Life

Colorado’s Pro-Life Bills: Conscience Rights, Consent and Care

Several bills have been introduced this session in the Colorado legislature aimed to protect human life, parental rights and the deeply held beliefs of medical professionals. Sadly, these bills will probably never become Colorado law — but they should be.

Among the pro-life bills under consideration this session, the measures below would advance the cause for life in Colorado by protecting women, girls, babies, medical professionals and parental rights.  

HB25-1255: Health-Care Provider Right to Exercise Conscience

This bill, also known as the Medical Ethics Defense Act, attempts to safeguard the conscience rights of healthcare professionals to act according to their ethical, moral or religious beliefs when working.

HB25-1255 would allow providers to refuse to participate in or pay for a procedure, treatment, or service that violates their conscience. The measure would also prohibit agencies from revoking or denying a license to professionals who exercise their free speech rights and follow their convictions.

The bill would also create a private cause of action against those who violate the conscience rights of healthcare professionals.

Medical professionals and faith-based hospitals who are morally opposed to abortion should not be forced to perform or provide abortion procedures.

HB25-1257: Relinquishment of Child in Newborn Safety Device

This measure aims to expand Colorado’s Safe Haven Law by allowing a newborn to be placed into a baby box at designated locations up to 60 days after birth. Under current law, a baby can only be surrendered within the first 72 hours of its birth.

Safe Haven Laws allow parents to anonymously surrender their newborn babies.

According to the legislation, some of the permitted locations for baby boxes include fire stations, hospitals, and emergency clinics.

These laws are compassionate because they give parents who may otherwise choose abandonment a safe alternative that lets newborn babies live and find adoptive placement with a family that wants to care for them.

HB25-1251: Parental Consent to Treatment of a Minor

This bill may seem unnecessary, but it’s not. HB25-1251 would prohibit people and organizations from arranging or performing a surgical procedure on a minor without the written or verbal consent of the minor’s parent. The measure creates exceptions for minors who are under the state’s custody, in an emergency situation, or if a court approves of the medical service.

The bill aims to involve parents in significant medical decisions affecting their children. Requiring parental consent protects minors and preserves parental rights.

This bill is necessary because it gives clear guidance for our state regarding the importance of parental involvement, specifically with regard to making healthcare decisions for minors.


HB25-1251: Abortion Clinic Regulation

This measure would require that abortion clinics performing second and third trimester abortions be licensed with the state and follow the safety standards of other medical facilities that perform medical or surgical abortions in the second and third trimester.

Under current law, abortion clinics are not regulated at all, jeopardizing the safety of women and girls. 

According to the legislation, second and third trimester abortions are associated with significant risk. There is a 10% chance that a complication will arise in a second trimester abortion. The risk of maternal death from abortion increases by 38% every week after eight weeks of gestation.

Abortion clinics shouldn’t be given a loophole when it comes to safety standards. Women and girls deserve to have laws in place that keep them safe. This measure would ensure that abortion clinics are held to the same standards of safety as other facilities performing second and third trimester abortions.

Call To Action

Collectively, the presence of these bills works to advance a culture of life in Colorado as they move through the legislative process. Debate and public engagement are powerful tools to influence the hearts and minds of legislators and voters alike.

Coloradans can participate in the process by contacting their legislators to share their support for these bills, providing testimony at public hearings, joining a pro-life advocacy group and staying informed.

Active public participation ensures that the laws are advanced and reflect the people’s will. The pro-life community must engage in the process if they want the laws to reflect their values and protect the most vulnerable members of our society.

Image from Shutterstock.

VP JD Vance: No More Harassing of Pro-Lifers

Speaking on Friday at the 20th National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C, Vice President J.D. Vance drew strong policy distinctions with the previous White House.

“Now we know the last administration liked to throw people in jail for silently praying outside [abortion] clinics,” he told those gathered. “We know that they liked to harass pro-life fathers of seven, very often Catholic fathers for participating in the pro-life movement. And we know that the last administration wanted to protect taxpayer-funded abortion right up to the moment of birth.”

