"Amendment 67 Is Saying... 'Be Barefoot and Pregnant'"

Opponents of Colorado's "personhood" amendment rallied today at Auraria campus in downtown Denver, as voters across Colorado are receiving their ballots for the Nov. 4 election.

"Amendment 67 is saying, 'Go back to kitchen," Dolores Huerta, Founder of the American Farmworkers Association and leader of America's civil rights movement told the cheering crowd of a few hundred. "Be barefoot and pregnant and don't come back."

Huerta said the "deceptive" personhood proposal, which would ban abortion in Colorado, will not protect babies, as advertised, but instead would "make pregnant women into criminals."

"If we can't decide on our own bodies, we can't decide on anything," said Huerta.

Huerta told the lunchtime rally goers that they have the power to defeat the measure, and each person present should get 10 others to vote against it.

She told the story of how, in the 1960s, just 40 farm workers stopped 40 million people from eating grapes.

State Rep. Dan Pabon followed Huerta at the podium with a call to men in the audience vote no on Amendment 67.

"Men, we have to stand with our women," said Pabon.

Three women stood near the rally with "Yes on 47" signs.

"A human being is a human being from the moment of conception, and the amendment acknowledges it as a person," said Lauren Castillo, who said she works with College Students for Life clubs on campus and opposes all abortion.

She said she was at the rally to have a dialogue and to explain that women should be able to choose to have babies without forsaking their educational goals.

"It is our belief that no one should have to choose between continuing an education and becoming a parent," said Castillo, who got pregnant during her senior year of college and did not have an abortion.

Amendment 67 is the third personhood measure that's appeared on the Colorado ballot. The first two, in 2008 and 2010, were defeated overwhelmingly.

This year's amendment would expand the definition of a "person" in the state's criminal code to include "unborn human beings," a change that would allow prosecutors to charge women who have abortions with murder. Women who lose pregnancies could be prosecuted for child abuse or other crimes.

The vague wording of Amendment 67 would leave the courts to determine many of its specific outcomes.