Colorado Right to Life and American Right to Life have landed a major win in their effort to ban the most common forms of contraception, along with invitro fertilization, stem cell research and abortion. Yesterday, Colorado Secretary of State's office validated 103,000 signatures on petitions for the ballot initiative -- 74,000 was needed to get on the ballot.

According to the American Right to Life, the ballot measure seeks to:

"To promote the prohibition of abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia (including by withholding of food and water, i.e., 'artificial nourishment and hydration'), and abortifacients such as RU-486 or any chemical weapon, physical device or process that kills a living human person (including Plan B also called the Morning After Pill, or any birth control pill or intrauterine device that works to prevent implantation"

They've even come up with a (saccharine yet still creepy) song for their campaign you can listen to here: Personhood.mp3

But to really get a fuller understanding of their twisted logic and language, watch the video below. Kristi Burton, of Colorado Equal Rights, one of the groups spearheading the ballot initiative, has to do some hillariously heavy verbal callisthenics to explain how the ballot measure is not a threat to birth control and even abortion rights. Her argument seems to run along the lines of: "Hey, I'm just an arsonist, it's the fire that burned down the house."

As the Bush presidency nears its end, the Christian Right is bellying up to the trough for a final feeding. They are hoping, with Bush's help, to get one more shot at their arch nemesis: the Planned Family. Thus the Unplanned Family Research Council has been spearheading a campaign to restrict federal funding for contraception to groups that offer comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion. Their goal is to throw sand in the gears of the nation's largest provider of family planning services, Planned Parenthood, by mandating onerous and superfluous policies on the health care provider. Their plan is to force Planned Parenthood to construct a chasm between the contraceptive services it provides with Title X federal funding and the abortion services it provides with its own. We won't know how burdensome the details of their plans are until released but its rumored that clinics will have to make the chasm an actual physical distance between the services, i.e. miles. One thing is for sure, when the anti-family planning crowd is at the drawing table, what's 'reasonable' won't come to mind.

Many believe Bush will alter the Title X regulations through an executive order and, given how deeply unpopular the action would be with the American public, it is suspected it could be done as early as today--just in time for the public to be distracted by Memorial Day weekend plans.

Certainly, the stage is being set for a dramatic attack on family planning. The Unplanned Family Research Council had gotten Bush to appoint one of their own, Dr. Susan Orr, a former Senior Director for Marriage and Family Care at the Unplanned Family Research Council to oversee the Title X program. Her most notable accomplishment in the year she has served is to defend the abstinence-until-marriage approach in the face of incontrovertible evidence it has failed. Now that the Unplanned Family Research Council is within days of hitting another nail into Title X's coffin, Dr. Orr suddenly and quietly resigns from her post so, one suspects, to not appear to have orchestrated the undermining of her own program from within. Dr. Orr's appointment to oversee the program was a huge controversy, given her antipathy for contraception and devotion to her former employer which hinders Americans access to family planning. But her resignation has received no coverage. (Only our dear friends at NFPRHA have reported on it.) The agency she works for, the Department of Health and Human Services, has not even put out a press release about it and those inquiring about it by phone have been placed in automated menu oblivion.

Something in this trough smells fishy.

(Thanks to iboy for the portrait above.)

When birth control prices starting soaring after changes prompted by Bush's Federal Deficit Reduction Act of the 2005, anti-contraception operatives played dumb. They claimed it was by no means intentional for the law to remove college health centers and private birth control clinics from the list of those eligible for discount drug pricing. For years they were included and it enabled women at greatest risk of unplanned pregnancy to access birth control affordably. And so when simple solutions were offered to remedy this "unintentional" act, like asking HHS to work out a simple correction (only to be rebuffed), it was more than a little suspicious that those pleading innocence were unwilling to back a remedy. More deliberate steps were taken; Congressmember Joe Crowley and Senator Barack Obama proposed bills to fix the problem, which have yet to pass.

And so the people who back contraception tried again. They tacked a provision to restore the discount drug eligibility onto a bill to fund the Iraq war. The provision would, once again, make college health clinics and Planned Parenthoods part of the discount drug program. It would cost the government nothing. It is simply an administrative change, but it would make pregnancy prevention more accessible to Americans most at risk of unwanted pregnancy. Enter the Unplanned Family Research Council, and anti-contraception champion Senator Tom Coburn.

The Unplanned Family Research Council now expresses outrage that this provision would be included along with what they consider to be other worthless programs like "healthcare and NASA." They write:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has a funny way of expressing his appreciation for our troops this Memorial Day. Rather than honoring our soldiers with the funding they need, the Senate is stuffing the war supplemental bill with pro-abortion paybacks for groups like Planned Parenthood. By fattening up the legislation with controversial earmarks, the leadership has not only jeopardized the timetable for the bill's passage but raised the possibility that it will not pass at all. Despite the urgent needs of our servicemen, Reid and his liberal allies are more concerned about funding the war against the unborn than the war in Iraq. The bill is rolling in pork, including a provision that would give groups like Planned Parenthood a big discount on contraceptives and Plan B, which can act as an abortifacient. It would also be a massive cash cow for university health centers, which would also be eligible for a discount on such drugs. Keep in mind that these clinics already make profits on the pills when they mark them up for resale. Nor are many of the recipients suffering in the financial department, thanks to a hefty investment of your hard-earned tax dollars. So the $165 billion question is: What does any of this have to do with Iraq? Absolutely nothing. Reid's personal political agenda is exposing our active-duty troops to new risks as they wait on Congress to duke out the abortion provisions. The bill is bloated with millions of dollars in other unnecessary pet projects for infrastructure, health care, NASA, and more. Until Democrats put their anti-war vendetta aside and both parties rein in spending, the supplemental faces failure on the floor or due to the President's veto pen. Contact your Senators today and remind them that this is no time to make a political statement. Now is the time to support our troops!

