These people tried, but didn’t save Roe. The Dobbs decision striking down Roe set off a flurry of states passing laws regarding abortion restrictions or rights, and Colorado voters get to weigh in with Amendment 79.
At its simplest, passing Colorado Amendment 79 would enshrine the right to abortion in the Colorado Constitution, and would also remove a prohibition on using public funds for abortion from the Constitution.
Amendment 79 is a citizen-initiated ballot measure, and proponents gathered enough valid petition signatures to put what was originally known as Initiative 89 on the ballot. This is a Constitutional amendment, and would require 55% of the vote to pass.
The actual language that would go into the Constitution by adding Section 32 is short:
Section 32. ABORTION
THE RIGHT TO ABORTION IS HEREBY RECOGNIZED. GOVERNMENT SHALL NOT DENY, IMPEDE, OR DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THE EXERCISE OF THAT RIGHT, INCLUDING PROHIBITING HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE FOR ABORTION.
Passing Amendment 79 would also delete section 50 of article V from the Constitution, copied in full below:
No public funds shall be used by the State of Colorado, its agencies or political subdivisions to pay or otherwise reimburse, either directly or indirectly, any person, agency or facility for the performance of any induced abortion, provided however, that the General Assembly, by specific bill, may authorize and appropriate funds to be used for those medical services necessary to prevent the death of either a pregnant woman or her unborn child under circumstances where every reasonable effort is made to preserve the life of each.
Why Amendment 79?
In very brief, people in the United States have had federally-protected abortion rights since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that “the specific guarantee of “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects individual privacy, includes the right to abortion prior to fetal viability.”
Fast-forward to 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in what is commonly known as the “Dobbs decision.” Named after the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court majority ruled that abortion is neither a federally-protected Constitutional right nor a fundamental right. In the wake of Dobbs, a number of states began drafting and/or passing laws of various levels of restriction, often banning abortion after some number of weeks after conception. This was commonly referred to as turning abortion law over to the states.
In Colorado, Democratic lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates anticipated the Dobbs decision, and that was a little easier to anticipate because there was a leak of the draft majority opinion before Dobbs was officially settled. In 2022, the Colorado General Assembly passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act (RHEA, HB 22-1279), which in very short guaranteed reproductive rights in Colorado in state statutes, but did not authorize public funding for abortions since RHEA was statutory and the prohibition on public funding was in the Constitution.
Colorado voters adopted the prohibition on public funding in 1984, through Amendment 3 which passed by 50.39% – 49.61%. In very brief, the legislative declaration of this year’s Amendment 79 says this prohibition had the “unintended consequences of denying health insurance coverage for abortion services for state and local public employees…” plus it disallowed health insurance coverage for abortion through Medicaid.
In 2023, the General Assembly also passed a package of three bills relating to reproductive rights:
- SB 23-188: Codified protections for reproductive health care providers and facilities.
- SB 23-189: Included several actions designed to increase access to reproductive health care.
- SB 23-190: Created penalties for deceptive practices, such as if an organization advertises that they provide abortions when they don’t actually provide them.
But neither RHEA nor the three bills passed in 2023 put protections into the state Constitution, because the General Assembly can’t amend the Constitution unless voters approve a ballot measure. A group called Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom is leading the effort to pass Amendment 79 and put reproductive rights in the state Constitution.
State Laws And Other Realities Since Dobbs
The Guttmacher Institute reports that 13 states have total abortion bans, although these states have exceptions when there are threats to the life of the pregnant woman, while fewer among these states have exceptions for the health of the pregnant woman. Eight other states have bans (with various exceptions) once a pregnancy has reached a certain gestational age within the first 18 weeks – some states at 6 weeks, some at 12 weeks, and one at 18 weeks.
Nineteen other states either ban abortion (again with exceptions) after “viability,” when it’s considered possible that a fetus can survive out of the womb, or at around 20-24 weeks after conception. A number of states that have abortion restrictions include within their laws allowances for abortion in case of rape, incest, or a diagnosis of lethal fetal anomaly.
Only nine states, including Colorado, and the District of Columbia have no bans on abortion or gestational limits.
