Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said the laws cannot be used against a woman who lawfully terminates her pregnancy.
    "Some of them have been in existence for 30 years, and they haven't had any impact on legal abortions," he said.
    After Colorado Democrats rejected a fetal-homicide bill in 2013, state Rep. Mike Foote authored a measure allowing extra felony charges against anyone who commits a crime causing the death of a fetus. Foote, a Democrat, said the involvement of "personhood" activists in the push for a fetal homicide law makes it impossible for Colorado to implement one without risking lengthy legal fights over abortion.
    "The issue we were wrestling with is how you can hold offenders accountable and have some semblance of justice and not interfere with a woman's reproductive rights," said Foote, who is also a prosecutor.
    Foote and others said the key issues in the current case will be whether the fetus was alive outside the mother and whether the act that led to the unborn baby's death occurred outside her body. During a brief court hearing Thursday, Lane's defense attorney, Kathryn Herold, requested a defense expert be present during the autopsy planned for Friday.
    "In this particular case, the cause of death is going to be essential," she said.
    Lane went to great lengths to show her family she was pregnant, sharing an ultrasound photo with her daughter, an arrest affidavit says. Her husband told investigators that when he came home early from work Wednesday to meet her for a prenatal appointment, he found her covered in blood and a baby gasping for breath in a bathtub.
    Lane told her husband she had a miscarriage, and he took her and the baby to a hospital, where she was arrested on suspicion of attempted first-degree murder and other crimes.
    The victim managed to call 911, and police arrived to help her sometime after the couple left. While drifting in and out of consciousness, the 26-year-old woman told police she did not know Lane and went to her house in response to the ad, the affidavit says.
    The woman was alert and answering questions Thursday, police said.
    Lane and her former husband lost a 19-month-old boy in a drowning accident in 2002. Her then-husband wasn't home at the time, the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper reported. She and their two daughters, then 5 and 3, searched for the boy until they found him in a fish pond.
    He had been playing a game with his sisters while their mother was busy in another part of the house, the newspaper said.