Chacos: Why abortion needs to live

I am in a crowded park using a toilet without a door, there is no toilet paper, and everyone is staring at me because I’m sitting naked from the waist down. A week earlier, I approached a hairpin turn and continued to pick up speed. No matter how hard I pressed the brake pedal, I could not stop the car.

Each night, I woke wrapped in sweaty sheets drenched in anxiety. I suspect these nightmares are because I’m losing autonomy over my body. I am a woman who witnessed the 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion overturn last year, and as individual states are deciding my fate, I’m losing more and more of my reproductive freedom after every election cycle.

Since the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, the U.S Constitution is no longer able to protect a woman’s right to decide what to do if she becomes pregnant. The U.S. Supreme Court left the issue for individual states, out-of-touch politicians, and agenda-seeking campaigns to debate a woman’s fate instead. Fourteen states already ban abortion altogether. The battle for reproductive rights rages on, with no end in sight.

Although Colorado enacted the Reproductive Health Equity Act in 2022, giving women the right to abortion and contraception, she needs comprehensive, bulletproof support – much like the inherent right and constitutional protection we give individuals to bear arms. Losing grip over self is a significant thing, much more potent than the climate debate, the age of our president, or border control policies. Self-preservation protects me from harm. My body needs to be mine before I choose to give it to another. There’s little room for debate. 

Thankfully, a woman’s reproductive health and well-being is the cornerstone of many Colorado organizations that think similarly. Coloradans for Reproductive Freedom is working hard to secure an individual’s right to this freedom and allow abortion to be covered by health insurance plans in the state. Collectively, they are gathering enough signatures now to get Colorado Initiative 89 on the November ballot. This will give voters an opportunity to secure a woman’s constitutional, fundamental right to have an abortion.

Colorado Initiative 89 would “prohibit state and local governments from denying, impeding, or discriminating against the exercise of that right …” and put it in the state constitution, making it a law that is harder to dismantle. If the ballot measure passes in November, women in Colorado will be protected from local governments and conservative measures that want to use her body as a religious, political, or martyred pawn. She will have solid legal protection and air to breathe.

Unfortunately, nothing worth fighting for comes that easily.

There’s another 2024 ballot measure, and this one is riddled in inciteful rhetoric that wants to prohibit certain birth control and halt all abortion services, without exception. There would be no consideration in cases of of rape, incest, health of the mother, or contraception failure. The anti-abortion sponsor, Faye Barnhart says, “We are not going to destroy children.” After prayer and consultation, members of the Colorado Life Initiative concluded that their duty is to “protect all living children from mutilation and intentional death beginning at conception until adulthood.” The penalty for seeking a safe, affordable, or necessary abortion would be prosecution for murder.

This misguided language targets an extremist base of individuals fighting for a woman to carry a baby at all costs. As similar initiatives continue to define a “living human child” as a human being beginning from the moment of conception, there leaves no room for the health, safety, and well-being of the other human being involved: the pregnant woman. She is routinely pushed aside to make room for fanatical ideology with little talk about taking care of the child once it is born.

The hypocrisy chokes me while I sleep. 

Political views, the meaning of life, or how one slices the definition of a baby aside, individuals should have the right to make reproductive healthcare decisions for themselves in a safe, supportive environment. Putting abortion rights in the Colorado Constitution will let women sleep without fear of being woken in the middle of the night with the gut-wrenching sensation that she is falling fast over a ledge. No one should have to wake from a dream and realize they are living the nightmare instead.

Andrea Chacos lives in Carbondale, balancing work and happily raising three children with her husband. She strives to dodge curveballs life likes to throw with a bit of passion, humor, and some flair.