The Denver-based American Right to Life Action (RTL) leads the charge against Coulter with a YouTube video that shows excerpts of Coulter’s on-air radio freak-outs and calls on the acid-tongued author to apologize and retract her support for Romney.

In typical Coulter fashion, she calls the critics “crazy Romney froofers,” “fanatics” and “on the order of 9-11 conspiracy theorists” before hanging up.

The foul-mouthed pundit, whose stock in trade is making withering remarks about liberals, may have met her match in American RTL’s leaders: ex-Colorado GOP chairman Steve Curtis, Brian Rohrbough, whose son Daniel died in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, and bombastic Pastor Bob Enyart — the three men are no shrinking violets themselves.

The controversial group was established in November 2007 shortly after Colorado Right to Life was booted from its affiliate status with National Right to Life for running a series of ads criticizing Focus on the Family founder James Dobson for not being anti-abortion enough in The Washington [D.C.] Times and Colorado Springs Gazette.

American RTL then moved on as an outspoken backer of Amendment 48, the failed 2008 Colorado ballot measure that sought to give constitutional rights to fertilized eggs.

Bashing Coulter appears to be its latest cause célèbre.

Says Rohrbough in a written statement accompanying the video release:

Ann Coulter has misrepresented and even defended some of the most egregious and immoral behavior. When Ann covers up aggressively anti-marriage action, and pro-abortion legislation that actually funds the killing of unborn children, she apparently is motivated by a desire to distort the truth and deceive Christians for some personal gain.

However, current health policy discussions about the role of publicly funded preventive reproductive health care services demonstrate a great step forward in accepting that health care includes family planning. In fact, debates over the availability of affordable birth control, sex education and the financial wherewithal to acquire said resources, are moot without considering the critical role government can play to empower individuals to make responsible reproductive health decisions. This includes the support of publicly funded family planning programs like Title X and the Medicaid family planning waiver.

According to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute, 2 million unintended pregnancies and 810,000 abortions nationwide are prevented annually by publicly funded family planning services. In Colorado, publicly funded family planning centers are estimated to have saved more than $69 million in 2004 alone and, in 2006, prevented 28,500 unintended pregnancies and 11,900 abortions. These numbers demonstrate the value of publicly funded, equitable resources that enable families of all socio-economic backgrounds to acquire the means for a secure livelihood.

Further, the current economic downturn puts a significant strain on state resources. For Colorado, where state taxpayer dollars cover prenatal, delivery, and infant-care expenses for an estimated 28,000 births every year, the Guttmacher report states an easy path to minimize health care expenditures covered by the state is to invest in preventive reproductive health care.

Last year, Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law a bill that removed a statutorily imposed income-eligibility cap for preventive family planning services provided through the state’s Medicaid program. The law authorizes the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) to determine an appropriate income-eligibility limit indexed to the federal poverty level that demonstrates budget neutrality. HCPF must submit a waiver to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for this change to go into effect. If approved, the waiver will enable Coloradans who don’t have health insurance and who otherwise would not qualify for full Medicaid benefits to be eligible for preventive reproductive health care services.

Colorado joined the ranks of more than 25 other states that are working to expand their publicly funded family planning programs to ensure affordable access to critical services that not only yield significant cost savings, but also have a tremendous impact on reducing unintended pregnancy, the need for abortion, and the spread of dangerous diseases.

Research verifies that $4 are saved for $1 invested in preventive reproductive health care services, from birth control counseling, distribution of contraceptive drugs and devices, and screenings for sexually transmitted infections. And Colorado pays just 10 cents of every $1 spent on these preventive family planning services, unlike other health care services covered by Medicaid.

As of 2008, 26 states had obtained federal approval to extend eligibility for Medicaid family planning services to individuals who would otherwise not be eligible; 20 states extend benefits under an income-eligibility formula similar to that pursued by Colorado. These states have demonstrated that expanded family planning services have dramatically reduced overall state and federal spending because of a decrease in Medicaid expenditures for prenatal, delivery, and infant care coverage.

