Jennifer Mason, spokeswoman for Personhood Colorado, told the Colorado Independent she believes it’s not too late for her group to land its anti-abortion initiative on the ballot in Colorado this year.
The state certified voter ballots for the November election Monday. Yet, Mason said “case law” suggests that if the secretary of state got it wrong when he declared her group failed to submit enough signatures to secure a spot on the ballot, then the state would have to rework and reprint the ballots.
“It’s taking time, but we’re building a very strong case that we have more than enough valid signatures,” she said. “And there is case law where, in a protest like this, the state will have to pay to reprint the ballots.”
The secretary of state’s office conducted a review of the more than 100,000 signatures submitted by Personhood Colorado this summer and announced on August 29 that the group fell roughly 4,000 valid signatures short of the 86,105 required to make the 2012 ballot.
Mason’s group has roughly another two and half weeks to file a protest of the Secretary’s tallies. A spokesman for the Secretary told the Denver Post, however, that, even if Personhood Colorado mounts a successful challenge to its findings, November 2014 is the earliest the personhood initiative could appear on a ballot.
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An Idaho law that bans the use of medication to induce abortion cannot be used to prosecute a woman who took the pills to abort her pregnancy, a U.S. appeals court decided on Tuesday.
Bannock County prosecutors brought a case against Jennie Linn McCormack in 2011 after she used medication that she obtained online to induce her own abortion. McCormack, a single mother of three, claims that she could not find a licensed abortion provider in Southeastern Idaho, so she had to violate a state law that requires abortions to be performed at a hospital or medical clinic.
An Idaho federal judge dismissed the charges against McCormack in September 2011 on the grounds that the law cannot be enforced. McCormack then challenged the law itself, arguing that it imposes an undue burden on women’s access to abortion in Idaho.
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Todd Akin and the Republican platform have highlighted the “personhood” movement to legally define fertilized eggs as human beings with the same constitutional rights born children have.
Proponents argue their case on religious grounds, so it’s worth asking what the Bible says about it.
The Bible doesn’t talk about abortion, but it does say when a human being’s life begins.
Genesis 2:7 is clearest. The first human became a “living being” (nefesh hayah, “a living breath”) when God blew into its nostrils and it started to breathe. Human life begins when you start breathing, biblical writers thought. It ends when you stop. That’s why the Hebrew word often translated “spirit” (ruah) — “life force” might be a better translation — literally means “wind” or “breath.”
But what about babies in the womb?
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