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Legal rights for fertilized eggs?

By KIRK JOHNSON
The New York Times; The New York Times

DENVER — A proposed amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would give legal rights to fertilized human eggs may be headed for the ballot next year, raising the prospect of a heated local debate over abortion at the same time that Democrats gather in Denver for their national convention.

The ballot measure, which passed a legal hurdle last week when the Colorado Supreme Court upheld an administrative panel's ruling about its wording, would give Colorado perhaps the most sweeping language in the nation about the rights of the unborn, legal experts said.

The proposal must go through several other steps before Election Day 2008, including the gathering of enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The one-paragraph measure would ask voters whether inalienable rights, due-process rights and equality-of-justice rights as defined in the state Constitution should be extended to "any human being from the moment of fertilization."

The deputy director of abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, Toni Panetta, said state courts could be swamped by lawsuits claiming specific rights for a fertilized egg that the broad language of the ballot measure did not clarify.

"All fertilized eggs could use the courts, and that lays the foundation for a potential onslaught," she said. She said the language would open up challenges to birth control, including oral contraception and intrauterine devices, which make the uterine wall inhospitable to the embryo.

Kathryn Wittneben, also of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, said, "Proponents of this initiative have publicly stated that the goal is to make all abortion illegal, but nothing in the language of the initiative or its title even mentions abortion."

She added that the measure could also hamper in-vitro fertilization and stem-cell research.

Michael Norton, a lawyer who represented supporters of the proposal, said the real impact of the proposal would be in its simplicity, asking a profound philosophical and moral question.

"The whole issue centers on when does life begin," Norton said. He said that though "abortion" does not appear in the proposal, it would effectively make an abortion "the destruction of a person" and therefore illegal.

"Whatever rights and liberties and duties and responsibilities are guaranteed under the Constitution or other state laws would flow to that life," Norton said.

A spokesman for the Colorado Democratic Party, Matt Sugar, said he thought the measure was perhaps timed in an effort to highlight divisions over abortion in Colorado at a time much attention will be focused on it.

Dale Schowengerdt, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization based in Arizona that supported the ballot measure before the Colorado Supreme Court, said the timing of the proposal was "pure coincidence" in regard to next year's elections.

"It's an important debate that people ought to have, and Colorado ought to have, about when does life begin," Schowengerdt said.

Colorado for Equal Rights must collect 76,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Supporters have six months to gather the necessary signatures, a deadline that began with the collection of the first signatures Tuesday, said Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for the secretary of state.

Anti-abortion activists said similar voter-led initiatives or legislative efforts are under way in Montana, Georgia, Oregon, Michigan and South Carolina.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.