Yesterday evening, Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis signed one of the most extreme pro-abortion laws in the country, codifying a supposed “fundamental right” to abortion.
“A pregnant individual has a fundamental right to continue a pregnancy and give birth or to have an abortion and to make decisions about how to exercise that right,” the law states. Not only that, but the law explicitly removes the protection of state laws from unborn children: “A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent or derivative rights under the laws of this state.”
The law appears to guarantee a right to any form of abortion at any stage of pregnancy for any reason, not even gesturing at allowing regulations of any kind after the unborn child is developed enough to survive outside the womb. It allows abortion for any reason, including abortions chosen on the basis of an unborn child’s sex or disability diagnosis. It makes it impossible to create health and safety regulations on abortion and removes parental-notification requirements for abortions sought by children.
In signing the legislation — which is truly extreme even by the Left’s standards; only a handful of states have formally declared abortion a “fundamental right” — Polis attempted to pass it off as an effort to keep health-care decisions private.
“In the State of Colorado, the serious decision to start or end a pregnancy with medical assistance will remain between a person, their doctor, and their faith,” Polis said. “Access to abortion and reproductive health care is currently under attack across the nation.” He asserted that the Supreme Court ruling in this summer’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization might “jeopardize access to legal abortion care for tens of millions of people, particularly those living in most Southern and Midwestern states.”
This law, not to mention Polis’s dense efforts to defend its extremism, is just one more instance of Democrats walking themselves into a losing situation if and when Roe and Casey are overturned. I wrote an essay for the Washington Examiner magazine last month arguing that, once abortion is handled at the state level rather than by the Court, Democrats will be in a real bind, because abortion on demand throughout pregnancy is deeply unpopular with the American people. Gallup has found that a mere 13 percent of Americans — and 19 percent of Democrats — want abortion to be legal in the third trimester. Yet abortion on demand with no restrictions is precisely what Democratic politicians at the national level have promised to deliver in the event that the Court stops mandating abortion on demand.
Already, every Democrat in Congress — with two exceptions — has cast a vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which not only would codify legal abortion at the federal level but would nullify nearly all state pro-life laws, including those as modest as parental-notification laws. In enacting this new law, Colorado Democrats have joined the ranks of abortion extremists, and they should expect to pay a political price.