Colorado abortion foes to try 'personhood' measures again - Boulder Daily Camera

DENVER — An anti-abortion group that sponsored an unsuccessful constitutional amendment in Mississippi said Monday it will try again next year in Colorado, Montana and Oregon.

Denver-based Personhood USA has campaigned for state constitutional amendments defining life as beginning at fertilization. The amendments sought to ban abortion. Many physicians have said they could make some birth control illegal and deter in vitro fertilization.

Personhood amendments have failed twice in Colorado, and Mississippi voters rejected an amendment this year.

A new version of the measure “will protect every child, no matter their size, level of development, gender, age or race,” Jennifer Mason, spokeswoman for Personhood USA, told The Denver Post.

Personhood USA said it would submit its proposed ballot language to the Colorado secretary of state’s office for approval before collecting signatures to place it on the ballot.

Organizers said they will have volunteers circulate petitions at grocery stores.

Any successful measure would likely trigger legal challenges because it would conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that established a legal right to abortion.

In Mississippi, which has some of the nation’s toughest abortion regulations, voters rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment 58 percent to 42 percent on Nov. 8. Republican Gov. Haley Barbour said he thought proponents erred by putting the amendment on the ballot instead of going through the Legislature.

“If it had gone to the Legislature, the wrinkles in it would have been worked out,” Barbour said after the vote.

“Instead, these were some people from Colorado who had an initiative they tried twice to pass in Colorado and they couldn’t,” Barbour said. “And they thought, ‘What’s the most pro-life state in the country?’ Well it’s Mississippi. So they came to Mississippi with a half-baked initiative.”

In 2008 and 2010, Colorado voters overwhelmingly rejected anti-abortion proposals that would have granted constitutional rights at the moment of conception under the state constitution. Opponents warned the amendments would ban fertility treatments and emergency contraception if they harmed fertilized eggs. Backers argued 21st century DNA experiments make it imperative to give fetuses human rights.

Abortion rights advocates raised nearly 10 times the cash that abortion foes did to defeat the 2010 effort.

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