That Personhood Amendment Again

Oh Colorado anti-choicers, you'll never give up trying to criminalize miscarriages and abortions through stupid, unconstitutional personhood amendments, will you?  Here we have Amendment 67, yet another attempt to give full legal rights to cells.  The ploy this time: making a poster child of Heather Surovik, a woman who tragically lost her unborn child in a car accident to a drunk driver.

Warning: FOX News link, only being used because of the admission of actual truth in FOX News story.

This time in Colorado, though, supporters have tied the measure to a tragic accident in July 2012. Heather Surovik was eight months pregnant and on her way back from a prenatal visit when her car was struck by a drunk driver.

"When she woke up in the hospital, she was told that her baby had not survived," Amendment 67 backer Jennifer Mason recalled. "But not only that, there would be no charges filed in relation to his death because under Colorado law, he was not considered a person."

Heather Surovik said, "They can't tell me that's not a baby. He was eight pounds, two ounces. Brady was the second victim, and nobody recognized it."

Yes, tragic, but Amendment 67 is not the solution, and backers of it know what it's really for.

Fofi Mendez, campaign manager of "Vote NO 67," sympathizes with Heather Surovik's loss but warns that redefining the words "person" and "child" to include the unborn would have the effect of banning all abortions, and even some forms of birth control.

"You end up giving legal and constitutional rights to a woman's fertilized egg and when you apply that definition to the criminal code and the wrongful death statute, you end up making criminals out of women and their doctors," Mendez said.

Which is the point of the amendment, to criminalize women for choosing not to carry a baby to full term.  Colorado state law would be amended to allow abortions to be literal murder under the law and/or miscarriages to be manslaughter.

Important point here, where the fundie nutjob admits it:

This is not something Mason denies. "Well, they could be [considered criminals]. If an unborn child is a person and we recognize that they are a person, should we say that some children should be protected and some shouldn't?" Mason said.

Lunacy.  Absolute lunacy.

Opponents also point out that in 2013, legislation inspired by Surovik's case was signed into law that criminalized the unlawful termination of a pregnancy. If the same accident happened today, the drunk driver who crashed into Surovik's car would be charged for the loss of her unborn child.

Oh, so there's no reason for Amendment 67 then.

Unless you're criminalizing abortions and miscarriages.

PS: GOP Senate candidate Joni Ernst in Iowa supports a national Personhood law/Constitutional Amendment too.  David Corn explains how Ernst is the future of the GOP.

If elected, Ernst would almost certainly be among the most conservative senators in the country. Yet she owes her rise to prominence not to the tea party, but to the Rotary Club types—the GOP establishment, which urged her to run and bet that her biography and folksy political charm would matter far more than her extreme policy positions. She is somehow both the handpicked champion of the mainline business-minded wing of the Republican Party and a hard-right conservative reactionary—the logical end-result of the ongoing merger of the tea party and the rest of the GOP. And if she wins on Tuesday, she'll set an example that Republican candidates will emulate for years to come.

That future includes criminalizing abortions with a smiling face and heartfelt stories of anguish over the unborn, but it'll also take rights away from tens of millions of women.

Or you know, you could just sit home and complain about how Obama failed you.

Your choice.  For now.  Soon you won't have a choice because it'll be gone.