Vice President Vance then stated:

“And on every single one of those issues, in 30 short days, Donald J. Trump has gone in the exact opposite direction.”

Since taking the oath of office on January 20, President Trump pardoned 23 pro-life advocates who had been arrested and jailed (some up to almost five years) for protesting at abortion clinics.

In appealing to President Trump on their behalf, the Thomas More Society stressed, “These individuals participated in mere peaceable civil disobedience, in the heralded tradition of the American Civil Rights activists. Peaceable actions like these usually merit, at worst, a minor misdemeanor conviction.”

In addition, the Trump administration has banned all taxpayer-funded military abortion travel, reinstated the “Mexico City Policy” which prevents U.S. taxpayer funds from paying for abortions in other countries, and reinstated the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions.  

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Humans Services, who said “every abortion is a tragedy,” has pledged to carry out the pro-life priorities of the Trump administration. This includes enacting a ban on fetal stem cell research, ending late-term abortions, investigating the current use of abortion pills, and protecting the rights of doctors who refuse to conduct abortions due to their religious convictions. 

Newly sworn-in Attorney General Pam Bondi has also pledged to prosecute those who illegally sell abortion pills. FBI Director Kash Patel has also assured the American people that his agency will no longer be targeted pro-life Americans. 

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast began in 2004 after Pope John Paul II had challenged members of his church to look for new and creative ways to evangelize the world.

Speaking on Friday to those gathered inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Vice President Vance reflected, “I think that what the Catholic Church calls me to do is, to say that as the stock market is doing OK, but people are literally dying and losing years off of their life, then we have to do better as a country.”

During his remarks, Vance, who is a Catholic convert, also referenced differences he’s had of late with church leadership over the Trump administration’s immigration policies. While acknowledging the inevitability of seeing things from another point of view, the vice president served up something of a challenge, too.

“I think it’s incumbent upon our religious leaders to recognize that in the era of social media, people will hang on every single word that they utter, even if that wasn’t their intention, and even if a given declaration wasn’t meant for consumption in the social media age,” Vance said.

In a post-Roe and Dobbs world, pro-life advocates continue to debate the most effective strategies and policies as we engage on both a national and state level. Regardless of these tactical and even practical differences, the Trump administration has made clear their willingness to cooperate and help advance a culture of life.

Image from Getty.

How in-Utero Diagnosis Is Being Used to Push Abortion

Imagine you’re an expecting mother, and you’ve just received the heartbreaking news that your unborn baby has a chromosomal disorder, and your doctor says it’s fatal. The doctor explains that an abortion would be the quickest solution, and that without one, your baby will die anyway in perinatal hospice. These are the only options presented.  

It’s cruel and unreasonable to expect a mother or father in this situation to realize they’re being misled. But in a disturbing number of cases, that’s exactly what happens.   

A recent report by the National Catholic Bioethics Center on Health Care and Life Sciences documented how physicians are often reticent about prognosis of children diagnosed in the womb with supposedly fatal disorders. Sixty-one percent of parents who received such a diagnosis said they felt pressured to abort, and in 39 states, “fatal fetal anomalies” and “non-viability” are legal justification to do just that.   

The problem is that, as the report puts it, “there is no universally accepted definition of a lethal or fatal fetal anomaly.” Diagnoses generally classified as “fatal” include “trisomy 13 and 18, severe brain malformations, conditions leading to lung underdevelopment, and absent or severely damaged kidneys.” Yet roughly half of children born with these conditions survive their first 12 months, and many live for years.  

Other conditions, like Down Syndrome, are compatible with “decades of survival” yet often result in pressure by physicians to abort or even withhold life-saving care. That may be why between 67% and 85% of such diagnoses result in termination.  

In reality, many of these supposedly “fatal” diagnoses aren’t reliable. The New York Times reported back in 2022 that false positives are incredibly common with prenatal tests for a number of chromosomal disorders, with screenings for a few conditions returning false positives 60-90% of the time! 

Worse, parents hit with this news are often told all sorts of inaccurate things. When surveyed, 57% of moms and dads who received a prenatal diagnosis said healthcare providers told them that if their child survived, he or she would live a life of suffering. Half were told their child would be a vegetable and live a meaningless life. And 23% were warned that giving birth to their disabled child would ruin their marriage or family. 

