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/SarahConsolacion, Flickr)

During a hearing Monday on the Birth Control Protection Act, five anti-contraception witnesses spoke out as state House Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Jim Reisberg (D-Greeley) tried in vain to keep the hearing room focused on the bill at hand.

Eventually and apologetically, Reisburg succumbed to the committee members’ subtle urging to shut down rambling filibusters and indelicate public disclosures about their personal sexual histories.

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 — the failed 2008 ballot measure that sought to grant constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. The bill would codify “contraception or a contraceptive device as a medically acceptable drug, device, or procedure used to prevent pregnancy.” The duo reasons that having a clear-cut definition that complements current state law defining pregnancy will eliminate a debate over whether contraception induces abortions.

McGihon set the tone, stating straightaway that “this bill is not about abortion” to hearing-room skeptics who believe contraception causes the miscarriage of fertilized eggs.

And, apparently, not only human eggs.

Secondary-school student Samantha Cole urged that oral contraceptives be banned entirely because women taking birth control pills excrete hormones into the wastewater system, which pollutes the watershed, creating intersex fish that are unable to reproduce.

The teenager contrasted the estrogen and progestin found in birth control pills (among many other U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs and products) with the risks of known-carcinogens and neurotoxins such as dioxin, DDT-based pesticides, asbestos, secondhand smoke, and mercury-based vaccines, among other hair-raising health threats.

Cole warned the committee to work toward “getting rid of the poisons in birth control pills or we can all just stop eating fish and drinking water.”

Fort Collins emergency physician Dr. Matt Lutrell rejects the standard medical and scientific determinations of pregnancy at implantation as “a false premise.” Instead, he echoed the conservative Christian interpretation that pregnancy begins at conception — arguments also made in the previous Senate debate that birth control pills are abortifacient.

But what stood out was his off-kilter phrasing of a pre-implantation zygote in terms more reminiscent of a fund-raising plea for a homeless shelter: “All that this new human life needs is a place to live and food to eat.”

Denver lawyer and Catholic antiabortion activist Rebecca Messall, an associate with the GOP power firm Hackstaff Gessler LLC, launched into the abortifacient argument, as well, despite the earlier admonishment of Lutrell by Reisberg for straying off-topic. Messall claimed that pharmaceutical lobbyists conspired with lawmakers to set the “arbitrary date of implantation” as the definition of pregnancy as a defensive tactic to avoid lawsuits for causing abortions in the years before the landmark Roe v. Wade case decriminalized the procedure.

Yet, Reisberg would later have his biggest challenge of the afternoon with the remaining opposition witnesses, who shared highly intimate details of their lives to the obvious discomfort of the committee and gallery.

One witness questioned why the bill didn’t emphasize sexual abstinence after relating her experience on birth control pills and injectable contraceptives beginning at age 11. The young woman told of a difficult home life marred by early sexual activity and teen pregnancy as she sought out “male approval” to replace an absent father.

Vivian Cole also lambasted the committee over the lack of support for abstinence-only education until Reisberg warned her to stick to the bill’s topic. She chose to end her testimony.

Natural family-planning advocates Pete and Marguerite Gormley went into deep detail about their fertility issues and how contraception could have destroyed their marriage. Marguerite Gormley, who counts Archbishop Charles J. Chaput as her hero on Facebook, told the committee, “I had been duped into believing that the pill was helping me [for painful menstrual cycles] for close to 10 years. … Being on birth control never triggered those discussions in our marriage,” she said blaming the convenience of the pill for the delay in starting her family.

Pete Gormley claimed, without any substantiation, that family-planning classes taught him that birth control is not healthy for women and doesn’t constitute medicine. “I never once even considered looking into it and learning what the drug was doing to my wife’s body and potentially to her fertility,” said Gormley, a pharmaceutical chemist by trade and the father of four boys.

Only Evergreen Rep. Cheri Gerou attempted to mount serious opposition by the committee by asking clarifying questions of the witnesses to draw out alternative arguments about contraception conscience clauses and abstinence as a legally defined contraception method. Unlike her GOP Senate colleagues Kevin Lundberg and Ted Harvey, she didn’t mention abortion or conception.

The committee broke on a 6-4 party line vote after McGihon amended the bill to reflect the updated Senate version to exclude emergency contraception from the definition, since it is addressed elsewhere in the state revised code. Affirming the bill was McGihon and Democratic Reps. Reisberg, Sara Gagliardi of Arvada, Gwyn Green of Golden, John Kefalas of Fort Collins and Dianne Primavera of Broomfield. The panel’s Republicans — Reps. Gerou, Jim Kerr of Littleton, B. J. Nikkel of Berthoud, and Spencer Swalm of Centennial — voted no. Aurora Republican Cindy Acree was absent.

The bill moves to the full House for a first reading debate.

(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.