This coming Election Day, Coloradoans will not only help select a new president, they’ll also place themselves at what’s being called ground zero in the battle over how human life is defined. A group going by the name of Colorado for Equal Rights has gathered over 130,000 signatures – well over the 76,000 required – to have a proposal put on November’s ballot defining a person as “any human being from the moment of fertilization.”

If passed, the proposal would radically impact everything from abortion rights to criminal law to obstetric care. By classifying embryos and fetuses as humans, all abortions – even those carried out because of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life – would be considered murder.

While it’s obvious that banning all abortion is the point of the proposal, less obvious are its ramifications in other areas. Could a miscarriage because of trauma to the mother in a car accident open the mother or driver to charges of manslaughter? Would natural miscarriages prompt criminal investigations? Will Colorado’s OB/GYN’s be exposed to entirely new frontiers in malpractice?

This is not a case of good intentions having unintended consequences, but bad intentions having precisely the sort of consequences its proponents envision. The creators of this ballot initiative know full well that foisting their unscientific, religion-based definition of human life on the public radically scales back the rights of women in Colorado.