Parents who choose not to abort when anomalies are detected before birth are frequently pressured into perinatal hospice, which is where infants go to die naturally. But often, this leads to newborns being denied life-saving care that would be given to any other infant, contributing, ironically, to the supposed “lethality” of their conditions. 

As the author of the bioethics report, Dr. Martin McCaffrey, put it, these diagnoses have become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: 

If physicians say a condition is lethal, it becomes lethal. When parents are counseled that a prenatal diagnosis is fatal, and offered no hope for supportive medical interventions, they are left to choose between abortion and perinatal hospice. … Lethality begets lethality. 

The damning fact exposed by this report is that too many healthcare providers are functioning like self-appointed eugenicists, dictating to parents which little lives are worth living and which are not. This perpetuates misinformation around children with chromosomal and other disorders, all of whose lives, however long or short, are precious in the sight of God.  

This has to stop. Thankfully, reports like this move us in the right direction, exposing the word games played with terms like “fatal,” “lethal,” “terminal,” and “compatible with a meaningful life.” These games are played at both ends of life, justifying abortion and infanticide on one hand and assisted suicide and euthanasia on the other. 

Doctors need to be honest and “fulfill their duty to offer parents informed consent.” It’s their job to heal, not to kill. And it’s certainly not their job to exaggerate or lie about the lethality of conditions when they believe children who have them are better off dead. Many already know this, but too many, apparently, do not.  

Parents also have a crucial role to play by staying informed and insisting healthcare providers give them the true accuracy of prenatal tests. They should also know that hospice isn’t the only option. As the report concludes, those with children who have life-limiting disorders have every right to demand their children be stabilized, evaluated, and otherwise given the reasonable, life-saving treatment offered to other infants. Parents don’t have to give in to the pressure of self-fulfilling prophecies.  

Lastly, all of us, whether we have a child with disabilities or not, must insist upon a culture that welcomes human life as a gift. The ugliness of encouraging parents to kill their newborns is born of a lie: that human beings are products to be optimized or returned if “defective.” But we’ve seen where this lie leads. It leads to a world where no one is safe from the fibs of physicians playing God. We should prefer a world where more people respond to suffering with the words of God’s Son: “Let the little children come to me.” 

‘Mass Exodus’: Dr. Jay Richards on the Demise of Gender Ideology and What It Means for the Pro-Life Movement

What do gender and sexual ideology have to do with protecting preborn babies?

Dr. Jay Richards explained at this year’s National Pro-Life Summit, an annual event designed to help people, particularly students, defend and advance the pro-life cause.

Richards, who directs the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation, joined Kristen Hawkins, Charlie Kirk, Ben Carson, Kayleigh McEnany and dozens of other experts in Washington D.C. to help attendees understand the pro-life landscape in 2025.

“To protect [preborn babies], we need to think about them [within] the institution of the family, and the destruction of the family as a result of the sexual revolution,” he exhorted aspiring activists.

Hosted by Students for Life, the Summit drew energy and inspiration from pro-life wins in the White House. But Richards emphasized the pro-life movement’s unique opportunity to change hitherto inaccessible hearts and minds.

To take advantage of this opportunity, he argued, pro-lifers must understand the President’s actions in the context of a larger backlash against the ideology of the sexual revolution.

To do that, Richards explained the connection between abortion and gender ideology.

Killing children in the womb and abolishing the sexual binary might seem unrelated. But Richards contended both are distinct consequences of the sexual revolution, an ideology that “exploded” in the 1960s with the introduction of birth control.

Richards suggested picturing abortion and gender ideology as two stations on a train track.

Imagine the sexual revolution is a train trip. You’re on a track, so the train is moving you in a particular direction. And there’s different stations along the way to your destinations … At every stop, people can get off the train.

Contrary to popular belief, the sexual revolution isn’t moving passengers to a more sexually liberated society.

“If that’s what it is [doing], we wouldn’t be sterilizing children who are confused about their bodies in 2025,” Richards remarked.

