House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Gunbarrel, unloaded on state Republican lawmakers Tuesday for continuing to attempt to limit access to abortion in Colorado, saying the drive to strip women of the right to make their own medical decisions was having a corrosive effect at the Capitol.

“I think we’re all gettin’ a little tired of the extreme right in our body continuing to send these very extreme bills on women’s right to choose,” the Speaker told reporters at her biweekly news conference. “I would simply say that a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions with her doctor are none of their damn business.”

Several bills have been presented so far this year by House Republicans that concern abortion, directly or indirectly, including HB 1113, a personhood bill sponsored again this year, as in years past, by Rep. Steve Humphrey, R-Severance, and HB 1007, the latest version of a fetal homicide bill being run by Rep. Janak Joshi, R-Colorado Springs.

Hullinghorst said she didn’t assign the bills to the State Affairs Committee, the committee where the majority party typically sends bills to die. Instead, she said, she divvied the bills up among committees where members were requesting the opportunity to kill them. She assigned Joshi’s bill to the House Business Affairs Committee and Humphrey’s bill to the Public Health Committee.

“On all of these bills, the personhood bills, the bills that go against a right to choose, we have chairs and members on every single one of our committees that would love to (kill) those bills,” Hullinghorst said. “Quite frankly, last year you’ll remember we spread them out because (committee chairs) were asking for them. There was a special request in Business Affairs (for this bill) and so that’s where I put it.”

Some, however, suspect the hot-button bills were divvied out among committees with an eye toward election-year political advantage. They noted that Rep. Jon Keyser, R-Morrison, who is now running to replace Democrat Michael Bennet in the U.S. Senate, sat on the Public Health committee and would have very likely gone on record supporting Humphrey’s personhood bill — which would have made good fodder for campaign ads against him. Keyser resigned from the House Jan. 25 to focus on his campaign.

Likewise, Rep. Kit Roupe, R-Colorado Springs, sits on the Business Affairs Committee and occupies a hotly contested district, one that has swung between the parties for years. Democrat Tony Exum is running this year to unseat Roupe, who took the seat from him in 2014. Roupe is not a hardline anti-abortion politician, but she might well vote with her Republican committee colleagues in favor of Joshi’s fetal homicide bill, giving abortion rights groups material to attack her this year.

Hullinghorst said election politics didn’t enter into the committee assignment decisions.

Humphrey told The Statesman that the issue of human life is “everybody’s concern” and that the discussion needed to be had in the Legislature.

“I would have two questions for the Speaker. First, Why is it OK to end the life of a beautiful, healthy baby just because it is unborn? And two, What is that unborn thing, then? What is that unborn baby, if not human?” Humphrey said.

Coloradans have voted down three personhood initiatives in recent years, but Humphrey said that didn’t mean the state’s representatives should not continue to discuss this in the Legislature and look for ways to protect life.

“I’m listening to my constituents and many Coloradans across the state that are pro-life,” Humphrey said.

Joshi told The Statesman that his bill was not about abortion or reproductive rights. He said it only seeks to protect fetuses and pregnant women against criminals.

“My bill is a criminal law bill, as it states very clearly. There are 38 other states that have this bill. We’re one of the states that doesn’t have protection for a woman and her unborn child,” Joshi said. “District attorneys have said anytime there is something that takes place, we can’t prosecute because we don’t have this law on the books. They’re asking for this tool in their tool box.”

The Speaker’s remarks come just days after Democrats in the state House celebrated the 43rd anniversary of the Roe V Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, spurring some Republican lawmakers to exit the chamber. The remarks come almost two months to the day that a shooter killed three and injured nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, making headlines and stoking heat around abortion politics in the state and across the country.

On Opening Day of the session three weeks ago, Hullinghorst said she wouldn’t tolerate harsh rhetoric in the chamber aimed at a woman’s right to choose or that demonized abortion services providers such as Planned Parenthood. On Tuesday she reiterated that sentiment, referencing the indictment handed down in federal court in Texas this week against the filmmakers behind the undercover videos released last year of Planned Parenthood staffers discussing fetal tissue donations.

“Every legislator, as long as they abide by the rules of introduction, have a right to introduce five bills, and no one can interfere with that,” Hullinghorst said. “They can introduce whatever they want. But I do object very much to the rhetoric that has gone on related to women’s choice and women’s rights.”

During her opening day remarks Hullinghorst also said the House would focus on issues of equality this session, including working to bring women and ethnic minority pay up to the same level as their male counterparts. On Tuesday both the Speaker and House Majority Leader Rep. Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, touted House Democratic efforts on that front, including introducing HB 1001, which would require companies contracting with the state to pay women and men the same wage for doing the same job.

The bill’s sponsors, Reps. Jessie Danielson, D-Wheat Ridge, and Janet Buckner, D-Aurora, are scheduled to host a news conference Thursday before the bill is presented in the Business Affairs Committee.

Thursday is the sixth anniversary of the passage of the anti-discrimination federal Lilly Leadbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored women’s right to challenge pay discrimination in court.

-ramsey@coloradostatesman.com