EDITORIAL: Prop 115 is another dishonest seizure of women’s medical rights — vote no

The war on women’s hard-won reproductive rights has come to the Colorado election again. Get out your ballots and get ready to fight.

Proposition 115 seeks to undermine Colorado abortion-rights mandates by outlawing abortions after 22 weeks of gestation.

The measure is a legal land-mine based on myths and disinformation.

Voters have turned back similar blatant attempts to let the government and politicians dictate women’s reproductive rights and the practice of medicine before. This failed initiative appears on the ballot only because state election officials allowed proponents to leverage the pandemic crisis to make good on deficient signatures. Despite heaving out-of-state efforts, Colorado voters continue to have little interest in surrendering the rights of women in this state.

Colorado voters can easily see through Prop 115 propaganda and outright lies about how limiting access to abortion by choosing an arbitrary week of gestation is a fair “compromise.”

By leveraging falsehoods about so-called “infanticide” and other baseless myths, proponents seek to make this request seem reasonable.

It’s anything but that.

It is never reasonable for legislators and the government to impose political will on a woman’s right to control her own body and her life. That’s the basis of the famous Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision and the basis for Colorado’s historic abortion law.

The matters of reproduction, women’s medical treatment and abortion are issues only for a woman and her physician. There can never be grounds for “compromise” by allowing political intervention to dictate women’s pregnancies. The Constitution and decency demand that women have the same right to privacy as do men, who do not permit political whim to dictate their healthcare.

The Centers for Disease Control are among others who dispell the myth of common late-term abortions, making it clear they are excedingly rare. The number has fallen over the past few years to about 1.2% of all abortions, according to CDC data. Of those abortions conducted after 12 weeks of gestation, many completed for young teenagers in denial about a pregnancy, deathly afraid to tell, or women who are seriously mentally ill, according to CDC and other research.

Especially misleading about this most recent attempt to end abortion rights is language making it appear that the law would allow for the life of a woman to be taken into consideration, as an exception to the abortion ban. It would do no such thing. The language is so fraught with intent that no physician would even attempt to make arguments by stepping through written legal landmines about mental illness and immediacy. The leverage of this law is to criminally prosecute physicians and revoke their license to practice medicine.

If anti-abortion activists were sincere about wanting to reduce the incidence of abortion, as are all medical professionals, they would spend their time and money on proven programs that prevent unwanted pregnancies, such as those administered by Planned Parenthood and quality public-schools sex education programs.

There’s nothing honest, accurate or reasonable about Prop 115. It’s an illegal and nefarious effort to revoke the hard-won medical rights of women. Vote no.