For those of you that don’t know, the great state of Colorado will be voting on a constitutional amendment that will declare a fertilized egg a person. Yeah, the Dog can’t believe it either, but it is true. In this state we have 106, 000 people that were willing to sign a petition to get this amendment on the ballot, which can only make you sad for the state of critical thinking in CO.

Here is the thing, we know very precisely when pregnancy starts, and it is when the fertilized egg implants itself in the uterine wall. This signals the woman’s body that it is time to gear up and start making the hormones that drive the biological changes which sustain the embryo. It is also when home pregnancy tests can tell if she has a bun in the oven. Unfortunately, this can happen as long as 8 days after the egg is fertilized. This new amendment (note, not a law, but an actual change in the constitution) would recognize the egg as a person eight whole days before anyone could reasonably know that it existed!

But it gets worse than that. 1/3 of all pregnancies end a miscarriage. No one knows why exactly, but it is true. When Mrs. Dog got pregnant we were really excited. We had been trying and were very happy that it happened. We scheduled that first ultrasound where you get to see the little future human. When we went in, the little black check mark that is the fetus’s heart was not moving. The tech went to get the doctor to tell us what we already knew; this was no longer going to be our baby.

It was a really hard time for us both, but if this law had been in effect, it would have been infinitely worse. We would have had to deal with the local coroner, after all a person has to have a death certificate (even if they never got a birth certificate) and if this coroner did not like what we had been doing in the days leading up to the miscarriage, we could be charged with negligent homicide. What is a common but hard time in a couple’s life could suddenly become a legal nightmare. This is just one of the consequences of this heinous little amendment.

For those that need a little help getting pregnant, you are completely out of luck. The current in vitro techniques require the creation of multiple embryos, some of which are implanted in an attempt to get a viable pregnancy. This process would end in the state of Colorado, as they would all suddenly be people and therefore heirs to any family estate. As with a miscarriage if any of these little balls of cells died, they would need a death certificate.

This amendment would also outlaw quite a few methods of birth control. There is some doubt exactly what hormonal birth control (commonly called the pill) prevents pregnancy but one strong school of thought is that it prevents implantation of the embryo. Under this amendment (don’t forget it is a hell of a lot harder to change an amendment than a law) it is conceivable (ha! A pun!) that any woman using the pill could be charged with child abuse (e.g. not providing a proper shelter for the “person”). This would also be true of any kind of IUD (inter-uterine device) and any other method of preventing implantation of the embryo.

Obviously the goal of this turd of a ballot initiative is to make abortion illegal in the state of Colorado. The good news is that the fools that support this measure have completely overreached with this. Leave aside that there is no way to know when an egg is fertilized (inside the body), the fact is that even most of the staunch anti-reproductive rights supporters have fallen short of being ready to hold the woman criminally liable, even if they are willing to do so for a doctor that performs abortions. This new amendment would make everyone involved in an abortion criminally liable. Currently if you are in any fashion involved with the death of a person, you are in legal jeopardy. Since this amendment would make an embryo a person, you can see how it would have to be interpreted by law enforcement.

The Dog could not find any polling that would let us gauge how this initiative is doing with the voters in Colorado, but that does not really matter. What the Dog needs is for his readers in and outside of this state to start talking about the consequences of an amendment like this; after all we know that the forced pregnancy crowed will certainly try this kind of initiative again if they have success here, so this is by no means a local issue. To the Dog the in vitro argument is the strongest one against it. It cuts right to the heart of this issue, a group of narrow minded single issue voters want to get in between you and your ability to have a child. If we hit this point again and again and again, the Dog is confident that we should be able to defeat this odious amendment.

By crushing this kind of bullshit in the first state that it is has been tried in, we have a much better chance of not having to deal with it in other states, in the future.

So, there are the Dog’s ideas on this issue, what are yours?