As we race toward Colorado’s 150th birthday, and the nation’s 250th birthday, it occurred to me that I personally have lived through over a third of our state’s history. I knew people who knew people who witnessed the birth of the state.
I’ve been reformatting a bunch of my old blog posts, and I ran across my posts from September 2008 about the Republican Majority for Choice banquet, headlined by former Sen. Hank Brown and former state Attorney General and national Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Yes, you read that right: the Republican Majority for Choice, as in choice regarding abortion.
Brown said:
“The heart of the Republican Party is here tonight. . . . This party has always been a bastion of protecting individual freedom, and individual rights, and individual opportunity. It took the form of fighting slavery, it took the form of leading the civil rights movement. . . .
“It took a place in fighting to preserve individual freedom as the government became a regulatory monster at the federal level. And even today it takes the form of fighting to save Americans who work for a living a chance and an opportunity to keep a fair share of what they produce. . . .
“And in true form the Republican Party continues to be a champion of individual freedom and individual rights. The issue that we are concerned about tonight is just such an issue. Who in the world ever would believe that the federal government and a federal bureaucrat should have the right to dictate to people their most personal decisions?”
As Brown spoke, he wore a “No on 48” sticker on his lapel. You may recall that Amendment 48 was the first of three failed so-called “personhood” ballot measures seeking to grant full legal rights to fetuses from the moment of conception. The follow-up measures were offered in 2010 and 2014. At the time, Diana Brickell and I wrote issue papers explaining the problems and harms of the measures.
Incidentally, a main sponsor of the 2008 measure, Kristi Burton Brown, still is active in politics. She sits on the State Board of Education. She also used to head the state GOP, and she was active last year with Advance Colorado to promote a homeschool measure (which failed and which, as a homeschool dad, I opposed).
So, even though Sen. Brown claimed to speak for the “Republican majority for choice,” the reason he felt compelled to speak on the matter was that a hard anti-abortion stance already was taking root in his party. Now, the Republican Party is dogmatically anti-abortion. It was not always so.
Republicans liberalized abortion in 1967
Let’s go back to 1967, before the famous Roe v. Wade case of 1973. On April 27, the Rocky Mountain News ran as its top headline, “Abortion Bill Signed Into Law by Gov. Love.” (Note: I used ChatGPT to help excavate this article.) John Love was a Republican.
True, by today’s standards, the 1967 measure is substantially regressive. If Republicans ran such a measure today, pro-choice Democrats would scream. But, for the time, the bill represented a substantial step forward for women’s liberty. (For purposes of this article I am taking for granted the position that abortion generally should be legal, a stance I defend elsewhere.)
Martin Moran’s Page 5 article explains: “The new state law allows a 3-doctor hospital board to permit legal abortions when the life or the physical or mental health of the mother is in peril, a child might be born with a serious physical deformity or mental defect, [or] pregnancy resulted from incest or rape, including statutory rape if the girl is under 16.”
Even this law, although it would be a big step back relative to current standards, would be radically too permissive for many of today’s Republicans. Jason Salzman reported last year on a committee hearing for a bill put forward by state Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-CO Springs), which would have outlawed abortion in Colorado. During the hearing, Rep. Jenny Willford (D-Northglenn) asked Bottoms, “If somebody is raped or someone wants to move forward with abortion care or they have a miscarriage, would you consider that, murder?”
Bottoms answered, “A miscarriage is obviously not murder. To the rest of your question. Murder is murder, and people who choose to murder little babies should be held accountable legally. In the court system, they should be held accountable. So. Yeah. . . . Somebody who has been raped who goes to seek an abortion is still choosing to murder a baby, regardless of how that baby came into conception.”
Just to be clear, the implication of Bottoms’s remarks is that a woman who gets an abortion after getting pregnant through rape should be locked in a cage, potentially for the rest of her life.
The Republican Party of 1967 had much different priorities and a vastly different tone. Moran writes, “Sen. John R. Bermingham (R-Denver), a chief sponsor of the bill, said he was pleased and felt the new law was more in keeping with what most people in Colorado wanted. The new law, he said, has many safeguards which were not contained in the old law.”
Meanwhile, Democrats were hardly lock-step in favor of liberalized abortion laws, as they mostly are today. Moran writes, “Sen. Sam T. Taylor (D-Walsenburg), a Catholic who led the fight against the bill in the Senate, said he felt the governor should have asked the Colorado Supreme Court for an opinion on its legality.” Moran quotes Taylor, “I feel there is a very serious Constitutional question involved. My feeling is that the unborn child is being deprived of his life without due process of law—there is nobody to represent the unborn child.” This is today’s common Republican position.
Obviously, what most matters are the moral truths at stake. Is abortion really murder, as Bottoms says? Or does a woman have a right to get an abortion (at least in almost all cases), as I argue? How one comes down on the matter will depend on one’s moral beliefs. Still, I think that looking at aspects of how the debate evolved over time can help the discerning observer distinguish between people’s dogmatic commitments and their reasonable stances.
