Wanted: 76,000 idiots in Colorado (plus Mike Huckabee)

What will a longer-and-longer long-shot candidate for his party's presidential nomination do to pander to enough conservative voters to keep himself in the game (at least in his own tiny mind)?

Mike Huckabee is supporting a Colorado constitutional amendment to declare that fertilized eggs are human beings.

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement backing the Colorado Human Life Amendment.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value.

“Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Among other things, this amendment would effectively make in-vitro fertilization illegal in Colorado. The way that IVF generally works is that a woman undergoes a cycle on fertility drugs and produces between 8-15 eggs. The clinic takes sperm from the potential father, and attempts to fertilize each of them in a petrie dish. Normally, about 5-10 of these eggs will fertilize and get to the four-cell stage, when the physician makes a decision about which ones look healthy and/or hardy enough to survive implantation. Two or three of these fertilized eggs will be implanted in the woman.

The rest of the eggs--what happens to them? Sometimes they are frozen for later potential use, sometimes they are handed over to the physician for experimentation, and sometimes they're simply destroyed.

Likewise, most ethical physicians require patients to agree ahead of time that on the off-chance that too many embryos adhere to the uterine wall that they will accept a selective reduction or abortion of one or more embryos to safeguard the health of the woman and the viability of the remaining embryos.

IF Mike Huckabee has his way, all of these actions would be classed as homicide in Colorado.

Fortunately, he will need 76,000 Coloradans to endorse this amendment, and having lived there I do not think he'll find them.

Of course, the amendment Huckabee supports would also have the effect of outlawing all abortions in the State, setting up a major confrontation with the Supreme Court, but for a man who wants to rewrite the US Constitution to make it more consistent with the New Testament, why think small?