With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, protecting reproductive freedom is up to the states, and, most importantly, us. The painful reality is that we now have to fight for essential freedoms that we thought were won generations ago. But there is a flip side to this painful reality—the American people and Coloradans are with us in fighting for equality and reproductive freedom.
At the ballot box in Kentucky, Montana, Kansas, and Ohio, voters stood up for freedom and against government interference in reproductive health care decisions. And that’s what we’ll do here in Colorado this November. As your Attorney General, I am standing up for Coloradans in court, protecting access to mifepristone (for medication abortion care), taking on unconstitutional restrictions imposed on doctors, ensuring access to emergency abortion care to save lives, and defending Colorado’s reproductive freedom law.
Protecting access to abortion care as critical health care is about protecting people and their right to make choices about their future. That’s made plain by stories we heard from brave women—like a woman in Texas who needed access to abortion care to live and a woman in Kentucky raped by her stepfather at age 12. These stories are not isolated events—consider, for example, that 64,500 pregnancies have resulted from rape in the 14 states that now have abortion bans in place.
I am inspired to fight for reproductive freedom to protect people and to advance equal rights for all. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously put it, protecting women’s ability to control their bodies and future is essential to ensuring equal rights with men. Justice Ginsburg’s work advancing equality and her teaching—that we should fight for the things we care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join us—lives on as a blessing.
This fall in Colorado, we will have the chance to protect access to reproductive health care as a fundamental right in our state constitution. I am proud to be an early endorser of this amendment and I will work tirelessly to ensure it passes. My speech at the January launch rally is here and you can help get the measure on the ballot by signing the petition here.