Instead, the fundamental premise of the sexual revolution is the legal and social “fracturing” of marriage, sex and childbirth, or, “The idea that those things don’t have to go together, ought not to go together, might be better if they don’t always go together.”

Abortion and gender ideology should be understood as phenomena that contribute to the rupture of God’s design.

Abortion is one of the revolution’s earliest stops. It is what Richards calls an enabling technology — something that makes the ideas of the revolution feasible. The sexual revolution’s first enabling technology, and train stop, was the birth control pill.

“There’s been types of contraception or contraceptive behaviors for as long as there have been humans,” Richards acknowledged, continuing,

But it was not until the approved birth control pill that it seemed at least [plausible] to have sex, all you want, right in the middle of the most fertile years of your life without having to deal with the consequences, namely a baby.

But birth control didn’t sufficiently delink sex and childbirth. In fact, Richards noted, “It so greatly increased out-of-wedlock sexual activity that it vastly increased the numbers of out-of-wedlock births as well.”

The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 made abortion the new stopgap — an enabling technology that stopped childbirth by killing the child.

Gender ideology comes quite a few stations down the line, after the Supreme Court detached sex and marriage in 2015.

Prior to the dissociation of sex and childbirth, Richards argued, the state had a compelling interest to recognize marriage as a productive partnership between a man and a woman:

Marriage is the institution that socially ratifies, recognizes, protects and reinforces a basic biological reality, that it takes a fertile male and a fertile female, one of each, to mate.
There’s a widespread assumption, now widely confirmed by social science, that, all things being equal, the well-being of a child is enhanced dramatically if that child is raised by his or her married mother and father.
So, there’s a state interest in recognizing and protecting and distinguishing this institution from, say, a rotary club, voluntary association, or a religious body, or a medical license or a real estate license.

But, by 2015, Americans had largely accepted the idea that sex, marriage and childbirth weren’t related — and didn’t need to be.

Richards decoded the logic behind Obergefell v. Hodges: If sex doesn’t have to take place within a marriage, and marriage doesn’t have anything to do with producing or raising children, then marriage need not be between a man and a woman.

Within a week of the Obergefell ruling, trans activists began appearing on the covers of magazines. The T, joked Richards, began jockeying for a place with the Ls, Gs, and Bs.

Where once all relationships — including homosexual ones — assumed a sexual binary, the introduction of gender ideology now made the sexual binary obsolete, and even discriminatory.

Richards explained the progression like this:

Obergefell decided that the sexual binary did not matter for the institution of marriage. Gender ideology just says the sexual binary does not matter, period.

A logical next step.

Until gender ideology, most people had passively accepted a ride on the sexual revolution express. But this stop struck passengers differently from its predecessors, Richards found:

We’re now far enough along that the victims [of gender ideology] are telling their stories. That makes this different from abortion. The primary victims of abortion very rarely live to tell about it. The detransitioners do. This is a different issue from every one before. This train station is different from every other train station before.

Confronted with the consequences of demolishing the sexual binary, Richards said people have gotten off the ride.

It’s a mass exit of people wanting off this train. People who were partisans in favor of same-sex marriage, people who had been pro-choice their whole lives, people who thought free sex was great, people who had never spent two seconds thinking about the sexual revolution saw Rachel Levine, and big ol’ Leah Thomas standing next to Riley Gaines, and said, “This is insane.”

This is the environment pro-lifers find themselves in, Richards concluded — on a train station with a bunch of confused, disillusioned people that “are open to conversations [they] were not open to five years ago.”

Richards urged pro-lifers to equip themselves to have these important, delicate conversations. His advice? Connect the systematic destruction of God’s design with bizarre ideology making them exit the crazy train in the first place — station by station.

To walk it back, you have to connect pre-born babies to the sexual revolution. You have to be able to situate the sexual revolution as responsible for the destruction of the family and categorize abortion as a weapon of that attack.

If we can convince people in the train station of that, Richards said he’s convinced we can end “the scourge of abortion.”

This author tends to agree.

