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In Colorado, we elect our county coroners, just as we elect sheriffs, assessors, treasurers and commissioners. Normally, the campaign for coroner is a yawner, if the post is even contested at all. But it could get a lot more interesting if Colorado for Equal Rights has its way.
Colorado for Equal Rights should not be confused with
the Coalition for Equal Rights in Colorado, which holds the
heretical notion that adults are capable of deciding
whether they want to smoke indoors. Nor should it be
mistaken for Equal Rights Colorado, which promotes equal
rights for Colorado's gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered people and their families.
This equal-rights outfit plans to circulate petitions to
amend our state constitution to define the term 'person'
to include any human being from the moment of fertilization
as 'person' is used in those provisions of the Colorado
Constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of
justice and due process of law.
In other words, it's another attempt to ban abortion.
And it could even be an end-run around Roe v. Wade, by some
legal reasoning. Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the
1973 Roe decision, noted that if the suggestion of
personhood [for the unborn] is established,
then the
right to abortion collapses, for the fetus's right to
life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th]
Amendment,
which provides that no state can deprive
any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
So, the state defines a fertilized human egg as a
person, and that person is entitled to due process of law.
That's where county coroners might play a big role. Under
state law, as explained by the Summit County Coroner's
office, the coroner is supposed to investigate all
victims of homicide or suspected homicide,
as well as
victims of accidental death or suspected accidental
death.
Ferreting out abortions would be tricky enough: We
just got a tip from a neighbor that a 19-year-old girl down
the street looked chubby, went to Mexico for three days,
and came back thinner. Want me to bring her in for
questioning?
But even miscarriages would also have to be investigated
as a suspected homicide
or accidental
death.
There's a book that should be required reading for all
Coloradans, The Life of an Ordinary Woman,
by Anne
Ellis, which details both the excitement and the marginal
times in various mining camps a century ago. She writes of
a time in Gunnison County:
By now I am expecting another baby, and am very
sorry, as things are coming so hard. One day the mill
catches fire, and I am the hardest fire-fighter -- not to
save the mill, however. I grabbed huge tubs of water and
carried them up a steep path from the creek, using every
ounce of strength and straining every nerve and muscle in
my body each trip. Time and time I did this, was dripping
wet, my hair hanging down, and working in a frenzy. Finally
I dropped, exhausted, and thought 'Well, if that doesn't do
it, nothing will.' No one spoke to me. The next day I felt
fine, and Rosie said, with a knowing look, 'Had all your
work for nothing, didn't you?'
Anne Ellis eagerly fought the fire in the hope that it
would cause a miscarriage. She failed at that, but suppose
she had succeeded and fetal personhood
had been the
law. The coroner would have been duty-bound to determine
her motivations. Would Rosie testify? Could the state prove
she was toting water, not to fight the fire that threatened
her family's livelihood, but to miscarry? Does any
jurisdiction in Colorado have the money or the manpower to
conduct such investigations?
Tim Glenn, who was the coroner before he became a county
commissioner here, told me that how much a death gets
investigated is often a judgment call
for the
coroner. An unattended hospice death, for example,
generally won't get the same attention as an unidentified
body found in the woods.
We elect coroners, and if we don't like their judgment
calls, we can elect somebody else. And just think how
interesting, expensive and intrusive Colorado might become
if this amendment passes and some counties start electing
hard-core pro-life coroners who promise to investigate
every rumor involving the pre-born.
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