The new state laws post-Dobbs have led to women traveling to other states if they can’t get reproductive health services in their home state. Just for a quick example, the New York Times reported that 171,000 women traveled for abortions in 2023 alone, and that has included travel to Colorado.
Very briefly, it’s possible for a pregnancy to include medical conditions that might threaten the health or life of the pregnant woman. For a quick example, the media organization ProPublica was among a number of outlets reporting that two women from Georgia died because they couldn’t access the reproductive health care they needed.
Guttmacher has also reported that an estimated 1,037,000 abortions were performed in the U.S. in 2023, which was an 11% increase since 2020 – despite the new post-Dobbs laws.
Follow The Money
The pro-Amendment 79 committee Coloradans For Protecting Reproductive Freedom reported that it had taken in about $7.8 million in monetary and non-monetary contributions as of Oct. 28. The top single contributor was Cobalt Advocates, at about $2.5 million. Other top contributors included $500,000 from Abigail Dow of New York, $100,000 from Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and $100,000 from Colorado-based Kent Thiry.
The anti-Amendment 79 committee Pro-Life Colorado Fund reported total contributions of about $373,000 as of Oct. 15. The largest contributor to this fund is the Archdiocese of Denver, at $225,000.
Richard’s Take
Vote YES. It’s necessary to put reproductive rights in the state Constitution, because there is no doubt there are attacks on these rights throughout the nation, and people can’t necessarily count on Colorado statutory protections into the mid-to-long-term future. Democrats enjoy healthy legislative majorities and control the Governor’s office in 2024, but there’s no telling if or when this might change. I’ve seen a number of bills and initiatives that would take away or chip away at reproductive rights introduced right here in Colorado over the years, even though they probably had little or no chance of passage. There is no doubt in my mind that anti-abortion legislators or activists will keep trying.
I’ve lived through fairly recent times in which Republicans held an 18-17 majority in the state Senate, and about 12 years ago Republicans had a majority in the House. Democrats might not be able to run an independently wealthy candidate for Governor in 2026 like they did in the past two elections, and with an open seat the Democratic nominee won’t be an incumbent. If Republicans eventually earn as little as one-vote majorities in both the House and Senate, plus control the governorship, they could repeal the RHEA or any of the bills that passed in 2023. It might not seem likely now because Democratic legislative majorities are gigantic, but overconfidence can be dangerous.
I wrote in my opinion piece about this year’s Amendment 80 that I didn’t think protections on school choice needed to be in the Constitution, largely because I don’t believe there’s a believable threat that the state would somehow ban charter schools. But with abortion rights, the threat of having them taken away or severely curtailed is undeniably real. The Dobbs decision striking down Roe v. Wade is fresh in memory, and generally-conservative states across the nation have used this opportunity to pass some very restrictive bills.
This has led to pregnant women needing to leave their home states to get abortions or the reproductive health care they need, and there have been disturbing reports of women suffering serious trauma or even death attributable to the new laws. According to the New York Times story on women traveling to get abortion:
“Abortion is one of the most common procedures in medicine. We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting. Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.”
This is just me speaking, but I haven’t had to travel outside of Boulder County for any health procedure whatsoever. It just seems crazy to put pregnant women on the long road like this when they are likely to get an abortion anyway, but on the other hand – some women who don’t have the resources or the time to travel might not be able to get the services they need at all.
Some voters might oppose 79 because it allows public funds to be used, but in many cases that will be publicly supported health insurance like Medicaid, and I don’t believe there are restrictions on public funding for any other type of health care services in Colorado’s Constitution. People could smoke three packs of cigarettes per day for 50 years, and Medicaid/Medicare would still have to support some type of care, even if it’s too late to tackle the lung cancer and the smoker needs hospice.
I’m fairly certain readers either already support Amendment 79 or already oppose it, so I won’t write much more here. I support so many means of minimizing the likelihood of abortion – contraception, family planning, even abstinence – but it’s obvious to me that unwanted pregnancies will still happen. I don’t believe it’s the government’s business to prevent women from having abortions if they don’t want to carry a fetus to term, and enshrining Amendment 79 in the state Constitution will more dependably protect reproductive rights into the future than will statutory protections that could be overturned by narrow legislative majorities.
