It was his experience as an adoptive parent that spurred state Sen. Jessie Ulibarri, D-Westminster, to join a national push to protect abortion services this election year from intense and successful efforts around the country to trim those services back.

“I had the ability to choose how our family was made and I think it gave me the ability to prepare and have the financial resources so we could care for our daughter,” Ulibarri told The Colorado Statesman. “I think every family should have the ability to make those decisions when they’re ready and not forced by some politician.”

Ulibarri, who is Senate Minority Caucus Chair, was one of the hosts, along with representatives from abortion-rights groups Public Leadership Institute and the National Institute for Reproductive Health Wednesday for a national conference call announcing the new effort.

He said he was approached by the the Leadership Institute, which has an active presence in Colorado, to talk about the reproductive health landscape in Colorado and the challenges the state faces related to maintaining, or even increasing, abortion services.

“It’s important to recognize that, even though we’ve had success on defensive battles, there hasn’t been a proactive strategy to ensure that abortion remains safe and legal when it’s necessary,” Ulibarri said.

The organizations are putting together comprehensive data from each state regarding public opinion and access to services and comparative information on related legislation state to state.

For Colorado, according to Ulibarri, the challenge now is mainly about keeping the cost of reproductive services affordable to all residents of the state and providing accessible care to rural residents.

“Although Colorado is more accessible than other states in terms of being able to receive safe and legal abortion,” he said, “87 percent of counties have no abortion service provider. So this an issue we’ve dealt with at the legislature and one that we’ve seen at the ballot box in three separate attempts to ban abortion through the personhood measures.

“Nearly two-thirds of Colorado voters have agreed that they keep abortion safe, legal and accessible,” he said.

Last year’s defunding of a long-acting reversible contraception program — which was among the most successful programs in the nation for reducing teen pregnancy — is a case in point, Ulibarri said.

The program demonstrated that “You can reduce teen abortions,” he said. “[But] Senate Republicans eliminated that program, which means abortion needs to remain a viable option.”

The likelihood that abortion services would be deeply restricted in Colorado as they have been in other states seems unlikely, given that Republicans and Democrats share power in the state, but Ulibarri said that doesn’t mean effort shouldn’t be made to shore up access to contraceptive and abortion services.

“The majority of legislators here will never know what it’s like to be pregnant,” he said. “There’s still this belief that we should be telling women what to do with their bodies and that we shouldn’t leave those decisions to women and their doctors. That seems incredibly backwards to me.”

–kara@coloradostatesman.com