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Colorado’s prosecutors should not be in exam rooms with patients and their obstetricians. Proposition 115 would put the long- arm of Colorado’s law in the middle of the complicated, tragic, and sometimes life and death decisions doctors help women with high- risk pregnancies make every day in this state.

We hope voters refuse this ban on abortions after 22- weeks of gestation, which is approximately 4 months from delivery when the baby is about 11 inches long and weighs about 1 pound.

The ban does include exceptions for when the health or life of the pregnant woman is at risk, however, it does not include any exceptions for when a woman is told her fetus will die in the womb or shortly after birth because of a severe birth defect or genetic abnormality.

Because there is such a stigma in America around pregnancy and childbirth, we seldom talk about these tragedies, but they occur more frequently than people realize. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are 24,000 stillbirths — pregnancies that are more than 20 weeks past gestation where the baby dies often without explanation — every year in America and about 4,700 babies die every year after being born of congenital malformations, deformations or chromosomal abnormalities.

Women and their doctors should be the ones selecting the safest and most humane paths forward. Some women will decide to continue their pregnancy until it ends naturally or until the baby is born in a neonatal hospice for however long its little life lasts. Some women will choose to have an abortion, and sometimes the diagnosis is not learned until after 22 weeks.

These decisions are heart- wrenching and women consider all manner of complications.

The last thing we need is for women to also fear that their decision could violate a state law, or for doctors to fear having their license suspended for three years if they are found guilty of the class 1 misdemeanor. The doctors could not be put in jail for the new crime but could be fined.

New York’s ban on late- term abortions was recently replaced by a law that accounts for when a fetus will never be viable outside the womb, even at full- term, approximately 37 weeks of gestation. To be clear, no one has found evidence of abortions happening in Colorado or elsewhere in the U. S. that late in pregnancy. New York’s law allows for abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy if “there is an absence of fetal viability.”

We do not mean to be entirely dismissive of points being made by those who brought this ballot question forward. We understand that for some people religious and/ or ethical concerns about killing a fetus outweigh any medical or personal justification a woman may have for electing an abortion.

“When I found out what was the status of abortion in Colorado, when I found out that you can have an abortion right up until the minute of birth, it’s just too extreme,” Giuliana Day, one of the proponents of Proposition 115, told us. “This is not right. We have to be on the right side of history.”

However, we are continually compelled by the fact that we trust women and their doctors to make the decisions that are moral given all of the unknowable circumstances each individual woman may face in this world.

“You can never fully know what another person is going through, and these are inevitably complicated personal decisions,” said the Rev. Amanda Henderson, who leads the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado. “That judgment on another person’s situation is not the path that we want to take. We need to be meeting people where they are with compassion and dignity and trust that they can make the decision that is best for them and their family with consultation with their health care provider.”

Most abortions in America occur before eight weeks when the pregnancy is still considered an embryo. According to the CDC, about 1.2% of abortions occurred later than 21 weeks.

For many of those women having abortions in the second trimester, they were unable to access an abortion in their state and needed time to get an appointment, find the money and travel. In essence, abortion restrictions in other states are having the effect of pushing abortions later in pregnancy.