Pueblo City Council member Regina Maestri gestures while questioning City Attorney Dan Kogovsek about local, state, and federal law regarding a possible ban on abortion clinics within the city at council’s Dec. 12, 2022, meeting. (Mike Sweeney, special to Colorado Newsline)
Pueblo City Council could once again consider an ordinance to restrict abortion access in the city, challenging a 2022 state law that protects reproductive health care.
Council members heard presentations from Planned Parenthood, lobbyists and an anti-abortion lawyer during a work session on Monday night to learn about the legal landscape of abortion access in Colorado. It could be a precursor to introducing and voting on the second proposed anti-abortion ordinance in Pueblo in two years.
In 2022, as a new abortion clinic planned to open in the city, council rejected the ordinance on a 4-3 vote. Since then, the body has become more conservative.
“Municipalities and counties push back on the state all the time when they do not like what is going on in their communities and when (laws) affect their communities in a negative way,” City Council member Regina Maestri, who ran the 2022 ordinance and would likely bring forward the second one, said amid audience jeers in the packed chamber.
“What has happened is that state legislators have imposed laws and put them in place to basically almost dissipate morality in our community, and as a community, we have the right to have certain expectations of how our community runs in a healthy atmosphere,” she said.
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The ordinance would likely once again hinge on the federal Comstock Act from the 19th century, which prohibits mailing “obscene” materials, including pills and devices used for abortion, across state lines. It has not been enforced in decades, especially after the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protected abortion access at the federal level. Since Roe was overturned in 2021, some anti-abortion activists hope the federal law can be used to restrict care, even in states with broad abortion access like Colorado.
“That is a federal law that an ordinance here in Pueblo could address, saying ‘Here in Pueblo, we’re establishing that we’re going to follow federal law.’ There’s no inconsistency there between state law and the local ordinance, and if there were, the state law would have to bend in favor of the federal law,” said Josh Craddock, a Colorado lawyer who regularly writes anti-abortion opinion pieces.
Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-led strategy for a potential second administration of former President Donald Trump, calls for a campaign to enforce the criminal provisions of the Comstock Act as it relates to abortion materials. Comstock-related ordinances have been passed in about 80 cities with the help of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn project.
Maestri also contends that as a home-rule municipality, Pueblo can legislate on local matters.
The only reason that we’re here having this hearing is that people’s feelings are hurt that they can’t control women’s choices and bodies.
– City Council member Sarah Martinez
A Pueblo anti-abortion ordinance would almost certainly be challenged by Attorney General Phil Weiser and act as a test case against the state’s Reproductive Health Equity Act.
“Should the Pueblo City Council enact a proposed ordinance that violates the Reproductive Health Equity Act, the Attorney General’s Office will defend state laws on this matter, and seek a judicial resolution in court,” Weiser wrote in a letter to City Council member Sarah Martinez, who repeatedly pushed back on the idea of an anti-abortion ordinance on Monday night.
“The only reason that we’re here having this hearing is that people’s feelings are hurt that they can’t control women’s choices and bodies,” Martinez said. “Instead of focusing on pressing (city) issues, we’re discussing matters over which we have no jurisdiction.”
RHEA prohibits a public entity, such as a city government, from interfering with someone’s effort to have an abortion. That means regulating abortion is a matter of state concern and not within a city council’s purview.
Colorado voters will decide whether to protect the right to an abortion in the state Constitution this year through Amendment 79. That amendment would also eliminate the constitutional prohibition on using public funds for abortion care.
“The people of our community do not support this and deserve better than a rogue City Council member with her own agenda. Health care access is a continual problem in southern Colorado and attempting to close down a women’s health care clinic is the opposite of what we need,” Kiera Hatton Sena, the organizing director for abortion-rights group Cobalt, said in a statement. “And this is exactly why we need to pass Amendment 79 and put abortion rights in the state Constitution — so that individual politicians spreading falsehoods stop interfering with our rights and stop putting themselves in between patients and medical providers.”
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