As Saturday’s South Carolina primary voting draws close, presidential candidate Mitt Romney is being savaged on the right for his shifting stance on abortion, just as he was savaged months ago on the left for his shifting stance on abortion.
Federal presidential-election-year campaigns are heating up in Colorado now that the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts have been updated. Yet, so far, Mike Coffman and Scott Tipton, the Republican representatives of new more-competitive districts Six and Three, have yet to articulate for the record their stands on “personhood,” the hard-line anti-abortion proposition that has become a litmus-test issue in Colorado after having landed on the ballot as an initiative in the last two general elections and after clearing hurdles to speed toward the ballot again this year.
Perhaps believing the third time is the charm, Personhood Colorado has announced it will once again seek to amend the Colorado constitution in order to define human life as beginning at the moment of conception. If passed by voters, the proposed amendment would ban all abortions except to save the life of the mother.
Personhood USA, the group behind ballot initiatives that aim to define life as beginning at the moment of conception, has unveiled a new video, comparing its efforts to ban abortion to the civil rights movement.
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has struggled to win over social-conservative primary campaign voters, but he recently took up the hard-core anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-stem cell personhood movement, which would grant full citizen rights to fertilized human eggs. It’s a move that will surely doom his chances to win a general election in Colorado, according to First District Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, head of the congressional pro-choice caucus, and state Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio.
Despite past statements to the contrary, some “fetal personhood” supporters are now admitting that, if enacted, their legislation would likely not only outlaw abortion, but some forms of birth control, as well.
Colorado voters in 2008 and 2010 roundly rejected “personhood” initiatives that aimed to grant full legal rights to human eggs from the moment of fertilization. The national organization behind the idea, Personhood USA, then took its campaign to Mississippi, betting the state’s large bloc of religious voters might put it over the top and set the stage to challenge Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973.
Personhood Colorado Director Gualberto Garcia Jones Tuesday told the Colorado Independent that his organization did not agree with a Facebook page portraying No on 62 campaign members as Nazis. However, he said the dehumanizing thought process that allowed the planned extermination of 5.9 million Jews during the Nazi regime bears similarities to what he sees as the misinformed perception that zygotes are not human.
Colorado has become “ground zero” for the personhood movement in the United States, according to opponents of the initiative. And with funds coming in from out-of-state organizations to bolster both sides of the constitutional fight to redefine the term “person,” the state has become a flash point for a potential ethical wildfire.
The coalition assembled to fight Colorado’s anti-abortion “personhood” ballot initiative in 2008 has regrouped to fight the 2010 version of the amendment. “Here we go again,” the reformed Protect Families, Protect Choices (PFPC) writes in a release Tuesday.…
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