October 16, 2025 09:53 AM UTC

They Just Can't Help Themselves, Abortion Ban 2026 Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

An email blast from Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado this morning warns of the approval of the ballot title for a new flavor of the “Personhood” abortion ban ballot measures that Colorado voters have rejected at the polls repeatedly despite nearly 20 years of fruitlessly trying:

Yesterday, the Colorado Title Board approved a title for an anti-abortion ballot measure that could appear on the 2026 ballot.

Although Colorado voters have affirmed their support for reproductive freedom time and again—including the passage of Amendment 79 in 2024 to enshrine abortion rights in our state constitution—extremists are once again trying to undermine those protections. Initiative 149 is intentionally misleading. It proposes adding “the right to be born” to the Colorado Constitution, without ever mentioning the word abortion. But its intent is unmistakable: to confuse voters and quietly dismantle access to reproductive health care. It’s a calculated attempt to roll back rights that Coloradans have repeatedly affirmed.

Colorado voters have already rejected similar attacks four times over the past two decades. With the national landscape growing more hostile under the Trump administration, through federal threats to medication abortion, funding cuts, and criminalization of providers, we know this proposal is part of a broader strategy to continue eroding rights state by state, until the right to abortion is criminalized everywhere.

What’s next?
Now that the title has been approved, the proponents must submit the formatted petition to the Title Board for final review. Once the petition language is approved, they can begin collecting signatures to qualify for the 2026 ballot. This can begin as early as next week.

The repeated failure of abortion ban ballot measures in Colorado has coincided with a steady progression toward Democratic political dominance of the state government, a trend that solidified in 2018 with Democrats winning their biggest majorities since FDR was President, and total control of the executive statewide elected offices. Correlation isn’t always causation, of course, but in this case the hopeless pursuit of abortion bans despite the increasingly clear collateral damage these measures inflicted on Republican candidates sharing the ballot with them is, if not the cause, then at least a very clear symptom of the Republican Party’s lurch away from the mainstream majority electorate in this state.

With Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion rights collapsing in red states, local conservatives feel emboldened to keep trying to play catch-up. At the same time, the fulfillment of the worst fears of abortion rights supporters, who remain very much in the majority in Colorado, has them on guard to turn out in massive numbers to vote down any attempt to curtail those rights.

The result, assuming supporters are able to raid the churches for the signatures they need as in prior years, will be another electoral train wreck for Colorado Republicans in 2026. The negative effects of abortion ban ballot measures for Colorado Republicans was clear enough in 2012 that the then-Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler questionably knocked that year’s abortion ban off the ballot.

For Colorado Democrats, an abortion ban on the ballot is a rallying point worth far more than proponents will ever spend.