More than 270,000 Colorado women and girls aged 13 to 44 needed publicly funded birth control services and supplies in 2006. This number will only rise as private insurance rates increase and Coloradans who have been laid off lose their health care benefits. Colorado already has taken steps to maximize the opportunities for savings, but given the current climate, we can and must do better.

By working in collaboration with medical experts, community-based organizations, and reproductive health care advocates, Colorado policymakers can develop common-sense strategies that ensure preventive family planning services are considered core health insurance benefits and essential components in comprehensive health care reform. As a result, Coloradans can realize both tremendous cost savings related to reproductive health care, and healthier families and communities.

Emilie Ailts is executive director of Denver-based NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado.

The Birth Control Protection Act passed on a largely party-line roll call vote of 39 to 25, with House Minority Leader Paul Weissman excused. Western Slope moderate Reps. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, and Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, voted with the Democrats.

State Rep. Anne McGihon and state Sen. Betty Boyd, both Denver Democrats, crafted SB 225 to thwart future legal or constitutional challenges similar to Amendment 48 (pdf) — the failed 2008 ballot measure that sought to grant constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. The bill codifies “contraception or a contraceptive device as a medically acceptable drug, device, or procedure used to prevent pregnancy.” The lawmakers reasoned that having a clear-cut definition that complements current state law defining pregnancy will eliminate a debate over whether contraception induces abortions.

Prior to the floor vote, Rep. Amy Stephens, R-Colorado Springs, inexplicably related her personal experience with in-vitro fertilization and opposition to Amendment 48. Stephens urged House members to defeat the bill using the same logic of the failed poison pill amendment that provisions defining conception and contraception should be “married together.” The decades-old state legal definition of pregnancy is implantation of a fertilized egg, the commonly accepted scientific and medical description.

Rep. Cheri Gerou, R-Evergreen, reassured her colleagues that she “isn’t going to talk about myself, so guys you can quit squirming over there.” Gerou also rehashed her Friday talking points by opposing the bill over what she perceives as a freedom of choice limitation — though she never explained how defining contraception creates a chilling effect.

The bill passed the Senate March 5 and now moves to Gov. Bill Ritter’s office.

At the behest of Ritter and Catholic hospital representatives, Boyd amended the bill to exclude mifespristone, also known as RU-486, and other federally approved pharmaceuticals that induce abortion, from the proposed legal definition of contraception. With that provision added, it is believed Ritter will sign the bill.

During the floor debate, bill co-sponsor Rep. Anne McGihon (D-Denver) derided the wrecking amendment offered by Rep. Don Marostica (R-Loveland) as a back door tactic to grant “personhood” to fertilized eggs. The poison pill created a no-win situation for the bill’s backers who couldn’t support adding a religious provision to the law.

McGihon argued that the pregnancy definition amendment moved SB 225 into the realm of the religious rather than the medical and scientific definition that is already codified in Colorado law as implantation in the uterus. The Denver Democrat reminded her colleagues that voters resoundingly defeated Amendment 48 — the 2008 ballot measure that sought to confer constitutional rights on fertilized eggs as full-fledged persons.

Marostica’s amendment was defeated on a voice vote.

SB 225 proposes to add “contraception or a contraceptive device as a medically acceptable drug, device, or procedure used to prevent pregnancy” to the Colorado revised code. McGihon and her Denver counterpart Sen. Betty Boyd contend that having a clear-cut definition that complements current state law defining pregnancy will eliminate future debate over whether contraception induces abortions.

The bill passed its second reading on a noisy voice vote with 33 House members affirming support. It now moves to a third and final reading Monday.

(Photo/Stacy Lynn Baum, Flickr)

The proposed Birth Control Protection Act (SB 225). introduced by state Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, is designed to stem future frontal assaults on contraception by conservative lawmakers and religious activists who argue birth control pills are an “abortifacient,” or a substance that can induce an abortion. By legally defining a “contraceptive or contraception as a medically acceptable drug, device, or procedure used to prevent pregnancy” Boyd believes she’s created a fail-safe to protect women’s reproductive freedom.

The challenge by Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, countered that SB 225 “codifies the ability to destroy life after conception” because some contraceptive methods prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Harvey said that contraception that prevents conception is OK in the state statute but after the joining of egg and sperm it is inappropriate and morally reprehensible as if birth control pills can be programmed to act as heat-seeking missiles for free-floating zygotes.

