President Obama's re-election campaign has been heavily invested in women's rights and reproductive health in recent weeks, but it's worth noting that the focus is not limited to campaign advertising. The president was in Denver yesterday, speaking to a largely-female audience, and vowing not to let the country slip backwards.
"[W]hen it comes to the economy," Obama said, "it's bad enough that our opponents want to take us back to the same policies of the last decade, the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place, the same policies that saw jobs going overseas and ended up seeing people's wages and incomes going down even as the costs of everything from health care to college were going up -- policies that culminated in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and that we've spent, now, three and a half years trying to recover from. That's bad enough. But when it comes to a woman's right to make her own health care choices, they want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century."
There's obviously an electoral significance to remarks like these. Obama is not only counting on Colorado to win a second term, but he'll need to take full advantage of the gender gap, urging women to turn out in force in November. (Note, the president was introduced in Denver by Sandra Fluke, whom you might recall was the target of a repulsive Rush Limbaugh attack.)
But let's also note that Colorado isn't just a 2012 swing state. Irin Carmon reported yesterday that in the Centennial State, a far-right group called Personhood Colorado is still fighting to force a measure onto this year's ballot that would classify a fertilized egg as a person in the state constitution.
Though proponents deny it, Carmon noted the language of the proposal would make effective in-vitro fertilization nearly impossible and prohibit the use of many forms of birth control. There's a reason these ballot measures keep failing, even in states like Mississippi -- even many on the right consider them far too extreme.
But in Colorado, home to the Personhood movement, conservatives are pushing forward anyway. It's a fight worth watching.





Does that mean that it will cost extra at a ski resort for the extra person or do eggs stay free?
The eggs stay free, but you better be careful having sex. Leaving anything on the sheets could get you charged with mass murder:-0
Because every sperm is sacred.....
'Obama is not only counting on Colorado to win a second term'
If Obama wins CO it makes it nearly impossible for the republicans to win. If CO becomes a reliable Blue state, the republicans will never win another presidential election again.
What will it do the carpool/HOV lanes? Will miscarriage be prosecuted as murder?
Some Republican bellwethers have introduced bills (in Georgia, for one) that would require an investigation into miscarriages (of anything but justice, anyway) for possible prosecution for felonious abortion.
The pun on bellwether aside, these aren't going anywhere until abortion is safely criminalized, which is still a ways out. However, the trend is there for those who pay attention.
I thought some states were already criminalizing miscarriages as possible murders. I remember reading something, must go look it up now...ah yes, Rennie Gibbs in Mississippi in 2006 being prosecuted for losing her baby. She was a cocaine addict. And Bei Bei Shuai, in Indianapolis, for taking rat poison when pregnant, despondent over her boyfriend leaving her. She survived, she managed to give birth but the baby died four days later...so she's in jail with no offer of bail. Alabama, under the chemical endangerment laws, has something like forty cases. All of this info from an article in the UK Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges
For now.
It's always amusing how the right screeches about "life" because for those of US that are "alive" they seem to have contempt for US!
GOTP = Christian Taliban!
When does dependent status start for tax purposes?
Colorado should consider nuking Colorado Springs. They keep doing it politically, knocking down all the b.s. those morons come up with.
I hope he is talking to the mothers of Erie CO who are fighting hard to stop the fracking right next to a community school