Gov. Jared Polis fares better in pre-election polling than his fellow Democrats in Colorado and across the country. His colleagues are underwater, while Polis enjoys a 5%-6% advantage over any generic Republican challenger. There’s a reason for that.

“Polis is gaining a lot of value for being independent,” said Tyler Sandberg, president of Ready Colorado, as quoted in The Gazette’s sister publication Colorado Politics on Feb. 7. “The pressure is on for Democrats to be able to buck the special interests in their party.”

Though Polis has made bad decisions as a genuine liberal Democrat, he has wisely distanced himself from the Democratic Party’s increasingly radicalized left-wing base.

He has done so by defending school choice and advocating moderate tax cuts. He has tried to project a moderate and compromising agenda that annoys his party’s wingnuts and raises suspicions among conservatives about the governor’s sincerity. He’s in a good space to win the support of our state’s all-important independent voters.

If Polis wants to immediately destroy an image he has worked hard to establish — if he wants to align with a lunatic fringe — he should sign House Bill 1279 into law. By signing this bill, which passed the Senate on Wednesday on a straight party-line vote, Polis would create the country’s most radically anti-child, anti-minority law. He would rubberstamp a bill poorly disguised as protection for reproductive rights.

Though Polis opposes forced abortions in China and other tyrannical societies, no one expects him to oppose restrictions on abortions chosen by pregnant women. Any reasonable political observer would expect Polis to support legislation protecting the right of women to seek abortions before childbirth.

House Bill 1279 is not a traditional abortion-rights bill. It proposes allowing parents and health care workers to kill or lethally neglect children who are birthed and living outside a mother’s womb. Though Democrats will deny it, one cannot read this bill without concluding it legally justifies infanticide.

The bill forbids any public entity from burdening “an individual’s fundamental rights relating to reproductive health care.”

That means no there can be no regulation regarding “reproductive health care.”

This raises a question. What do they mean by “reproductive health care”? The bill defines the phrase to include “postnatal” care. “Postnatal,” by any definition, means post labor and delivery. A “postnatal” human is a newborn child — a full-fledged person with rights. The bill expressly forbids legal protection for newborns.

The bill’s proponents, lacking the support of a single Republican, say we need this law to “decrease the health and socioeconomic disparities disproportionately faced by people of color and people with low incomes.”

God help those infants born to “low-income” mothers or women of color if a new law justifies their deaths by action or neglect. The law would suggest children of the poor have no right to live.

Sponsors of 1279 concede they advocate abortion rights during labor and delivery when an unborn human has reached full gestation. That alone makes the bill extreme.

Even the ruling in Roe v. Wade allows states to protect unborn children who have developed into the third trimester of pregnancy. Colorado never has and likely never will use this authority.

House Bill 1279 takes us far beyond the old debates surrounding late-term and partial-birth abortions. It allows the termination of newborns. Gov. Polis should veto this barbaric bill. Demand a reproductive rights bill that doesn’t forbid regulation of “postnatal” care. Otherwise, say goodbye to a moderate image.