In Colorado, we elect our county coroners, just as we elect sheriffs, assessors, treasurers and commissioners. Normally, the campaign for coroner is a yawner, if the post is even contested at all. But it could get a lot more interesting if Colorado for Equal Rights has its way.
Colorado for Equal Rights should not be confused with the Coalition for Equal Rights in Colorado, which holds the heretical notion that adults are capable of deciding whether they want to smoke indoors. Nor should it be mistaken for Equal Rights Colorado, which “promotes equal rights for Colorado’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and their families.”
This equal-rights outfit plans to circulate petitions to amend our state constitution to define “the term ‘person’ to include any human being from the moment of fertilization as ‘person’ is used in those provisions of the Colorado Constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice and due process of law.”
In other words, it’s another attempt to ban abortion. And it could even be an end-run around Roe vs. Wade, by some legal reasoning. Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe decision, noted that if the “suggestion of personhood is established,” then the right to abortion “collapses, for the fetus’s right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the Amendment,” which provides that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
So, the state defines a fertilized human egg as a person, and that person is entitled to due process of law. That’s where county coroners might play a big role. Under state law, as explained by the Summit County Coroner’s office, the coroner is supposed to investigate “all victims of homicide or suspected homicide,” as well as “victims of accidental death or suspected accidental death.”
Ferreting out abortions would be tricky enough: “We just got a tip from a neighbor that a 19-year-old girl down the street looked chubby, went to Mexico for three days, and came back thinner. Want me to bring her in for questioning?”
But even miscarriages would also have to be investigated as a “suspected homicide” or “accidental death.”
There’s a book that should be required reading for all Coloradans, “The Life of an Ordinary Woman,” by Anne Ellis, which details both the excitement and the marginal times in various mining camps a century ago. Ellis writes of a time in Gunnison County:
“By now I am expecting another baby, and am very sorry, as things are coming so hard. One day the mill catches fire, and I am the hardest fire-fighter — not to save the mill, however. I grabbed huge tubs of water and carried them up a steep path from the creek, using every ounce of strength and straining every nerve and muscle in my body each trip. Time and time I did this, was dripping wet, my hair hanging down, and working in a frenzy. Finally I dropped, exhausted, and thought ‘Well, if that doesn’t do it, nothing will.’ No one spoke to me. The next day I felt fine, and Rosie said, with a knowing look, ‘Had all your work for nothing, didn’t you?'”
Ellis eagerly fought the fire in the hope that it would cause a miscarriage. She failed at that, but suppose she had succeeded and “fetal personhood” had been the law. The coroner would have been duty-bound to determine her motivations. Would Rosie testify? Could the state prove she was toting water, not to fight the fire that threatened her family’s livelihood, but to miscarry? Does any jurisdiction in Colorado have the money or the manpower to conduct such investigations?
Tim Glenn, who was the coroner before he became a county commissioner here, told me that how much a death gets investigated is often “a judgment call” for the coroner. An unattended hospice death, for example, generally won’t get the same attention as an unidentified body found in the woods.
We elect coroners, and if we don’t like their judgment calls, we can elect somebody else. And just think how interesting, expensive and intrusive Colorado might become if this amendment passes and some counties start electing hard-core pro-life coroners who promise to investigate every rumor involving “the pre-born.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
