A bill pending before the Colorado legislature would force taxpayers to pay for abortions for women on Medicaid.

Colorado Democrats are touting a new reason why the state’s taxpayers should pay for low-income women’s abortions. Not only would it support “equity and fairness in health care,” they say, but aborting more babies is good fiscal policy, too.

“A birth is more expensive than an abortion,” Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie said at a committee hearing this week, touting a legislative fiscal analysis that claims taxpayer-funded abortions could save the state a half million dollars or more annually.

McCluskie is one of four Democratic co-sponsors of Senate Bill 25-183, which would require Colorado taxpayers to pay for abortions for women on Medicaid or enrolled in the state’s Child Health Plan Plus program, or CHP+. The bill already passed the state Senate on a 22–12 party-line vote earlier this month.

“Ultimately, we do achieve a cost savings because of the averted births that will not take place,” McCluskie told the House Health & Human Services Committee on Tuesday.

Talking about human life in that manner is “horrible” and “abominable,” say pro-life opponents of the bill. “Seriously, the bill’s sponsors are saying that if more babies die by abortion it will be cheaper for the state,” Dr. Catherine Wheeler, a pro-life OB-GYN and former abortion provider, told the committee, which ultimately advanced the bill.

Brittany Vessely, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, told National Review that SB 183, which is backed by pro-abortion organizations in the state, is more evidence that the abortion industry “doesn’t care about the dignity of the human person, it simply cares about its bottom line.”

The bill’s opponents are also taking aim at the fiscal analysis, which they say drastically underestimates both the costs of abortion and the number of women who will seek the procedure if it is paid for by taxpayers, among other problems.

“The analysis is so simplistic that it insults the intelligence of lawmakers who earnestly wish to understand the implications of state funding,” Dr. Thomas Perille, president of Democrats for Life of Colorado, told the committee. He called it “fiscal malpractice.”

In addition to requiring taxpayer-funded abortions, SB 183 would also require public-employee insurance plans to cover abortions. The bill was filed in February, a few months after 62 percent of Colorado voters approved Amendment 79, which made abortion a constitutional right in the state and repealed a prohibition on public funding.

The fiscal analysis is based on a constant enrollment of 333,330 females ages 15 to 44 in Medicaid or CHP+. It estimates that 1.67 percent of them will seek abortions each year; about half will be procedural abortions, with a reimbursement rate of $1,300, and half will use abortion pills, with a reimbursement rate of $800.

Having taxpayers foot the bill is “expected to increase the number of averted births by 30 percent,” with the average reimbursement for labor and delivery at $3,850, the analysis says.

To comply with federal law, the bill requires abortions to be paid only by the state, which will shift more costs to the General Fund. But overall, in the 2026–27 fiscal year — the first full year the bill would be in effect — “costs for abortion services are estimated to be $5.9 million, while cost savings for averted births are estimated to be $6.4 million,” according to the analysis.

The analysis also suggests that aborting more Colorado babies could lead to other savings in reduced social-safety-net costs, which are often ongoing, “whereas abortion care services represent a one-time expenditure.” It doesn’t detail those potential savings.

Critics say the fiscal analysis is fundamentally flawed in many ways.

For one, they say, it drastically underestimates the cost of abortion. The $1,300 reimbursement rate is based on the average cost of a first-trimester abortion. And while most abortions are performed in the first trimester, late-term abortions can cost far more — up to $20,000 to $30,000, depending on the provider. Over 3 percent of abortions in Colorado occur after 21 weeks, higher than the national average, according to Colorado health department data and the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute.

A state fiscal analyst who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing acknowledged that “obviously the actual costs could vary depending on the timing of when the procedures are done.”

Opponents also say the analysis underestimates the number of women who would seek abortions if they were paid by taxpayers in Colorado, where they say abortions are already underreported. They say the bill would incentivize more women to enroll in Medicaid and encourage a flood of more people from other states to travel to Colorado for abortions.

“Yes, Colorado is an abortion tourism state where people come from all over the country to dispose of their unwanted offspring,” Scott Shamblin, executive director of Colorado Right to Life, told the committee. He called abortion tourism a “huge gap” in the fiscal analysis.

