports abortion rights and same-sex civil unions, which makes him a radical liberal in the eyes of some El Paso County Republicans.
BOULDER– In a speech that alternated between conversational asides and full-throat exhortations, President Obama rallied roughly 11,000 supporters at the packed Coors Event Center on the University of Colorado campus here Thursday. It was the latest but not the last scheduled event in the high-intensity swing-state get-out-the-vote effort his campaign here has orchestrated for the final short stretch to Election Day next week.
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet rode to victory in Colorado two years ago with the support of women, who wanted nothing to do with Republican challenger Ken Buck’s hardline position on abortion and what seemed to be a dismissive attitude toward women in general.
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