According to a recent report from the Colorado Times Recorder, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea last week “denounced Colorado’s newly passed [Reproductive Health Equity Act] that guarantees the right to an abortion in state statute” — staking out an anti-abortion position in line with his hardline anti-abortion primary opponent Ron Hanks.
Both O’Dea and Hanks — the only two candidates on the GOP primary ballot — are abortion opponents who oppose the legislative effort to codify Roe v. Wade, despite its popularity amongst the vast majority of Coloradans.
Like O’Dea, Hanks has attacked any measure meant to protect abortion rights, and he is currently pushing a bill to criminalize abortion in Colorado and “enforce homicide and assault provisions without regard to the opinion of the United States [S]upreme [C]ourt in Roe v. Wade and other supreme court decisions, past and future.”
Since 2008, Colorado’s electorate has rejected abortion bans on four separate occasions, most recently in 2020, when over 60 percent of voters struck down a Republican-led effort to restrict that constitutional right.
Currently, in red states across the country, Republican governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures are pushing and passing hardline bans to outlaw abortion, attempting to trample constitutional rights. And at the national level, U.S. Senate Republicans have blocked every Democratic effort to protect and codify abortion rights.
“Joe O’Dea and Ron Hanks’ opposition to abortion rights is far out of step with Coloradans,” said American Bridge spokesperson Aidan Johnson. “And with Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s clear their opposition to Roe v. Wade and abortion rights should disqualify them from representing Colorado in the U.S. Senate.”
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Published: Apr 25, 2022