Cynthia Coffman – nor her staff – want to talk about abortion. Three months into her run for governor, Colorado’s Republican attorney general still isn’t clarifying where she stands on the divisive issue that’s a pretty big deal to a lot of bedrock conservatives in Colorado – at least some of whom she would need to win to become the GOP nominee.

Soon after she got in the race. Colorado Politics tried and failed to get a clear answer. A campaign staffer said then that Coffman has never said whether she is personally for or against abortion, but Coffman would talk about it on the campaign trail at the proper time.

Three months later is still not the proper time, evidently.

Jason Salzman, who reports from the political left, took a crack at it. And after he tried, I tried again. Salzman took on the search for clarity on the left-leaning Colorado Times Recorder website last week. You can read his article by clicking here.

Spoiler warning: Neither of us got a reply to our email – the way Coffman’s operation is handling press questions.

Coffman is hoping to court women and unaffiliated voters, she said early on. She’s been swerving and swiveling around abortion ever since.

Salzman wanted the attorney general to square her personal position with her legal history on defunding Planned Parenthood on behalf of the state, the same role she took in defending the state’s Civil Rights Commission against a Lakewood baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Her job puts her at odds with the core values of the Republican base sometimes.

Says Salzman:

She became widely known as an expert on the arcane topic, and last year, anti-abortion activists repeatedly cited Coffman’s 2001 legal opinion as evidence in a lawsuit (footnote 3 here) claiming that Colorado’s ban on using tax dollars for abortion precludes the state from funding Planned Parenthood at all, even for the women’s health organization’s non-abortion services for low-income people, such as breast cancer screening.

Last month the Colorado Supreme Court ruled differently, saying non-abortion services offered by Planned Parenthood could receive state money.

Salzman sent an e-mail at the time asking Coffman about the Supreme Court decision, and he didn’t hear back. So he caught up with her ahead of a gubernatorial debate and asked her in person.

“That’s a longer conversation we should have another time,” he reports she told him, sounding very much life a brush-off. She told me much the same … three months ago.

Coffman told Salzman to email a staff member his questions, which he says he did, but he never heard back, he told me at midweek.

So I tried my usual Coffman campaign contact, and I didn’t hear back, either. The email wasn’t even acknowledged.

When Coffman jumped in the race, her campaign told CBS4’s Shaun Boyd that the candidate supports abortion rights, but when I got involved the campaign seemed to walk that back. They didn’t ask the TV station for a correction, however.

Conservative talk radio, her presumed allies, turned on Coffman quickly, and she’s still in the haze on the issue.

On Feb. 3. she told Craig Silverman on 710 KNUS that she doesn’t personally like Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court, but it’s the law of the land. She’d prefer states decide.

“You can have a personal opinion that’s different, but to me that’s a settled question,” she said on the radio. “We really need to move on from this.”

She never got back to saying what her personal opinion is, just like her campaign never gets back to reporters on what her opinion is.

Salzman’s take on her reluctance is the prevailing thought on the right and left: Coffman is taking punches and hoping the issues goes away. Why?

And anti-abortion Republicans are known to have an outsized influence at the GOP assembly, where Coffman must win 30 percent of delegates to advance to the primary election.

So, she’d rather not say anything more to turn anti-choice activists away than she already has.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to fix an errant spelling in one of the references to Salzman.