According to the Denver Post, The group Colorado for Equal Rights submitted 131,245 signatures to place an initiative on the November statewide ballot that would define a fertilized embryo as a person and extend to it rights and protections under the Colorado Constitution. It's unclear how many of those signatures were from fertilized eggs. The Secretary of State's office will validate that at least 76,000 of them were from those considered people by today's standards of law.

The ballot initiative seeks to move the definition of life to an unknowable biological moment, when sperm fertilizes egg, for which there is no test to determine. By doing so, the state of Colorado would give rights to something the existence of which is unverifiable and set in law that life begins even before pregnancy does. The ramifications of such an act is not fully known but legal analysts propose that it could certainly outlaw the most commonly used forms of contraception, including the birth control pill, and complicate already complicated matters such as inheritance rights and use of HOV lanes.

Mississippi and Montana have similar petition drives underway.