October 04, 2010 07:03 PM UTC

Amendment 62 and Cory Gardner's Assault on Women's Rights

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• by: rdawkins22

( – promoted by ClubTwitty)

Republican Senate candidate, Ken Buck, has garnered a great deal of state and national media attention for his unusually rigid view of what rights a woman has to an abortion.  His contention that even in instances of rape and incest, abortion is still morally repugnant and should not recognized as legally permissible has even been fodder for campaign ads against the Weld county district attorney.

With all of this negative attention focused on Buck, it has gone largely unnoticed that CD-4 Republican Congressional candidate, Cory Gardner, holds similar views on abortion and women’s rights more broadly defined. In fact, where they do differ, Gardner’s pro-life position on abortion is even more extreme than Buck’s.

Last week, in an interview in the Coloradoan, Gardner, who is running against Betsy Markey, elaborated on his pro-life views and suggested that he makes no exceptions. When asked if he would allow exceptions for rape, incest, or in instances where the mother’s life was in danger, he simply answered, “I’m pro-life, and I believe abortion in wrong.”

What’s more, whereas Buck has vacillated on Colorado’s Amendment 62-he was for it before he was against it-Gardner ardently supports it.  Otherwise known as the personhood amendment, Amendment 62 is similar to 2008’s Amendment 48, which sought to define life as beginning at conception and gives developing embryos equal protection and due process of the law.

Instead of using the term “conception,” however, Amendment 62 uses the term ‘biological development.’ The term ‘biological development’ allows pro-life supporters to define the beginning of life at the moment a woman’s egg is fertilized by the male sperm. This minor semantic change from Amendment 48 is intended to keep pro-choice advocates from trying to define conception–and by implication life itself–as beginning at the moment the fertilized embryo attaches to a woman’s uterine wall.

Unlike Amendment 48, there is no ambiguity as to the intention of this new initiative. Not only would this new amendment make all abortions illegal, it would also criminalize common forms of contraception–including IUDs and some forms of birth control pills.

In other words,  even though Colorado voters overwhelmingly rejected Amendment 48 in 2008, including all 18 counties of CD-4, extreme pro-life advocates like Gardner are pushing an even more radical personhood amendment this election cycle.  (Note: Yuma county, where Gardner grew up, rejected the measure by nearly 22 percentage points.)

What’s most troubling about Gardner’s record, however, is that his assault on women’s rights does not end with the personhood amendment. While in the state legislature, Gardner has consistently voted against measures that would expand or strengthen women’s rights.  In 2006, he voted against HB1212, which would have allowed, but not require, pharmacists to prescribe emergency contraception.

And, in 2007, he co-sponsored a bill (SB143), which never made it out of committee, that would have made abortion illegal except in limited instances where the woman’s life was in danger.

In 2008, moreover, he was one of only six representatives to vote against HB1276, a bill that required employers “to provide reasonable paid or unpaid break time for nursing mothers to express milk.”

Lastly, Gardner recently endorsed the House Republicans ‘Pledge to America,’ which is an economic agenda that will run up the deficit, repeal efforts by the last two administrations to pull the country out of the recession and contain long-term federal spending, and create a recipe for economic catastrophe along with the prospect of a double-dip recession.

The fragile state of the economy is fundamentally a women’s issue because, according to a recent study by the Center for American Progress, unmarried women are most vulnerable to economic insecurity and they have been disproportionately affected by the recession.

In an election year when public anger is directed toward the Washington establishment and the incumbent party, it is easy to forget that elections are about choices.  As such, it is important to ask: What is the alternative? In the case of Cory Gardner, the alternative vision for America may be one in which Americans in general and women in particular are less free and are less able to determine their own destiny.  Is that really want we want America to be?

(Note: See my original post at www.ryanpolitics.blogspot.com for the appropriate links.)