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, who backed Harvey at the podium, has long-proposed defining pregnancy at conception rather than the widely-held medical and scientific interpretation that hormone excretion following the implantation of a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus determines pregnancy. But while Harvey carefully crafted his opposition arguments, Lundberg raised the controversial “A” word immediately. The Berthoud lawmaker asserted that Boyd’s bill uses circular logic that “[contraception] is not abortive” — arguing instead that birth control “terminates” the fertilized egg between the moment of conception and implantation.

Except, obstetric and gynecological experts report that from 60 to 80 percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant naturally, completely outside the use of contraceptives. Likewise, there is no scientific test to detect pregnancy at conception until weeks after the egg implants in the uterus.

During the debate, Lundberg claimed only a small handful of other states use what he termed the “convenient,” “not unanimous” and “scientifically inaccurate” definition of pregnancy rather than the conservative Christian construct of conception. In fact, Missouri is the only state that has codified “life begins at conception” in its state constitution.

Despite their protests, Harvey and Lundberg are using a widely repudiated conservative religious frame that hormonal and device contraceptives cause abortion. That same tactic was initially voiced by proponents of the so-called “Personhood Amendment” that sought to confer constitutional rights on fertilized eggs on the 2008 state ballot. That early semantic stumble was quickly backburnered by the personhood campaign after it became apparent that Colorado’s majority pro-reproductive choice electorate was in no mood for a referendum on contraception let alone an all out anti-abortion fight.

Although Amendment 48 was soundly defeated by a 3-to-1 margin, Boyd’s bill seeks to thwart continued states rights-fueled challenges to Roe vs Wade by anti-abortion activists.

“It’s a very simple bill actually,” Boyd told the Colorado Independent moments before she introduced the legislation to the Senate Health and Human Services Committee last week. “It keeps contraceptives out of the [personhood] argument … I think we’re clearly stating what contraception is and when you talk about preventing pregnancy that in no way is abortion. This is designed to prevent the potential need for anyone to seek an abortion.”

Lundberg and fellow ultra-conservative caucus members Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, and Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, panned the measure in committee but were defeated on a 5-3 party line roll call vote. Schultheis was pilloried after a Feb. 25 Senate floor discussion on SB 179 for remarking that HIV testing of pregnant women rewards promiscuity. He held his tongue during the committee debate on Boyd’s contraception bill the day after that firestorm.

At the behest of Gov. Bill Ritter and Catholic hospital representatives, Boyd offered an amendment to her own bill to exclude mifespristone, also known as RU-486, and other federally approved pharmaceuticals that induce abortion from the proposed legal definition of contraception.

Harvey’s amendment was ultimately beat back by Boyd with a title ruling request, a legal maneuver to determine whether the challenge has merit as a modification of the bill in question or goes too far afield from the subject at hand. Legislative legal services ruled that Harvey’s claim didn’t stand the test.

The bill passed on a voice vote and goes to third reading in the Senate Thursday where, if approved, will move to the House to be shepherded by co-sponsor Rep. Anne McGihon, D-Denver.

AP reports that the measure’s sponsor, North Dakota Rep. Dan Ruby, R-Minot, denies the legislation will ban abortion, a long-held and as yet unsuccessful aim in previous legislative sessions.

Bismark CBS affiliate KXMB broadcast snippets of the House debate where the true goal of the law — challenging Roe v. Wade — was made public.

Opponents of the tactic argue that the proposed law’s overly broad language could also outlaw reproductive health care, contraception, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research that involves fertilized eggs.

A statement from the bill’s proponents echo a blast from Colorado’s not-so-distant election cycle past:

“Personhood USA applauds the leadership and support that the North Dakota Life League and North Dakota Family Alliance have shown to make this victory happen,” stated Keith Mason of Personhood USA. He continued, “We thank Rep. Dan Ruby for his courage and for being actively pro-life. This great family man with his wife and 10 children are an example to us all.”

“North Dakotans have gotten used to cold temperatures like -44 degrees, but they haven’t gotten used to child-killing. We applaud and support their efforts to protect every baby by love and by law,” commented Cal Zastrow, who, along with his family, worked on the North Dakota bill at the grassroots level.

