Gubernatorial hopeful Bill Ritter’s nuanced stance on abortion is a problem for Democrats who want to vote for him. They fear that, once elected, he might work to erode women’s rights.
Ritter says he is personally opposed to abortion except in instances of rape or incest or if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, but on the other side of the ledger, he supports emergency contraception, would deliver state funding to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and approves of age-appropriate sex education in schools.
Ritter’s mixed feelings about abortion reveal one of the fundamental difficulties of this debate. Most regular citizens on both sides of the aisle have mixed feelings, just like Ritter. Yet most people tend to be intolerant of that type of ambivalence among their elected officials, because they fear that conceding any ground in the political arena would cause them to eventually lose everything.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most conservative position on abortion and 10 being the most liberal, most Coloradans are probably between 4 and 7.
At the conservative extreme, opponents of abortion want to outlaw the procedure in every case. Even rape, incest and the health of the mother are not persuasive motives to them. They contend that since you wouldn’t murder a 2-year-old who’d been conceived by rape or incest, then you shouldn’t murder a fetus so conceived.
They argue that the life of the mother is less important than the life of the fetus. If a mother and her 2-year-old were trapped in a burning building and you had time only to save one, you wouldn’t abandon the baby in favor of the mother. It’s more likely that you would save the child. So you shouldn’t kill off the fetus just to save the mother unless there’s no hope that either of them will survive.
At the liberal extreme are people who favor completely unrestricted abortions. They believe abortions should be completely at the discretion of the mother. So if a 13-year-old decided at the moment her contractions began that she didn’t want the baby because it was a boy and she’d always dreamed of having a girl, she could, without consulting her parents, a judge or any other adult, tell the doctor to abort the baby rather than deliver it.
But very few people are a 1 or 10 on the scale. Most of us have complicated feelings about the issue that would compel us to support the procedure in some situations and outlaw it in others. But it’s tough for elected officials to be as nuanced about this issue as the populace, because if you’re a 4 on the scale, you want your political leaders to be a 1 or a 2. If you’re a 7 on the scale, you want them to be a 9 or 10.
If people believed that Ritter’s ambivalence on the Democratic side of the aisle would be matched by similar ambivalence on the Republican side, then they could have hope that his governorship might open the door to rational, reasonable and moderate abortion policies that more accurately reflect the general will of the masses.
But the fear is that Ritter would come into office as a 5 or 6, and he would square off against Republicans who were a 1 or a 2, and abortion laws would be pushed down to 3 or 4 on the scale.
The stakes on the abortion issue are extremely high. The composition of the U.S. Supreme Court has shifted in the conservative direction. The White House and Congress are controlled by conservatives. And if Colorado gets a governor who is not strong on the abortion issue, it’s not that difficult to imagine that state laws will click down the dial, further encroaching on a woman’s right to decide for herself whether she will continue her pregnancy.
Former Bronco Reggie Rivers (reggierivers2002@yahoo.com) is the host of “Global Agenda” Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. on KBDI-Channel 12. His column appears every Friday.
