With Anti-Personhood Measure, Democrats Prove They Can Pass Pointless Abortion Bills, Too

For years, Republican state legislators have been
proposing and pushing pointless abortion measures. I say
“pointless” because the bulk of these are rooted not in medical or
legal necessity but in some combination of desires to prevent women
from getting abortions, to incite culture-war ire, and to force
challenges in court.

But why should GOP lawmakers get to have all the fun here? In

Colorado, congressional Democrats have introduced a feel-good,
do-nothing abortion measure of their own. 

The measure,
Senate Bill 175, sounds lovely on the surface. Deemed the
“Reproductive Health Freedom Act,” it aims to promote “freedom from
government interference in an individual’s reproductive health
decisions.” To this aim, no state or locality in Colorado shall
pass a policy that “denies or interferes” with such decisions.
Additionally, all reproductive health policies must be rooted in
“current evidence-based scientific data and medical
consensus.” 

Though the bill doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s at least partly
a reaction to abortion measures that have passed in other states
recently (kinda like the legislative equivalent of a subtweet). In
Texas, for instance, women seeking abortions may be required to
listen to a fetal heartbeat first, just for funsies. And 12
states require women to view an ultrasound image before the
procedure. 

As you might imagine, I’m no fan of these laws, which add
burdensome, costly, and medically unnecessary steps to abortion
procedures in the name of attempted emotional manipulation. But no
one is requiring these steps in Colorado, and no one is suggesting
requring them. This is a bill intended to ban the possibility of
future bills.

That’s a futile endeavor, of course: Were SB 175 to go into law,
a future anti-abortion majority in the Colorado legislature could
simply repeal it and proceed to pass all the personhood measures it
liked. “It’s one of the worst bills that I’ve seen in terms of
public policy,” Sen. Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud)
told 9 News Colorado. “When the legislature puts
something in statute, it’s supposed to mean something.”

“It doesn’t create a crime and it doesn’t cost money. What’s the
point of making this into law?”
asked 7NEWS Reporter Marshall Zelinger, displaying a depressing
but sadly accurate view of contemporary lawmaking.

Of course, state legislatures are frequently home to symbolic
lawmaking. Politicians love to delcare the things they support in
ways that can be easily referenced next campaign season. While a
waste of time, these things are essentially harmless. But since I
frequently complain when Republicans engage in this kind of
abortion grandstanding, I figured highlighting this instance of
Democrats engaging in similar silliness was only fair.