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.
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.
Should taxpayer funds be used to help a “Christ centered ministry” buy and renovate a building in which it will offer Bible instruction and other services aimed at preventing abortion?
Jennifer Mason, spokeswoman for Personhood Colorado, told the Colorado Independent, she believes it’s not too late for her group to land its anti-abortion initiative on the ballot in Colorado this year.
On a Friday morning in September 2005, 22-year-old Brittany Wilson sat in a Planned Parenthood clinic a mile away from her home in Sioux Falls, S.D., and bawled her eyes out. Ten days before, she had called the clinic to schedule an abortion. Three days before her appointment, she had called back to listen to some state-mandated information about the risks of abortion and her legal rights. And moments before, she had driven to the clinic alone and paid $447. But she was crying, she would later say, because she did not want this abortion.
DENVER– A rally hosted here Thursday on the steps of the capitol by this year’s “No Personhood Campaign” featured speakers who decried government intervention into citizens’ private lives and admonished overreaching political activists who would tap the organs of the state to solve perceived social ills.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s title board on Wednesday approved language for a “religious freedom” ballot initiative submitted last month by Colorado Springs-based evangelical organization Focus on the Family. Supporters of the initiative can now begin collecting the roughly 86,000 valid voter signatures it will take to land the proposal on election ballots this November.
A new report from the Guttmacher Institute shows that, in the past decade, a substantial number of states have shifted from having only a moderate number of abortion restrictions to becoming “overtly hostile” to abortion rights.
The Colorado Personhood Coalition on Thursday hosted rallies at Planned Parenthood clinics in Denver and Colorado Springs to launch the coalition’s drive to gather signatures for its anti-abortion ballot initiative.
Do you know where to vote on Election Day? Do you know what to bring with you? Get comprehensive voter information for your state here.
rss