The Washington Post reports this morning that another Democratic Party tracker video of U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck is making waves, this one capturing the candidate saying he opposes abortion without exceptions for rape and incest. The only exception he could support, he says on the tape, would be if the life of the mother were in danger. For Colorado political watchers, it’s that last part that’s news.
Buck has articulated his hard line position on abortion since he launched his campaign. He has also endorsed the controversial personhood amendment slated for the November ballot here, as has his GOP primary opponent Jane Norton. That amendment would grant fertilized human eggs the full spectrum of legal rights. In that framework, there is no exception for rape or incest, of course, and aborting the fertilized egg or fetus to save the life of the mother would be murder, fully prosecutable under the law.
That’s the lens through which to view Buck’s comments:
QUESTION: How do you feel about abortion? Are you for abortion, against abortion, are you for it? In what instances would you allow for abortion?
BUCK: I am pro-life, and I’ll answer the next question. I don’t believe in the exceptions of rape or incest. I believe that the only exception, I guess, is life of the mother. And that is only if it’s truly life of the mother.
To me, you can’t say you’re pro-life and say — if there is, and it’s a very rare situation where one life would have to cease for the other life to exist. But in that very rare situation, we may have to take the life of the child to save the life of the mother.
In that rare situation, I am in favor of that exception. But other than that I have no exceptions in my position.
The personhood amendment, like the tea party movement, is a marker of the far right swing the mainstream GOP has taken this year. In 2008, few of the GOP Colorado candidates backed that year’s version of the personhood amendment. This year, every major Republican candidate for office has backed the proposal, which legal analysts say would change the state constitution in thousands of places and shut down the fertility industry and stem cell research here. It would also set a whole new limited standard for the rights of pregnant women.
“Constitutional jurisprudence is all about weighing interests,” former Planned Parenthood attorney Kevin C. Paul of Heizer Paul LLP told the Colorado Independent in November. “If you’re creating a new interest, one that hadn’t existed previously, then that interest is going to have to be weighed against [those of] anybody else. And if you take the position that an unborn fetus is to be legally treated just the same as a woman, then those two interests clash.”
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