Additional Articles and Resources

The Two-Parent Privilege: Understanding Contemporary Family Formation

The 4B Movement: Anti-Women, Accidentally Pro-Life

Different Family Forms Lead to Prison or College for Young Men

Important New Research on How Married Parents Improve Child Well-Being

Here’s What Happens When Good People Don’t Connect Gay and Trans Ideology

Sorry ‘Gays Against Groomers,’ But Gay Activists Helped Start This Transgender Fire

Sorry ‘Gays Against Groomers,’ But Gay Activists Helped Start This Transgender Fire — Part Two

WSJ is Wrong About Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Having No Dire Effects

How the Binary in ‘LGBTQ+’ Reveals Its Utter Incoherence

Why Christians Can’t Avoid the “Trans” and Gender Redefinition Issue

How the “Trans” and Gender Redefinition Issue Attacks the Family

The Rise of Intentional Single Mothers

A recent, gut-wrenching story from the New York Times should be required reading for anyone thinking about employing In vitro fertilization. After a mix-up, two California couples ended up carrying, birthing and raising each other’s baby girls for several months. Ultimately, the two sets of parents made the “unbearable decision” to switch children, choosing custody of their genetic daughter over the one they had welcomed and nursed and loved.  

Though describing a rare occurrence, the story illustrates why this under-regulated industry needs more oversight, as the author notes. What is missed in the piece, however, is that the main problems with this kind of assisted reproduction aren’t the freak accidents with things that might but probably won’t go wrong. The main issue is the any number of things that go wrong anytime babies are created in ways that ignore God’s design for the family.   

For example, just as tragic as parents learning they must give up a baby they thought was theirs is when one genetic parent conceives a child without wanting the other parent to be involved in that child’s life. Unlike a rare embryo mix-up, this kind of parental alienation is common in the fertility industry. The Guardian recently reported that the number of single women seeking fertility treatments in the U.K. has more than tripled in the last decade, outpacing the growth of IVF in general and even the growth of same-sex couples seeking to make a baby.  

In her Guardian article, Amelia Hill quoted several women who chose to become solo mothers. They feel “empowered” because they “did it on their own.” Typically, the father relegates himself to the status of “sperm donor.” One single 45-year-old, conscious of her ticking biological clock, put it this way:  

I’m never gonna meet anybody. … I think doing it without a partner is probably a bit easier. … I worried whether [my daughter would] mind not having a dad. … But now I think it’s good not to have rushed into a relationship that might not have worked simply for that reason. 

According to the mother, the experience has been liberating. “People would ask: ‘Did he leave you—did you leave him?’ and it felt good to be able to say: ‘Nope, I did it on my own!’” 

But she didn’t do it on her own. No woman or man has a child on his or her own. In her case and in the case of each of the thousands of single women in the West turning to science to give them children, there is always a father involved.  

In any other situation that a father is alive but absent, he would be considered a “deadbeat.” The child and the mother are rightly considered abandoned and wronged. Somehow, in this case, choosing the abandonment is empowerment and progress for women. 

All the euphemisms in the world will not change what has happened to the child. Intentionally conceiving with the intent to raise a child without the father creates the same painful situation as if the father left. The consequences are not altered because technology was utilized. 

The rise of intentionally single mothers and same-sex couples hiring surrogates and “donors” has exposed how selective our society is with compassion. Major magazines run long-form articles about rare and terrible cases in which children are born to the wrong parents, but if a baby is taken from either their mother or father as the plan we are supposed to celebrate “freedom” and autonomy. And the children are not allowed to complain.

Each assumption behind these far-more common tragedies is adult-centric. Babies are a right that adults can demand. Adult happiness is the priority of the child’s wellbeing. Marriage and moms and dads are optional aspects of childrearing. The family can be remolded and deconstructed at will. 

Tragically, many Christians approach surrogacy and embryo-destructive IVF with the same “the kids will be alright” assumption, as long as adults get what they want. This is completely backwards. The first consideration when it comes to marriage and procreation is what God intended. This allows us to know what is best for children, what and whom they have a right to, and how children were meant to come into the world.

Failing to answer these questions has subjected children to serious harm, even when all the technology goes “right.”