Colorado’s stand for choice
It has caused trauma to providers, patients, and advocates alike
It has been a year since the Supreme Court overturned the Constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision on June 24, 2022, and the impact on Colorado has been devastating. It has caused trauma to providers, patients, and advocates alike.
Even in states like Colorado where abortion is legal, the Dobbs decision has thrown the health care system into chaos. Patients, many of them in medical, emotional, and financial distress, are flooding Colorado from abortion ban states. Statewide, patients here are seeing delays in the full spectrum of reproductive health care because of the time- sensitive nature of abortion care. Routine screenings and procedures are getting pushed back and moved around because we have a crisis created by the Supreme Court and anti- abortion ideologues.
Abortion is health care. That’s not just a slogan. That’s a fact. And when half the country bans a health care procedure for politics, the ripple effects spread far beyond an individual state’s borders. ‘ Rolling back abortion to the states,’ which was a lie to begin with because a national abortion ban is the clear goal, has been a disaster across the country. Patients are suffering from being forced to travel for an abortion, or worse yet forced to carry a non- viable pregnancy to term. Every day brings a new horror story.
The demand on the Cobalt Abortion Fund has exploded in the last year. Our client need has doubled and our financial outlays have tripled as the cost burden has shifted onto Colorado from other abortion ban states where similar funds have suspended operations for fear of lawsuits and jail time. In addition to paying for procedures, our funding for practical/ travel support such as plane tickets and hotel rooms, has gone
up exponentially. The Cobalt Abortion Fund spent $ 6,000 on practical support in 2021. In 2022, we spent nearly $ 222,000, almost all of it post- Dobbs. Procedure funding in 2021 was just over $ 200,000. In 2022, it was $ 475,000.
When I started at Cobalt ten years ago, Barack Obama was president and we had a pro- abortion rights majority on the Supreme Court. I got a lot of ‘ it’s nice that you’re doing this but banning abortion isn’t a real threat’ comments. Far too many people assumed that the fight over abortion rights was happening in Congress, not the grassroots. They were wrong.
Organizations like Cobalt, those of us on the front lines in the states, had been anticipating the overturn of Roe for years. It’s partially why Cobalt became an independent organization in 2020 — if Roe was overturned, the fight
to protect abortion rights would return ( mostly) to the states and we would have to rebuild access from the inside back out.
We saw the barrage of legislation aimed at state legislatures, and it was only a matter of time until something broke through. Here in Colorado, we defeated four statewide abortion bans since 2008 and 50 attempts to ban or restrict abortion at the General Assembly since 2010. But these laws passed in other states, even as they got challenged in the courts. Abortion opponents were willing to fail forward for nearly fifty years until, with the help of a Trump- Mcconnell judiciary, they were able to overturn one of the most monumental Supreme Court decisions in history.
Abortion bans are fundamentally
about power. Abortion opponents believe the state has the right to exercise power over a pregnant person, to deny them the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to give birth. And that is why Coloradans have been so historically stalwart in our support for abortion rights. We strongly believe that decisions about abortion belong between individuals and their doctors, without politicians getting in the way, and it’s why in 1967 we were the first state to allow legal abortion.
We passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act ( RHEA), putting abortion access into state law, in April 2022, a month before the Dobbs decision leak and two months before the decision itself. RHEA guarantees every Coloradan has fundamental reproductive rights and that a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights under the laws of the state.
This year we passed the Safe Access to Protected Health Care bill package to build on RHEA and reinforce reproductive health care access in state law. It includes an abortion and gender- affirming care shield law, Senate Bill 188, to protect patients, providers, and helpers from persecution from other states. This is where we are now because of the Dobbs decision — Colorado is having to pass laws to protect us from extremists in other states.
And in 2024, we intend to put proactive abortion rights measures on the ballot to ensure abortion access isn’t just in our laws, it’s in our Constitution. We need to put RHEA into the state Constitution and we need to ensure that everyone’s insurance, public or private, covers abortion care.
As a state, we are taking on the burden of the terrible consequences of the Supreme Court’s failure on Dobbs. Coloradans have a long, proud history of leading the nation on abortion rights. And it is time, post- Dobbs, for Colorado to again lead on abortion access and reproductive health care.
A former state legislator from Aurora who served on the State Board of Education, Karen Middleton has been president of Cobalt since 2013. Originally founded in 1967, the organization rebranded from NARAL Pro- Choice Colorado and became a fully independent, Coloradobased grassroots group in 2020. It has over 100,000 members.