If Bob Beauprez doesn’t think states have anything to do , he should talk to the women in South Texas crossing the border to buy abortion drugs in Mexico because the state has closed all but six clinics.
Thanks to state — not federal — laws, increasingly desperate Texas women are going to flea markets and Mexican pharmacies to purchase the ulcer drug Cytotec. Cytotec is the brand name for misoprostol, which is half the formulation for the abortion drug RU-486 and used off-label in Latin American countries for that purpose.
As reported in Cosmopolitan magazine, emergency rooms in south Texas are reporting a concurrent uptick in “miscarriages” — which aren’t miscarriages at all.
Is this what Beauprez wants for Colorado? He serves on the board of Laura Carno’s women’s organization. Carno believes that , a statement at odds with reality. Beauprez himself has repeated this falsehood to Colorado reporters. And he’s tried to disavow his past support for the most extreme anti-choice measures, including Colorado’s “personhood” ballot proposals.
Word to Bob Beauprez: Thanks to Republican politicians, abortion is being outlawed at the state, not federal level, the threats to Roe vs. Wade are very real, and governors have everything to do with it. Governors are signing the “women are stupid” laws mandating transvaginal ultrasounds, waiting periods, medically incorrect lectures, and medically unnecessary standards designed to regulate abortion clinics out of existence.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry held two special session in order to shut down most of that state’s clinics. Democratic Missouri Gov. a Republican-backed bill mandating a three-day waiting period for women to get an abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and then was overridden by the Republican legislature. There’s one abortion provider left in the entire state: Planned Parenthood in St. Louis. There’s a single abortion clinic left in Mississippi, one in South Dakota, and , all thanks to state laws.
of what’s happened to abortion rights in the states, including all the states surrounding Colorado hostile to abortion rights. Fifty-six percent of American women live in the 27 states hostile to abortion rights, double the number in 2000.
Beauprez himself has said he would sign Colorado legislation outlawing abortion even for victims of rape or incest, telling Colorado Public Radio in 2006 he’d oppose an abortion for a 16-year-old rape victim.
In the 2013 Colorado General Assembly, Republican state legislators introduced a both a ‘personhood’ bill and a flat-out abortion ban. One of the physicians who testified in opposition to the legislation said she’d provided an abortion to a 14 year old girl molested by her mother’s boyfriend. Given his past support for abortion bans and personhood bills, there’s little doubt a Governor Beauprez would have signed both bills.
According to the reproductive health research organization , after Republicans took over state legislatures and governors’ mansions, there were more abortion restrictions passed in 2009-2011 than in the previous decade.
More recently, “An unprecedented wave of state-level abortion restrictions swept the country over the past three years. In 2013 alone, 22 states enacted 70 antiabortion measures, including pre-viability abortion bans, unwarranted doctor and clinic regulations, limits on the provision of medication abortion and bans on insurance coverage of abortion. However, 2013 was not even the year with the greatest number of new state-level abortion restrictions, as 2011 saw 92 enacted; 43 abortion restrictions were enacted by states in 2012.”
Colorado voters have said over and over again that the decision about abortion belongs between a woman and her doctor. Bob Beauprez, like Cory Gardner, is attempting to fool voters about who he is and where he stands on taking away their reproductive rights. I think Colorado women are smarter than that.
Laura Chapin is a Democratic political strategist.
