Pro-abortion legislators in Colorado have introduced a package of three bills, each dedicated to protecting abortion. In addition to eliminating women’s ability to make fully informed choices, the package will allow for taxpayer funding of abortion and the ability of minors to access birth control and abortion. It also threatens the First Amendment rights of pro-life medical professionals.
Abortion pill reversal
SB23-190 attempts to ban what it defines as “deceptive” advertising by pregnancy resource centers and to prohibit their ability to promote or prescribe abortion pill reversal (APR), which consists of administering the hormone progesterone to counteract the effects of the abortion pill mifepristone. “They advertise in languages other than English specifically to target immigrant communities that already have folks who already have a harder time accessing health care services and anti-abortion centers,” Rep. Elisabeth Epps told Denver 7.
Rep. Janice Marchman added, “They peddle biased and inaccurate information about abortion care and contraceptives. And they take advantage of people during some of their most vulnerable moments. Simply put, they lie.”
Epps, in an interview with Colorado Public Radio, further claimed of APR, “This practice is not only dangerous and unregulated, but evidence shows that these pills cannot even reverse an abortion.”
Abortion pill reversal is not a lie, nor is it dangerous. It works by flooding the woman’s body with progesterone, the pregnancy hormone that sustains the embryo’s life, in an effort to offset mifepristone, the first drug of the abortion pill regimen, which blocks naturally-occurring progesterone in the mother’s body. The same hormone has been widely used to prevent miscarriage safely for decades.
A 2020 Mitchell Creinin study is frequently cited by abortion advocates as “proof” of abortion pill reversal’s so-called danger, yet two of the three women who had to be taken to the emergency room for hemorrhaging during his study received the placebo — not the progesterone. This means that the drug in their system was the abortion pill, with nothing to counteract it.
Meanwhile, twice as many patients who received progesterone instead of the placebo in the study were able to continue their pregnancies, while twice as many patients who received the placebo were transported to the hospital via ambulance. The abortion pill itself is known to carry a risk of hemorrhage and studies from the U.S. and UK have shown, approximately six percent of the women who take it visit emergency rooms or urgent care facilities with complications.
Creinin, meanwhile, has a vested interest in promoting the abortion pill regimen. He is an abortionist himself and has also served as a paid consultant for Danco Laboratories, which manufactures abortion pills. The study was sponsored by the University of California-Davis and the Society of Family Planning — both of which have strong ties to abortion.
Other studies, meanwhile, have affirmed the safety of progesterone and found that it increased the chances that women at risk of miscarriage — who had already begun bleeding — to carry to term.
SB23-190 would do nothing more than strip women of available choices other than abortion, including parenting, adoption, and abortion pill reversal.
Overturning taxpayer funding bans
SB23-189 attempts to skirt the Colorado prohibition against public funding of abortion. Large insurance plans would require that abortion be covered, and minors under the age of 19 would have access to for contraceptives and abortion without their parents’ knowledge.
“This package and this bill seeks to address those structural barriers to care by reducing cost sharing for Coloradans providing transportation services for abortion care, addressing both financial and access inequities,” Mannat Singh, the executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said.
Polling has routinely shown that Americans support parental notification laws regarding teenage abortions.
Attack on First Amendment rights
SB23-188 claims to protect women seeking abortions, as well as abortionists, from being prosecuted by pro-life states. “We want to make sure that people that are coming to Colorado are going to be able to get the services that they need that are legally protected here,” Rep. Brianna Titone said. “We’re hoping that we can continue to increase the services that we provide here by making it safe not just for the patients, but for those providers as well.”
Yet the bill tramples on the First Amendment rights of medical professionals. The Colorado Catholic Conference noted in a statement that the bill “[v]iolate[s] First Amendment rights of medical professionals and medical centers/hospitals that do not provide abortion-related services or ‘gender-affirming care;'” and “[v]iolate[s] First Amendment rights of employers who do not provide abortion-related services or ‘gender-affirming care’ in their insurance plan.” Religious health care providers would not be provided exemptions to opt out.
The Conference strongly condemned the package of bills and called for Colorado’s residents to write and testify against them. A Rally for Life will be held on the Colorado Capitol West Steps on April 4 at 10:00 am, hosted by the Pro-Life Colorado coalition.