Mason, from Wichita, Kan., was best known as an Operation Rescue “truth truck” driver before signing on to the Colorado for Equal Rights push that attempted to add the anti-abortion language to Colorado’s Constitution in 2008. He and Michigan resident Zastrow formed Personhood USA after their efforts to help pass Amendment 48 went down in a crushing 73-27 defeat. The pair now refer to themselves as “missionaries to the pre-born.”

If voters approve Allen’s ballot measure — after it passes through various hurdles to make the ballot — it could be written to override Amendment 43, the 2006 constitutional measure that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman, Bartels reports.

Allen told Bartels it’s only fair that gay couples “should have the same rights he and his girlfriend of seven years, Crystal Russell, would enjoy if they got married.”

RH Reality Check’s correspondent Kay Steiger attended the conference — timed to coincide with Barack Obama’s inauguration — and caught up with Burton about the “egg as a person” legal movement at the aptly named Liaison Capitol Hill Hotel in Washington, D.C.

That, of course, came after listening to former ambassador and perennial paleoconservative political candidate Alan Keyes bloviate for 57 minutes on biblical themes with little mention of the anti-abortion movement.

Since the ballot measure’s crushing 3-to-1 loss in November, Burton appears to have taken those hard-fought lessons to heart for her next expected go-around with voters.

She urged the pro-life movement to begin to hire political consultants, analyze polling data, and raise more money. This, she admits, comes from her active work with the Republican Party. She noted that the personhood movement often doesn’t get support from mainstream Republicans, pointing to the Republican Senate candidate in Colorado, Bob Schaffer, who came out against the personhood amendment despite identifying as pro-life. “Politicians and pro-lifers don’t really get along that well,” Burton said.

Most of all, she noted, the movement needs to unify. “Do you ever see NARAL, Planned Parenthood or NOW fighting against each other? No, because they have one goal and they don’t really care about anything but their goal,” Burton said.

But then things get muddy, as they did during the campaign season, about just what legal rights for fertilized eggs would mean.

Burton wants conservative activists to adopt the personhood campaign’s framework in their legislative efforts to prohibit stem cell research, eliminate emergency contraception, promote informed consent, and criminalize “fetal homicide.” But she steadfastly denies that Amendment 48 would have expressly affected such issues.

“The personhood amendment was a definition,” explained Burton, who is enrolled in a non-accredited Bible-based online law school. “What it said was that in the future, when our courts and our legislators are considering laws relating to those kind of things — I mean in Colorado there isn’t even a law on birth control, so how a definition can affect a law that doesn’t exist, I’m not sure.”

Except there are state laws on contraception among other reproductive health services.

Maybe it’s time to hit the law books again.

Following the overwhelming defeat of Amendment 48 — the ground-breaking “personhood” initiative to confer constitutional rights on fertilized human eggs last Election Day — this year’s annual march assembly underscored the sense of how lost the local antiabortion movement seems to have become after years of shocking vitriol, clinic violence and internecine fighting that has turned off much of the public.

The protest ran the gamut from the usual fiery antiabortion invocation declaring President Barack Obama a baby killer to a professorial lecture on 18th-century slavery abolition politics and soft Christian music interludes in between. The crowd of 275 people alternately hoisted gory homemade signs and extended gently swaying hands in the air to the cadence of prayers.

The schisms within the antiabortion community — from those invoking violent imagery to prayerful opposition and the politically powerful — were well-represented at the march.

A gaggle of Cub Scouts proudly bearing merit badges were joined in the crowd with pious Franciscan sisters in full black habit and gray veils, retirees, a bus load of high school students and families of all ages.

Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis of Colorado Springs sang along to an electric piano accompaniment of “Everyone has a Right to Life,” while Berthoud’s new senator, Kevin Lundberg, and House Republican Caucus Chair Amy Stephens looked on. GOP rising star state Sen. Scott Refroe was greeted enthusiastically by the crowd after an odd shout-out by the master of ceremonies, Colorado Right to Life’s president Joe Riccobono, who failed to recognize the other lawmakers standing in front of the crowd.

