Since Colorado has adopted a habit of legislating important questions by plebiscite, there are, as ever, several important questions on the ballot. For reasons that should seem apparent, Proposition 115, the prohibition on late-term abortions, edges out most of the others in scope of importance.

Abortion is among those issues which generates a great deal of passion on both sides. Arguments overloaded with passion tend to polarize those combatants who are already engaged and encourage the unengaged to tune out. There is plenty of room for dispassionate analysis in the abortion argument.

A dispassionate examination of 115 argues strongly in its favor. The measure represents a reasonable approach to the issue, offering a prohibition of abortions only after the 22nd week of pregnancy — the gestational age at which a fetus can live outside the womb — with an exception for those performed to preserve the life of the mother.

It is true that the number of late-term and partial-birth abortions is, blessedly, not very high, prompting the question of why so much thunder and fire is generated against their restriction. The passionate zeal for maintaining the facility of the baby guillotine until birth has spun off a fair bit of histrionic inaccuracy concerning the proposition, pretty much all of which is disposed of by reading the measure.

There is, for instance, the worn claim that 115 would endanger the lives of women; this despite the measure asking, verbatim, whether it ought to be “a misdemeanor punishable by a fine to perform or attempt to perform a prohibited abortion, except when the abortion is immediately required to save the life of the pregnant woman when her life is physically threatened.” If that was an insufficiently clear rebuttal, there is the allegation that 115 would criminalize women who receive those specified abortions; the ballot language specifically states that the new law would include definitions “specifying that a woman on whom an abortion is performed may not be charged with a crime in relation to a prohibited abortion.”

Being categorically denied valid arguments against the specifics of the proposition, the abortionists rely on an alleged belief that prohibiting late-term abortions would somehow emasculate Roe v. Wade. This is nonsense. The case in which the Supreme Court authorized abortions in general made provision for certain reasonable restrictions to be adopted by the states — a provision Colorado has never taken up, making it one of only a very few states that permit abortion up to birth. If 115 is passed, Colorado’s abortion laws would still be more liberal than such bastions of progressivism as New York and California, and would in no way dilute, much less vitiate, Roe.

It seems rather macabre to reduce the issue to the coldness of arithmetic calculations, but for those inclined to such speculative endeavors one good measure by which to judge prospective policy is to ask how many will be harmed or helped; ergo, in the month after enactment, how many mothers would die for the inability to kill their pre-born babies? Answer: none. Conversely, in the same time frame, how many Coloradans would be allowed to emerge safely from their mother’s womb who would not otherwise?

Polling on banning late-term and partial-birth abortion fares rather well, better than more doctrinaire policies such as, say, defining life scientifically — i.e. the moment of conception — and conferring related constitutional protections at that point, largely because the fetus that is closer to birth takes on a more relatable feel: the baby kicks the mother’s stomach; ultrasound images reveal a being with features and reactions not dissimilar to our own; a sensitive nervous system has developed, indicated by reactions to pain, like the prick of an instrument, that are also not unlike what we would do. It is not much of a leap to therefore support a policy which would spare those close to birth the pain inflicted by an abortionist’s knives.

I am reminded of the story of the professor who posed the following question to his students: You behold a family — the father is suffering from syphilis, the mother from consumption; two children are dying from disease, a third was stillborn. The mother is pregnant again — what do you recommend? The class answers, unanimously, abortion. “Congratulations”, says the professor, “you just aborted Beethoven.”

The fate of 115 may rest upon the realization that all of us, every single one, were at one time among those the proposed law would seek to protect; and contemplation of what, fundamentally, is the difference between a body one minute after and one minute before birth.