June 28, 2011 12:34 AM UTC

CO Pro-Choice Advocate Draws Ire of National Pro-Lifer

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• by: naralprochoiceco

(So they DO want to ban birth control now? Tell Ken Buck quick! – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Last week, HuffingtonPost Denver featured a commentary from NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado Political Director Toni Panetta raising the point that anti-choice politicians aren’t just out to restrict abortion anymore – they’re going full-bore after birth control during their quest to solidify their pro-life credentials. Today, national pro-life voice Judie Brown, president and co-founder of American Life League (operator of the multi-year “pill kills” campaign opposing birth control) used her weekly column on RenewAmerica.com to attack Panetta, ostensibly defending the burgeoning “personhood” movement that pushed for constitutional rights for fertilized eggs here in Colorado in ’08 and 2010. Brown’s piece mischaracterizes summarizes Panetta’s commentary by, among other things, likening pro-choice Americans to slaveholders. Excerpts after the jump.

According to Brown:

Whether a woman wants or does not want to be pregnant, in Panetta’s world, depends on the equal opportunity to cherish or dispose of her baby. That’s what “reproductive rights” are all about.

This is a ridiculous, prejudiced viewpoint when one considers that, just like those who chose to turn a blind eye on blacks because they were slaves a couple of centuries ago, today people like Panetta turn a blind eye on their fellow human beings because they are not yet born. Panetta is incredulous as she tells her readers that “anti-abortion extremists are doing their best to accomplish” the banning of contraceptives through dangerous, deceptively-worded personhood measures that she says would grant “constitutional rights to fertilized eggs.”

For the record, the term “fertilized egg,” is very misleading since “there is really no longer an egg (or oocyte) once fertilization has begun. What is being called a ‘fertilized egg’ is not an egg of any sort; it is a human being.”

Brown refrains, however, from tackling the heart of Panetta’s argument: that anti-abortion, anti-birth control politicians sit in the majority in a frighteningly large number of places, from the U.S. House of Representatives to state Legislatures that have considered upwards of 1,000 bills restricting everything from access to comprehensive sex education to publicly funded birth control and prenatal care to safe, legal abortion.