Will Women Be Prosecuted?

Let's be clear. It is not the intent of this initiative to prosecute mothers. It is the intent of this initiative to protect mothers from taking the lives of their children!

Anyone who understands the humanity of preborn children will not ask this question. Do we ever ask if a woman will be prosecuted for killing her three-year old? Or for leaving her newborn in a hot car? Why is that? Because we understand the humanity of these children. Regardless how complicated or stressed a mother's life may be, we understand a child is dependent on adults responsible for their care.

When we stop believing the lie that children prior to birth are an unrecognizable 'clump of cells', we won't ask this question of these mothers, either. Once we understand these are living human children with their only life ahead of them - the same children they will be following birth - we understand the humanity of these children, too.

Once a woman chooses to engage in activity that creates a child, she is a mother responsible for the care of her child. These tiny infants with recognizable fingers and toes and faces and a heartbeat growing and moving around within the first few weeks of pregnancy are the same children they will be forty weeks later. The question then becomes what will we do with this knowledge of the facts and these lives before us?

This initiative is written to prevent the mutilation and intentional deaths of children. As long as no one is intentionally mutilating or intentionally causing the death of a child, then no one will be prosecuted for breaking the law.

With the advice of multiple attorneys, medical doctors, and before a panel of representatives from the Attorney General, Secretary of State, Legislative Council, and others, this is how the law is intended to be interpreted.

The law makes it illegal to mutilate children and applies statutes fairly for all children. These children deserve fair laws to protect them. If someone chooses to intentionally break the law by mutilating or intentionally ending a child's life, it is then up to the judiciary.

In one hundred years of judicial precedent when abortion was illegal, the courts treated the abortionist as the criminal of the illegal act and the mother as a second victim upon which the act was perpetrated. Mothers were not prosecuted so that their testimony was used to convict those pimping the abortion. [1]

Our intention is not to prosecute women. Our intention is that women obey the law so that they and their children will be protected by the law.

Mothers are protected in that no one is going to stop trying to save the life of a mother. But there are currently no laws in Colorado protecting children from being intentionally killed between conception to birth.

The goal is to prevent anyone from taking these children's lives away from them.

The purpose of law is to protect people. The purpose of a red light is not to give a ticket when someone runs it, but to protect the people who could be killed if they do. The law is a teacher and deterrent to harmful and fatal behaviors, which is why we have laws.

The purpose of this law is to save children's lives, preventing loss of life and protecting mothers in the process. The sweet little toddler with pudgy cheeks and curly hair is the same child prior to birth with the same face, the same personality, and the same heartbeat that will last her lifetime. She feels pain by just seven weeks from conception and will move away from touch to her face. Even light touch is painful to her. She looks like a tiny newborn and she can be killed all forty weeks of pregnancy by any means, including poison, dismemberment, scalding, even her throat cut while she's working hard and hoping to be born. She is as living and human as you and I are, with the same Constitution protecting her right to live as ours. Currently, two thousand children a month are unprotected in Colorado from being tortured to death, their lives, futures, and the dreams they would have taken from them.

When we protect children, we also protect mothers. Childbirth and C-section are safer for mothers than giving birth to a dead child. And mothers are not currently protected from the physical, emotional, and spiritual damage abortion causes women. Eighty-one percent of women experience psychological problems following an abortion and all women experience spiritual damage. In just one year, 5 million women were hospitalized and 57,000 women died from elective abortions worldwide. And those were just the reported hospitalizations and deaths, which Colorado is not required to report. [2]

When this passes, abortion clinics will be closed. Abortion pills may not be manufactured or mailed. Mothers will no longer be coerced, deceived, or exploited for profit by abortionists to endure a lifetime of grief and regret. Mothers' bodies will not be legally violated by abortionists to rip their children from them, or put into preterm labor to deliver a dead son or daughter. We will have less rage, depression, anxiety, suicide, and drug and alcohol dependence among women, [3]

The lives of actual children will be saved!

Mothers will be referred to the many non-violent, no-cost resources available, including pregnancy care centers, modern adoption agencies, churches, and other agencies where caring women walk alongside mothers with individualized help so that mothers and their children can thrive! [4]

The question for anyone understanding the humanity of these children is not if the judiciary will enforce consequences for mothers who choose to break the law, but rather, how can we as compassionate people prevent mothers from killing their own children and provide every opportunity for these children to continue living.

[1]Why the States Did Not Prosecute Women for Abortion Before Roe v. Wade, Clarke Forsythe, J.D., Americans United for Life, 23 April 2010.

[2] WHO, 2019.

[3] Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995–2009, Cambridge University Press, 02 January 2018

[4] Protections Of Children, 18-6-901(8), Colorado Life Initiative, 18 Oct 2023.

Faye Barnhart, Co-Proponent of the Life Initiative for Colorado 2024, is a Life Affirming Specialist and Women's Advocate of nineteen years, served in a federal think tank on the co-occurrence of adult and child violence and four pregnancy care centers in two states, including CEO of the largest pregnancy care center geographically in the US and Colorado. She has been a follower of Jesus Christ since a small child.