Progress Now Action

How does one, 20 minute tape of material allow for a teacher to be forced to go on leave? Thought provoking questions and statements should be encouraged--leave it up to the students to define their positon on controversial issues rather than telling them their position.   Read More »

Unfortunately, this is how Colorado is rated by the national organization NARAL Pro Choice. This means that the coming legislation protecting women's choice is that much more important and needed. A "D" rating is unacceptable.



Protesters rally at Planned Parenthood

March 2, 2006
By Chuck Slothower | Herald Staff Writer

Colorado received a "D" grade for abortion rights from NARAL. Seventy-eight percent of Colorado counties do not have an abortion provider, according to the organization.

This is a really significant step forward for women, as support for a woman's right to use over the counter Emergency Contraception is acquired on the CU campus from both political parties. Personal choices should not be controlled by the government. This agreeance on the CU campus should be a model for Democrats and Republicans all over the country, at all levels of government and political activity. It's not simply a matter of Republicans vs. Democrats. It's a matter of women having control of their own bodies.   Read More »

Rocky Mountain News


Abortion proposal tweaked
By Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News
February 23, 2006

Sponsors of a proposed initiative on late-term abortion are making what they call "voter friendly" word changes after a recent poll showed lower-than-expected support.

The Legislative Council will rule today on whether the changes are substantial enough to require a hearing.

The initiative has gone through four changes since September, the most recent one last month. All changes must be approved by the Legislative Council and the title board before sponsors can seek voter signatures to get the initiative on the November ballot.

Now those steps must be retraced.   Read More »

Higher-ed bills come fast and furious

By MATT WILLIAMS Colorado Daily Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 21, 2006 9:14 PM MST

Bills on higher education are multiplying seven weeks into this year's session of the state Legislature.

State lawmakers have introduced about 20 bills related to colleges and universities so far, including legislation that would require all institutions to adopt a post-tenure review procedure for faculty members as well as a bill that would give students the opportunity to sign a consent form to notify relatives when they are suicidal.

Most higher education bills are stuck in committees right now as lawmakers continue to tweak them; others are in transit between the House and Senate.

State Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder, told the Colorado Daily on Tuesday that bills on higher education are all vying for the same $4 billion that Referendum C, the state's temporary budget fix, will make available over the next five years.

It has created a landscape of "competing interests" at the Legislature, he said.

Tupa is member of the Senate Education Committee.

"I'd like to see more go into financial aid for the students, and if that comes as a College Opportunity Fund increase, which I'm hearing that it will, I'd like to just see more money assisting students get in and out of college," Tupa said.   Read More »

Women won't "just get over" reproductive freedom

By Diane Carman
Denver Post Staff Columnist
DenverPost.com

I will fight against anybody, including those in my own party, who say abortion should be a litmus test.

- Sen. Ken Salazar,

endorsing Bill Ritter for governor.

So it's come to this. The right to privacy in a fundamental health-care decision is trivialized as a petty, narrow, political litmus test.

With women making up 58 percent of Democratic voters in the state, Salazar's threat is a risky strategy.

"I don't think that was necessary," said Dottie Lamm, a Democratic pro-choice advocate for 40 years. "I think he could have made that pitch for solidarity without alienating the very people he was trying to bring in."

Lamm has not leapt aboard the Ritter bandwagon - at least not yet.

"I'm still kind of reeling from John Hickenlooper's decision not to run," she said. "I'm feeling very ambivalent."

It's going around.

Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald said Salazar's office has encouraged her to endorse Ritter. But his unwillingness to support women's reproductive rights still makes her uncomfortable.

"I understand where he is on this issue," she said. "It's not where I am."

Judging by the storm of calls and e-mails to NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado on Wednesday, the abortion issue is not going to go away just because Salazar says that it should.

"For the 1 million women of childbearing age in Colorado, the issue of nongovernmental interference in their private, personal lives is of paramount importance," said Kathryn Wittneben, executive director of Colorado NARAL. "Women's reproductive rights are fundamental freedoms that cannot be lightly dismissed by political candidates for political gains."   Read More »

The woman warrior
By Ellen Goodman | February 7, 2006

WHEN THE news came of Betty Friedan's death on her 85th birthday, I remembered Aug. 26, 1970, the Women's Strike for Equality. I remembered Betty Friedan parading down New York's Fifth Avenue, with tens of thousands of exhilarated women behind her.

I also remembered the afternoon edition of my paper illustrating that march with two front-page photos. On the left was the pretty, blond, smiling figurehead of some unknown group of Happy Homemakers. On the right was Betty Friedan, mouth open in midshout, face contorted, as unattractive a photo of this woman as was ever chosen by any editor. Under both pictures ran a simple, loaded question: Which one do you choose?

This came to mind not only because Betty won her place in the history books. It reminded me of what this passionate and irascible, strong-willed, and difficult woman was up against: a culture with prescribed roles for women and harsh ways of slapping down those who didn't conform.

Betty Friedan, author and agitator, most assuredly did not conform. Not to Peoria, Ill., where she grew up. Not to suburbia, where she raised her children. Not even, always, to feminism.

She was born the year after suffrage passed. Her book, the book, ''The Feminine Mystique," was published in 1963, the year that Adlai Stevenson told my graduating class at Radcliffe how important our education would be in raising our children. It was released to paperback and fame in 1964, the year I worked in the sex-segregated research pool at Newsweek magazine -- and thought I was lucky to have the job.

It's easy to forget now what it was like before Betty named ''the problem that had no name" and, in futurist Alvin Toffler's words, ''pulled the trigger on history." We know how far women have come, but for every woman who believes life has improved, there is another who believes that life has become more stressful. Some of us believe both things at the same time.   Read More »

Rocky Mountain News

Ex-DA still 'has problem': abortion

By Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News
February 7, 2006

Now, a new waiting game begins.

Minutes after Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced he would not run for governor, attention turned to candidate Bill Ritter.

Will certain reluctant Democrats rally behind the former Denver district attorney, or will they seek an alternative?

Alice Madden, the majority leader in Colorado's House of Representatives, said she might just be that alternative.

"I'm seriously considering running," she said after the mayor's announcement.

Several big-money Democrats and old party pols were working to conscript Hickenlooper, political consultant Floyd Ciruli said.

Some in the party are "having trouble uniting behind Ritter," he said. "He still has a problem."

That problem centers on one issue: abortion. Ritter is personally opposed to abortion, although he says he would not back any effort to criminalize women or their doctors.   Read More »