Colo. measure tests strategy to ban abortion

updated 8:45 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2007

DENVER - A 20-year-old law student has become a cause célèbre in the anti-abortion movement for her efforts to have the state Constitution define fertilized eggs as people — a tactic spreading nationwide in bids to neutralize the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

The measure spearheaded by Kristi Burton would give fertilized eggs state protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process, and she needs 76,000 signatures to get it on the state ballot next November.

Similar efforts are under way in Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi and Oregon.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the awakening of a sleeping giant here as conservatives come out to vote on this because of the purity of the bill and because it's a no-nonsense amendment," said Keith Mason, a veteran of grass-roots efforts defending Ten Commandments displays and parental notification laws. He is helping the petition effort.

Burton's so-called human life amendment doesn't mention abortion. She insists her only aim is to define when human life begins, and any discussion about abortion is up to lawmakers, she said.

"It's a concrete point in time that we can point to. It's at the moment of conception, life begins and at that moment we need to protect it. If we don't do that, then anyone can take away people's lives at other stages," Burton said.

A decades-old approach
Abortion rights groups say the measure would hamper in-vitro fertilization and stem cell research. They say it also could affect birth control because the most widely used form of contraception works by preventing fertilized eggs from attaching to the uterus.

Burton's strategy also diverges from a decades-old approach among anti-abortion activists of trying to incrementally regulate abortions.

"Once you have the principle enshrined in a state constitution that flies in the face of Roe, that would be the test case that would go before the Supreme Court," said Brian Rooney of the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, which has written similar proposals for other states.

Amendments that attack Roe head-on revive an old strategy that Rooney said was abandoned by the National Right to Life Committee, the largest of the anti-abortion groups formed in the 1970s to challenge Roe v. Wade.

James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the NRLC, said efforts to get state laws that would ban abortion outright "divert our attention and resources into feudal strategies" that would languish in the courts for years.

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