Unborn persons lawsuit a possibility with Colorado amendment

Editor,

While I have no intention of starting a debate via opinion letters, I do feel that I should speak out against the personal slander from Sade Patterson’s Amendment 67 article response, in which she referred to me as “uneducated.”

Regarding the issue, I am, in fact, quite well-versed in the facts and have not only read Amendment 67 in full (that is, not picking out a select few words of it and espousing that single point), but I also explained in the article what the law would actually mean for Colorado voters. I gave not only a well-researched response, but a critical and honest explanation of what the amendment is proposing.

I did say that it was a personhood amendment, which is different from a law for homicide protection. After all, it does not exclusively provide protection for such cases, having a much broader and expansive restrictive scope in its terms. It does not give any specific exceptions for any particular case.

What Amendment 67 proposes, while it does mention such protections explicitly, is a general legal definition of the unborn as a person. It does not explicitly say what that would mean, but those implications are what I tried to explicate in the article (only to be informed that my claims were somehow uneducated).

Personhood means that abortions are banned in all cases, including rape, which is why Students for Life supports this. However, loss of a pregnancy can lead to the persecution of the mother and/or her doctor (one wouldn’t think that people would press charges over this sort of thing, but it happens in medical situations all the time; it makes doctors hesitate to actually perform their jobs sometimes). If a woman is not on good terms with her spouse or family, they could use this law against her if she were to suffer a miscarriage. It’s not written out in the law, but this Amendment does give legal precedence for such things.

If the unborn are defined as persons, some women are not even going to be able to have children if they wanted to. Personhood amendments mean restrictions on fertility treatments (persons can’t be stored and so on in laboratories). Even if one is opposed to abortion for any reason (despite the fact that it is a personal medical decision), or even if one simply thinks this law sounds like a decent protection for pregnant women and their children, the facts show that Amendment 67 is too extreme for just those things. Some of this is a repeat of what I told the Daily Lobo in an interview last week, but I wanted to make it clear that I have, in fact, read the amendment and know what I’m talking about.

Anyone interested in reading the actual amendment can do so at: sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/Initiatives/titleBoard/filings/2013-2014/5Final.pdf

Sincerely,

Kendall Lovely

President of UNM’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance