One thing has become clear since the Trump Administration has started taking shape: the threat to women’s reproductive rights are very real. At NARAL Colorado, we’ve seen a huge surge in the number of volunteers and calls wanting to help coming in. As a practicing Ob-Gyn, Dr. Emily Schneider has heard these concerns from patients and from fellow physicians.
And that concern is reflected in thousands of Colorado women – and men – who will be marching on Saturday. Itap not just about the Trump Administration. Itap about protecting women’s rights, including a strong commitment to protecting our access to reproductive health care, contraception and abortion care, which has been legal in Colorado for 50 years.
When we march on Saturday, we will raise our voices to protect this tradition. We will join others demanding our Colorado values be reflected in Washington, D.C. We will demand that the Trump Administration hears loudly and clearly that rolling back these rights — in Colorado and across the nation — will have consequences.
If the Trump Administration takes away the contraceptive coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act, or rolls back women’s health protections with a repeal of the ACA, or eliminates Planned Parenthood funding, or tries to overturn Roe v. Wade, they will hear from Coloradans. We need to be proactive in Colorado to ensure the Constitutional rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade are protected here, regardless of what happens in Washington.
Coloradans are pro-choice — an issue that crosses party lines — and has been demonstrated in landslide votes against ‘personhood’ measures that would have outlaw all abortions and many forms of birth control.The belief that personal, private decisions about abortion and birth control belong between a woman and her physician, without interference from politicians is an integral part of our Western values. We’ve seen this in NARAL national polling research, where Coloradans support Roe v. Wade at 76 percent consistently. Support for women making decisions without interference from politicians was close to 90 percent.
As the first state to allow safe, legal abortion — six years before Roe v. Wade — in 1967 Colorado has been a leader on privacy and access around women’s health care and reproductive rights. Our state is a shining example in the United States that pro-woman public policy, including access to abortion, access to birth control, and trusting women to make their own choices leads to better health outcomes for individual women and the state as a whole.
We know this because the Colorado Initiative, a comprehensive policy effort that provided free, long-acting reversible contraception to low-income women, cut the teen birth and abortion rate in half over a five year period. The Initiative integrated policy, outreach and education components with contraception access, which resulted in a success story many states hope to replicate. Taxpayers avoided an estimated $6 in Medicaid costs for unintended pregnancy for every $1 invested. It improved maternal and child health by reducing preterm birth among at-risk women.
Meanwhile, in states like Texas that cut reproductive health funding, the negative impact is evident. In Texas, the maternal mortality rate doubled following funding restrictions to Planned Parenthood. Colorado’s success is proof that smart policies that empower women work – and efforts to chip away at women’s reproductive health care access including policies like abortion bans, targeted regulation of abortion providers and mandatory ultrasound laws, don’t.
You simply cannot separate abortion care and birth control access from women’s health as a whole, as anti-choice politicians want to do. It all falls on the same spectrum of the medical service Schneider and her colleagues provide. As the American Congress of Obstetrician Gynecologists puts it, “safe, legal abortion is an integral part of women’s health care.”
So we will be marching on Saturday to protect the Colorado values we believe in and to send a message. We’re loud. We’re clear. And after 50 years as the political voice of the pro-choice movement in Colorado, we are not going away.
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