LET’S NOT RECALL MAXINE MOST
Louisville is lucky to have a reproductive rights champion on City Council, Maxine Most. She’s not attempting to make medical decisions or play doctor. Instead, Maxine is applying two bedrock principles — equity and inclusiveness — to medical care. Simply put, Maxine believes that equity and inclusiveness demand that pregnant persons have access to all evidence-based medical care.
Recent articles in the Daily Camera and other newspapers share horrifying stories about women who need abortions to save their lives being sent home to become sicker and their lives more endangered. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists unequivocally states that “induced abortion is an essential component of women’s health care” because “pregnancy complications, including placental abruption, bleeding from placenta previa, preeclampsia or eclampsia, and cardiac or renal conditions, may be so severe that abortion is the only measure to preserve a woman’s health or save her life.”
And yet not all hospitals, including AdventHealth Avista in Louisville, provide abortions when necessary to preserve the health or life of a pregnant person. Avista describes its care as “Rooted in Faith.” AdventHealth, to which Avista belongs, is a major player in the health care marketplace; it is “one of the largest health care providers in the United States, with thousands of compassionate professionals working to extend the healing ministry of Christ around the country.”
Even though Avista is a nonprofit hospital — and as such does not contribute any tax revenue to the City — and in spite of its failure to provide evidence-based medicine, Maxine has done nothing to drive Avista from Louisville. Insinuations to the contrary are misleading. She is right to provide our community with accurate information, enabling pregnant persons and their families to choose whether to drive into Boulder.
To keep Maxine, vote no on the Ward 2 Recall.
— Cathern Smith/Louisville
COLORADO CAN SET AN EXAMPLE
Trump has traumatized the nation. Despite his flagrant and illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 election, he is of course running for president again and is currently the leading Republican. Could Trump win? Could he be elected in jail and then pardon himself? According to new research done by two conservative legal scholars published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, these questions should be moot points. After studying the matter for over a year, they concluded that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars Trump from running because of his encouragement of insurrection in 2020. MSN reports, “The legal experts also said that Section 3 is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress.” In other words, those responsible for deciding who is eligible to run for office can simply bar Trump from running as simply as they could bar a 20-year-old who isn’t old enough to run for president, and the only way this prohibition can be overturned is by a two-thirds majority in the national House and Senate. Although the authors argue convincingly that Trump has indeed engaged in “insurrection,” apparently, this needs substantiating by a federal judge somewhere. Then, we in Colorado need to insist that our secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, enforce this law, this part of the Constitution. If we do this, we can set an example for the rest of the nation and stop the Trump nightmare in its tracks.
— Paul Dougan/Boulder
