Editor,
Colorado is on the move to define an unborn human being as a “person” via Amendment 67 “Protection of Pregnant Mothers and Unborn Children,” which will be up for vote on the Nov. 4 ballot.
This proposal was initiated after an expecting mother, Heather Surovik, was hit by repeat drunk driver Gary Sheats in the final weeks of her pregnancy and lost her 8-month-old baby. The driver was never sentenced. Following 38 other states in the United States, this bill would grant unborn babies fetal homicide rights, protecting them from criminal acts that result in the termination of a pregnancy.
Misconceptions of this bill have caused much controversy within Colorado and even our UNM campus due to individuals neglecting to read the proposed bill. Kendall Lovely, president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance at UNM, stated in a Daily Lobo article on Friday that “even a miscarriage could leave the expecting mother in the hands of the law” and that “health care professionals might be in danger of legal action if one ... delivers a stillborn baby.”
Lovely’s uneducated claims could not be further from the truth, since no other state that grants fetal homicide rights convicts women or doctors who lose a baby out of natural causes.
The bill clearly states that the intentional termination of a fetus, which includes elective abortion and any criminal act upon the mother that results in the death of the baby, will be considered a crime. Exceptions include emergency procedures that are performed to save the life of the mother, miscarriages and any other natural death of a fetus.
Lovely should have researched this first before she made an official statement, saying that “there are no exceptions in this bill.”
It’s important to understand that unborn humans should be allotted the same homicide rights as any born human being. People need to know that Colorado is merely taking the steps to protect its own citizens from criminal acts, and not get confused with misleading perceptions that the bill is criminalizing mothers and doctors who have no part in causing the death of an unborn baby.
Sincerely,
Sade Patterson
Vice President of UNM’s Students for Life
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