The Congressional Quarterly reported today that Coburn was trying to figure out a way to prevent the fix. CQ quotes a Coburn spokesperson:

“Sneaking a divisive provision into a war spending bill that will help Planned Parenthood . . . is politics as usual — not change,” said John Hart, spokesman for conservative Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Hart said Wednesday that Coburn was looking at ways to address the provision, but it wasn’t the subject of any floor debate Thursday.

The amount of effort the anti-contraception team is putting into protecting this "unintentional" scale back in contraceptive access is telling. It appears some mistakes are really worth fighting for.

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.

On this ‘National Day to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy,’ I thought it would be a fun exercise to compare the sexual activity of teenagers and their pregnancy rates in the most pro-choice states with those of the most pro-life states. I used NARAL's rankings to determine which were the best and worst states on choice. (Simply, those that scored "F" are the worst and those with an "A" are the best). I then filled in the state data for each from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the National Day sponsors, and compared the pro-choice states with the pro-life states.

Which side is actually doing a better job?

Conclusion: one side has a lot more to celebrate. Turns out pro-life states, those that are prone to tell kids that abstinence is the only proven contraception, and discourage use of actual contraception, then wag their finger at the less "morally superior" states, are where high schoolers are:

· more sexually active

· more likely to have had sex before the age of 13

· more likely to have four or more sexual partners.

Turns out that to be "pro-life" is to be pro-your-young-teen-having-a-risky-sex-life. In addition, the states that are witnessing the most dramatic drop in teen pregnancies are the most solidly pro-choice ones (CA, VT, HI, AK) while the ones where teen pregnancy rates are declining most slowly are anti-choice (NE, MS, WY, OK).

As this election goes from a simmer to a boil, the culture warriors will be dosing ideological gasoline on the flames. Isn't it time to call the religious right's bluff? If we measured their agenda based on its results they could only be considered the pro-risky-adolescent-sex-unwanted-pregnancy-teen-mothers-and-more-abortion crowd. They have no right to moralize and no standing to be sanctimonious--that should be our job. They're wrong. We know it and it’s time the American public did too. Pro-choice people, and most candidates, have got to use the gifts of evidence we've been given (and earned). The American public doesn't want its 12-year-olds sexually active or their daughters impregnated by one of their four or more sexual partners—but that's what the pro-life agenda is poised to make America's reality, and sadly has for too many already. And there's quantitative data to prove it. One thing is for sure, they're not going to be the ones to mention it. Now wonder they're lying low today.

Tired of the same-old lame protests outside of abortion clinics? Looking to impose your religious beliefs in other people's lives in a new and exciting way? The pro-life movement would like to expand your horizons. On June 7th, the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that gave married people the right to use contraception, the American Life League, along with Pro-Life Wisconsin and Pharmacists for Life International Associate groups want you to join them in protesting in front of facilities that distribute birth control products. The national day against contraception, Protest the Pill Day ’08: The Pill Kills Babies, was started to convince the American people of a simple and imaginative idea: attempting to prevent abortion is abortion too. These arguments have been confounded by diabolical scientists and experts who insistently point out there's no evidence to support that the birth control pill works the way these groups claim. As we all know, however, if ideology waited for science to prove scientific points, our ancestors would have never have spent all those years wandering the then-flat earth.

The campaign website is chock full of important information and you don't want to miss the informative "

Talking Points

"section. Here's a sampling:

Q: The Supreme Court has ruled that it’s my right to privacy — who do you think you are to say otherwise?
A: On June 7, 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Griswold v. Connecticut decision. The Supreme Court justices first presumed that previous Court decisions dealing with a citizen’s right to liberty and security that prohibited invasion of one’s home and acquisition of evidence that might later be used to convict him of a crime also addressed privacy within marriage. In fact, the justices argued, “The concept of liberty is not so restricted… it embraces the right of marital privacy though that right is not mentioned explicitly [emphasis added] in the Constitution” and is based on “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights [which] have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”

This confusing language, which has no relationship whatsoever to what the Founding Fathers intended, gave married women permission to use the birth control pill. The Supreme Court literally created the “right to privacy” out of thin air.

We now know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that not only did the Supreme Court literally make up the right that you claim gives you permission to use birth control, but the most popular form of birth control, the pill, can kill innocent preborn children. If there is a chance that human beings are going to be murdered, I am going to do everything in my power to help prevent that from happening. If you knew there was a chance that someone might poison your neighbor, don’t you think you would try to notify your neighbor and do as much as you could to help save a life?

And before you despair that your right to privacy is being lost, take comfort in the knowledge that once we all finally live in a country where ideology is valued over evidence and our government is run by and for those who subscribe, or succumb, to the exciting agenda of these groups...privacy will no longer be needed. Your point of view and way of life will, conveniently, be decided for you. So what are you waiting for?! Sign up now!