The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill stipulating that all colleges and universities be required to provide abortion pills either in their campus pharmacies or via prescriptions to obtain them off campus.
The bill passed the state Senate last week and the House in late April, but pro-life and religious leaders told The College Fix that the measure will isolate young women and pressure them to abort their unborn babies.
House Bill 26-1335, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Lorena Garcia, requires higher education institutions “to maintain a stock of abortion medication to dispense to students enrolled at the institution” if there is a pharmacy on campus. If there is no pharmacy, it requires health centers to provide prescriptions for students to obtain abortion pills off campus.
It stipulates that any institution of higher education, whether public or private, must provide access to abortion pills unless doing so would jeopardize its “federal grant participation, … modify the generally accepted standards of medical practice, or conflict with the institution’s sincerely held religious beliefs or practices.”
If signed into law by Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, the bill will go into effect Aug. 1, 2027.
Nathan Fisher, associate director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, expressed concerns about the bill in an interview with The College Fix. “HB26-1335 will force college-aged women into an isolated environment with one perceived option: abortion.”
The bill holds additional religious concerns for the conference. Fisher told The Fix that while there is a religious exemption for institutions as a whole if they have “sincerely held beliefs,” this is not sufficient.
Fisher said the exemption “does not protect the First Amendment rights of speech and expression for the millions of students on non-religious campuses whose student tuition and fees will be used for abortion medication or the college faculty and staff who will be forced to permit or even prescribe the medication.”
The College Fix also contacted Rep. Garcia, Sen. Katie Wallace, and Rep. Kenny Nguyen, the lead sponsors of the bill, to ask about the religious freedom concerns, as well as the reasoning for including private campuses in addition to public. None responded to two emailed requests over the past two weeks.
The text of the bill states that “true equality cannot be achieved without access to reproductive health care, including abortion.”
In her introduction of the bill earlier this spring, Rep. Garcia said a key issue is that “your life is on campus when you are in college, and that limits the ability to access certain services that might not be on campus when you’re there.”
Garcia said Colorado has a “constitutional right to abortion care,” so “it is imperative to make sure that all of our institutions ensure that that right exists.”
In the same session, Rep. Nguyen, a co-sponsor, emphasized the importance of abortion “accessibility.”
“I believe that reproductive rights are truly under attack in the federal government, and this continues to codify laws in the state of Colorado to protect access to abortion,” Nguyen said.
However, Lydia Davis, spokesperson for Students for Life of America, described abortion pills as “anti-woman.”
They have “injured and hospitalized women, proving these drugs have never been about ‘healthcare’ or ‘supporting women,’” she told The Fix in a recent interview.
When asked about the Colorado bill, Davis said that “these deadly drugs have killed millions of babies, harmed women, and polluted our water systems with chemically tainted fetal remains flushed into our sewer systems. This bill would turn college campuses into abortion distribution centers and continue transforming our sewers into cemeteries.”
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