Tag: Egg As A Person

Eight months pregnant, confused and suffering psychological disorders, Jessica Clyburn jumped from a fifth story window in South Carolina. According to the media, she had attempted unsuccessfully to commit suicide. According to the District Attorneys office, she had committed murder. "Clyburn survived but suffered a stillbirth as a result of the fall. She was arrested on homicide charges and is still being held without bail," attorney Lynn M. Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women told the Colorado Independent.

A version of the anti-abortion initiative soundly defeated by Colorado voters in 2008 is making its way to the 2010 ballot, this time reworked as an "egg-as-a-person" initiative. This new version would move the legal definition of a person further back into the reproductive cycle, granting cells the full spectrum of citizen rights. Opposition groups, including Colorado genetic and fertilization researchers, say the law would have spiraling consequences, that it would put women at risk and freeze current work in medicine and reproduction.

Out-of-state anti-abortion activists who rallied behind Colorado's Amendment 48 last year came up with another big goose egg Friday when the North Dakota Senate rejected a "personhood" bill that sought to confer constitutional rights to zygotes. But reproductive rights advocates aren't cheering Roughrider State lawmakers just yet.

Ultra-conservative Christian talk radio hosts are taking a new approach to getting their message out — ambushing right-wing pundit Ann Coulter over her support for 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who absolutist antiabortion activists accuse of being "willing to sacrifice children for your vote." The Denver-based American Right to Life Action is leading the charge with a YouTube video excerpting Coulter's on-air radio freak outs and calling on the acid-tongued author to apologize and retract her support for Romney.

This year is the 55th birthday of the birth control pill. It is also 44 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut. Yet, debates over family planning and contraception are alive and widespread. Coloradans witnessed this first hand last fall when the "personhood" amendment that could have re-criminalized birth control in the state was defeated. Similar measures have already been introduced in seven other states so far this year.

Efforts to block a contraception bill shriveled today in the Colorado House after a series of weird and contentious legislative hearings and an unsuccessful attempt during a House floor debate Friday to add a poison pill amendment to insert the religious definition of pregnancy as at the moment of conception.

Colorado House Republicans failed in their attempt Friday to modify the Birth Control Protection Act that would re-define pregnancy as at the moment of conception. 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.

Conservative activists are celebrating the latest antiabortion bill to wind its way through a state legislature — this time in Montana — that seeks to challenge the landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade decision legalizing abortion. Except before they party hearty, a quick check of state law reveals the likelihood of a constitutional "personhood" amendment to give fertilized eggs civil rights is as flat as stale champagne.

Semantics were the order of the day when conservative Republican state senators attempted to weaken a bill defining contraception arguing that the state must first define that "life begins at conception."

A controversial political tactic to ban some reproductive health services moved a step closer Tuesday. A bill to confer constitutional rights on fertilized human eggs passed the North Dakota state House Tuesday and moves on to the Senate.