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April 08, 2015 09:09 AM UTC

Anti-choice activists push for dangerous fetal-homicide bill

  • 5 Comments
  • by: Jason Salzman

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Senate President Bill Cadman (R).
Senate President Bill Cadman (R).

During a KNUS 710-AM radio interview yesterday, Colorado Senate President Bill Cadman said he’s “really hoping” to get a fetal homicide bill introduced “by the end of the week.”

KNUS radio host Dan Caplis, who’s a deep-red social conservative, urged Cadman to push for a law like California’s, which establishes a fetus as a potential victim of a crime.

Cadman replied that the California law is “definitely one of the models that we’re looking at.”

Pro-choice advocates, however, say the California law undermines civil rights protections of pregnant women, allowing for criminal investigations of pregnant women based on the legal rights of the fetus.

They say any fetal homicide measure is unnecessary, as Colorado’s Crimes Against Pregnant Women Act is the gold standard insofar as it mandates severe penalties for perpetrators of crimes like the Longmont attack, while protecting abortion rights and the civil rights of pregnant women.

The Longmont attacker faces charges that could result in a 100-year prison term.

And if history is our guide, it’s unlikely that the anti-choice members of Cadman’s Republican caucus will go along with anything short of the California model.

In 2011, bipartisan support for a bill allowing for criminal prosecution for reckless crimes against pregnant women unraveled after attacks by anti-choice activists.

They were angry about language in the bill specifically stating that the legislation did “not confer the status of ‘person’ upon a human embryo, fetus, or unborn child at any stage of development prior to live birth.”

The Republican sponsor of the 2011 bill, Rep. Mark Waller, pulled his own legislation in frustration over the dispute about whether anti-personhood should be part of the language of the bill, telling journalists in 2011, “The right to life folks bring up a valid point when they said that this is a criminal justice provision. Why does this language need to be in there?”

Anti-choice forces in 2011 insisted on legislation modeled on California’s fetal homicide law, as they appear to be doing this year. As the Colorado Independent reported at the time:

Father Bill Carmody said he had met with Waller for close to an hour to express his concerns about the bill and had advocated for California style fetal homicide legislation.  He said he was concerned that though abortion had been decriminalized since 1967, the bill’s removal of the criminal statute would take Colorado back a step “if and when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade.”

“The other problem is that other than in the title, there is no mention of the word child in the bill. It goes out of its way to say it is not a person. It goes out of its way to say it is not anything human, so bring manslaughter charges if it is not human.”

When Democrats got control of the state legislature 2013, they passed a law similar to the failed 2011 legislation.

Last year, Colorado Democrats passed another law allowing civil penalties to be filed against perpetrators of crimes against pregnant women.

Comments

5 thoughts on “Anti-choice activists push for dangerous fetal-homicide bill

    1. PPK and PPO (both Oklahoma and Kansas) are going to be filing an permanent injunction against these two idiotic laws, and have the federal judge throw it out in violation of Roe v Wade.

  1. This one is going the way of the Parent Anti-Vaccination Freedom bill.

    Too bad these phony Pharisee’s aren’t as concerned about feeding the poor and attending to the sick as they are with eliminating freedoms for women.

    1. This is such a transparent move by Cadman that it makes them look bad. There’s no clamor for this except from abortion opponents, and there’s a reason why.

      1. I went to Taos last month for the weekend and as we were going through Antonito which is a small town below Alamosa on the Colorado/New Mexico border there were 5 or 6 people standing on the side of the road with their anti-freedom signs.  My initial impression was that they do that a lot and why aren’t they holding signs deploring poverty and supporting affordable healthcare for all.  This isn’t Christianity as it was taught in the first century.

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