At the same time, the Operation Rescue “truth truck,” a rolling advertisement plastered with antiabortion slogans and gruesome images of dismembered fetuses, circled the block around the Statehouse.

Yet even the March for Life itself seems torn between its own conflicting personas of rabble-rousing advocates with a penchant for picking fights with Focus in the Family and serving as the local political muscle for the personhood initiative.

The event program featuring a photoshopped image of a scalpel resting on top of a slave shackle.

It appears the antiabortion movement is having a middle-age crisis, if not an existential one.

The rally’s keynote speaker, author Eric Metaxas, implored the crowd, during a nearly 30-minute recitation on British abolitionist William Wilberforce from his biography-turned-movie “Amazing Grace,” to be real Christians and turn away from the temptation of criticizing their opponents. Metaxas’ long speech was delivered in such a quiet and unassuming manner portions of the crowd began to get restless, since they were likely expecting the rip-roaring barn burners of past rallies — or at least the fervor of Pastor Kevin Swanson’s preceding invocation — than a Christian advocacy history lesson.

Following the speech, Metaxas told me, “It’s always lonely being on the right side of history because in the beginning you always sound crazy.” To him, the fight to imbue slaves with unalienable rights 200 years ago is a perfect analog to the quest for personhood status of fertilized eggs, a political action first attempted in Colorado and catching fire with religious conservatives nationwide.

The soft-spoken contributing writer and narrator of the popular children’s morality video series, “Veggie Tales,” Metaxas uses the same value touchstones expressed by animated tomatoes and cucumbers to TV tots in talking about how movement Christians need to talk with more love and humility. While all the same acknowledging how “radical” the personhood concept is to some folks — especially for those who voted against Amendment 48, which was defeated in a 73-27 drubbing in statewide polls and by a similar margin in ultra-conservative Colorado Springs.

It’s tough to not to question the futility of this headier argument that fetuses, like black slaves a century before them, enjoy only “three-fifths of personhood” when a family with young children standing near the West steps of the Capitol held a hand-lettered “Obama ? Nation” poster board sign replete with Nazi symbolism and pasted dot-matrix printouts from some grisly antiabortion photo stockpile.

While Metaxas decried to me the “specter of a few nuts” that give the antiabortion movement a bad name, a man decked head-to-toe in camouflage with a free “I survived Roe vs. Wade” rally T-shirt draped over his shoulders stood nearby carrying a sign — “Abortion is the New Holocaust.”

There goes the “truth truck” again.

Correction: State Rep. Amy Stephens was misidentified in the original publication of this story as having attended the rally. She did not. The Colorado Independent deeply regrets the error.

The league’s communications director, Katie Walker, offered this startling admission to the Christian newswire OneNewsNow.com about ALL’s future political strategies:

The idea of personhood in this movement is really the only thing, the only option left to us, and it’s one of the best options and one of the most beautiful concepts I’ve heard in a long time, she contends. We’re very excited about it.

Is one of the major players in the anti-abortion movement waving the white flag of surrender?

Not so fast. Why do that when, as Walker continues in a bizarre bit of revisionist Colorado political history, backpedaling can get the job done to downplay Amendment 48′s bruising 73-27 loss:

The fact that they got 27 percent of Colorado, which is historically a liberal state, is very hopeful, I think, she notes.

Huh? Historically liberal state? The one that George W. Bush carried in both 2000 and 2004 by sizeable margins? The state in which 53 percent of the voters approved Amendment 2 in 1992, which would have barred civil rights protections for gay and lesbians until it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court? The state that, until four years ago, held large Republican majorities in the General Assembly and its congressional delegation for decades?

And the state where U.S. News and World Report noted that the Colorado personhood measure went down in flames 65-35 in conservative El Paso County, in the backyard of Focus on the Family and a host of state and national anti-abortion groups and conservative candidates, like Bob Schaffer.

As we reported Nov. 7, the group Personhood USA is undaunted and claims to be picking up the mantle of Colorado for Equal Rights with plans to introduce the “egg as a person” measure to 16 states that opponents say would not only outlaw abortion, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research but also certain forms of contraception.

h/t Right Wing Watch.org