Recently, Rep. Millie Hamner had a town hall meeting in Summit County with Karen Middleton, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado to discuss women’s health and reproductive rights. In the email she sent to constituents, she labeled recent legislation in other states as extreme.

So, I decided to attend the meeting to find out what she meant by extreme, as that moniker is thrown around frequently by Millie and her ilk. Numerous times, she used Texas as an example of extreme legislation. The recent Texas law requires doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, allow abortions only in surgical centers, limit where and when women may take abortion-inducing pills and ban abortions after 20 weeks. Given the recent horrors uncovered in a Philadelphia abortion clinic where abortions were performed in unsanitary conditions, babies’ necks were snipped when aborted alive, and women died; Texas’ response seems to be a reasonable attempt to protect women and babies from these atrocities.

She went on to say that Coloradans have spoken frequently that they don’t like government interference in their choices, namely, by rejecting the personhood amendment. She touted that abortion is a right guaranteed under the constitution and should not have any limits on it. Colorado currently has no limits or regulation on the abortion industry.

So for me that raises questions about her votes on the gun control measures. Gun ownership is a right that is specifically defined in the Colorado and United States constitution unlike abortion. Yet, the public outrage over the recent gun control measures were deemed extreme too. Senate President John Morse likened Coloradans’ desire for freedom from government overreach on gun control as a “sickness in our soul.” Representative Hamner voted for every single one of the gun control regulations. She classified these regulations as “…common-sense measures that move us in the right direction without infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens.” According to her logic on abortions, these gun measures would be an extreme infringement on our 2nd Amendment rights. You just can’t have it both ways Representative Hamner.

So, if any legislation to regulate the safety of the abortion industry is extreme and people who believe that the 2nd Amendment should have the same wall of protection from regulation are also extreme, I guess that Representative Hamner is extremely misleading or very confused about her desires to protect our rights. More likely, she is swayed by the money flowing into her campaign coffers from NARAL, Mayor Bloomberg and like minded committees.

Since Representative Hamner has not established her legislative agenda for 2014 yet and we all agree that Coloradans desire freedom from government interference in our lives, I’d like to offer her a suggestion. In this coming legislative session, how about allotting half of your legislative sponsorships to remove regulations and spending that restrict our liberty? Or, are you misleading us on that front too?

Lisa Knobel

Silverthorne