Colorado isn’t just near the middle of the nation geographically. People on both sides of the issue also put the Centennial State somewhere toward the middle among U.S. states in term of the restrictiveness of its abortion laws.
In 1967, Colorado became the first state to decriminalize abortions involving incest or rape, or in which pregnancy would lead to permanent physical disability for the woman,
according to the pro-choice organization Planned Parenthood. The U.S. Supreme Court six years later issued the Roe v. Wade decision giving women nationwide the right to an abortion while leaving state lawmakers to decide how strictly they wanted to regulate the procedure.
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Colorado legislators have since amended the state’s laws in a manner that left it ranked as the nation’s 22nd best state for
reproductive rights in 2013 by NARAL Pro-Choice America. That organization on its website gave Colorado a grade of C+ for its reproductive rights laws.
The anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, in a report released in January on its website, listed Colorado as being the nation’s 29th most-protective state in terms of enacting anti-abortion legislation.
Colorado maintains a mixture of reproductive rights laws that include:
1. Requiring parental notification – but not consent – for a minor to have an abortion,
according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.
2. Allowing partial-birth abortions.
3. Allowing abortions to be performed only by licensed physicians using accepted medical procedures, according to the AUL report.
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4. Prohibiting public funds from being used to pay for an abortion except when the procedure is necessary to save a woman’s life, the AUL report said, adding that a federal court found that provision – along with two related statutes – was in conflict with federal law. The report said: “Currently, the state follows the federal standard for Medicaid funding for abortions, permitting the use of federal or state matching Medicaid funds for abortions necessary to preserve the life of the woman or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.”
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