Perille noted that the expected increase in “averted births” is based only on a small study from Louisiana. He called the Louisiana study “tiny” and “methodologically flawed.”

“It’s really amazing that they would use such a small study,” he said.

The bill’s opponents contend that the analysis also ignores scores of other potential cost increases, including payments to cover abortion complications and mental-health treatment for women who come to regret their abortions.

McCluskie said the analysis doesn’t address “secondary impacts,” but Perille countered that “averted births” — which it does consider — “is a secondary impact.”

“If you’re going to look at secondary impacts, you have to do it more thoroughly,” he said.

The bill would also shift abortion costs from private organizations to the state, opponents say. The Cobalt Abortion Fund, which backs the public-financing bill, announced last summer that it is capping its spending on helping women travel to get abortions.

Michael J. New, a Charlotte Lozier scholar and professor at the Catholic University of America, told National Review that the Colorado fiscal analysis also appears to obscure the cost impact of the Hyde amendment, the federal law that prohibits federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the mother’s life.

Because of the Hyde amendment, “nearly all of the costs of publicly funded abortions will be paid for by Colorado taxpayers,” he said in an email. “On the other hand, since federal Medicaid dollars subsidize births, Colorado taxpayers bear a fraction of the cost for births. As such, since Colorado taxpayers are paying for every abortion, but only bearing a fraction of the cost of each birth — publicly funded abortions are a net loss for Colorado taxpayers.”

In addition to touting the prospective cost savings, the bill’s pro-abortion backers championed it as “historic” and “transformative.”

State Representative Lorena Garcia, one of the sponsors, called the bill a “vital piece of legislation” that would remove barriers to abortion and reaffirm Colorado’s “commitment to the values of equity and fairness in health care.” Pointing to November’s approval of Amendment 79, McCluskie said taxpayer-funded abortion “was well supported by our voters.”

But opponents say the state’s voters were “duped” — a voter guide produced by the Colorado Legislative Council last year said  there would be “no fiscal impact” if voters approved Amendment 79. While there was technically no cost to removing the state’s prohibition on public funding, it was clear that pro-abortion Democratic lawmakers would subsequently steer public money to abortion providers.

One abortion opponent said at the hearing that using tax dollars to fund the procedure creates a conflict for people with “sincerely held religious beliefs . . . that life is sacred.”

“Is ripping a baby from limb to limb a practical use of tax dollars?” she asked.

New said talking about human life in terms of dollars and cents and turning it into a commodity “takes you down some roads I don’t think a lot of people want to go down.”

“Children cost money. No one disputes that,” he said. But, he added, “life has intrinsic value and it’s priceless. . . . I would hate to see a situation where we’re going to increase or try to encourage women to abort handicapped children because, frankly, [they] will cost the state more money.”

At least one backer of the bill expressed concern about highlighting its alleged cost savings. “The premise that insurance coverage for abortion care is a societal good because it saves money on births doesn’t seem right to me,” Jack Teter, regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, told the Denver Post. “Access to health care is good always.”

Vessely said it’s been a struggle to keep Colorado’s pro-life community upbeat and motivated after a series of difficult political losses over the last half decade.

“We have such a disheartened pro-life community right now,” she said.

In 2020, voters rejected a ballot proposition that would have banned abortion after 22 weeks of gestation. Two years later, Colorado lawmakers passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codified the right to abortion in state law and affirmed that unborn babies have no independent rights. In 2023, Colorado became the first state in the nation to ban abortion-pill reversal, deeming it unprofessional conduct.

Vessely said Democratic lawmakers and the pro-abortion lobby have since killed bills that would have required abortion clinics to be held to the same regulatory standards as other surgical institutions, expanded the state’s safe haven law, and required pain-killers for babies before an abortion “so they don’t feel being ripped apart in their mother’s womb.”

She pointed at the February death of an 18-year-old woman from abortion complications as a reason to continue fighting. The teen, Alexis “Lexi” Arguello, was 22 weeks pregnant when she went to the Fort Collins Planned Parenthood for an abortion, pro-life news reports say.

“I think Pro-Life Colorado needs to focus on education initiatives and chipping away legislatively just to humanize” victims of abortion, Vessely said.