Vessely testified against the bill during the hearing, saying in part: “Human reason based on the findings of science affirms that human life begins at conception, and human beings have an inherent developmental trajectory that does not start, stop, or change at birth. At the moment of birth, a baby does not all of the sudden gain her dignity and worth.”
“The Catholic Church objects to abortion on the principle that every human life has inherent dignity, and thus must be treated with the respect due to a human person. This is the foundation of the Church’s social doctrine, which is why it is the preeminent issue,” she continued.
Among other things, the Catholic Conference had warned that the bill could effectively remove Colorado’s requirement, passed in 2003, that parents of minors be notified 48 hours before an abortion procedure.
Vessely expressed hope during her testimony that the bill’s sponsors would add an amendment to the bill clarifying that it was not intended to remove the state’s parental notification requirement, but no such amendment was adopted.
Also testifying was Linda Saccomano, Executive Director of Alternatives, a network of pro-life pregnancy centers that have operated in the Denver area for the past 40 years. She told CNA ahead of the hearing that regardless of the outcome of the vote, Alternatives will continue to serve the medical and counseling needs of women facing crisis pregnancies in Colorado.
“Abortion is not their only option. They don’t have to choose between their success and the life of their unborn child,” Saccomano told CNA ahead of the hearing.
Vessely, too, mentioned with sadness that several women who testified in support of the bill claimed that they could not have finished college if they had not aborted their child.
“I think that’s worth highlighting is that women do not have to abort their children to be successful in life, and there were so many testimonies in the opposition of the bill of women saying exactly that,” she said, pointing to testimony from Lauren Castillo, Director of Development for Students for Life of America.
Castillo testified that despite getting pregnant in college while working and dealing with difficult life circumstances, she chose life for her son and ultimately was very successful, thanks to the support she received from her community.
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“I now work full time to ensure other women do not have to feel pressured into abortions, because that is a reality when women don’t know their community does support them,” Castillo said.
“Abortion extremists in Colorado want the state constitution to say that my son and I are different classes of citizens. They want you to think that because I’m bigger and stronger than my son, I deserve the unfettered right to kill him. And they want you to believe that my son should have had no rights under the law until he reached a certain age. If that doesn’t remind you of the bogus legal arguments that were made by slaveholders to keep their slaves on the plantation, I don’t know what does,” Castillo continued.
Amy Langemann, a nurse at Alternatives Pregnancy Center, told CNA before the hearing that she hopes to challenge the bill’s supporters to consider the long-term impact of abortion on women: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
She said she often hears the mantra that abortion will end a woman’s crisis so that she can move on, but in her experience working with women who have had abortions, “the exact opposite is true…abortion is not the end of the crisis.”
In addition, Langemann took issue with the description of abortion as “reproductive health care,” and warned that the dehumanizing language in the bill used to describe preborn children “has implications far beyond the unborn.”
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