Fifty-five years have elapsed since a group of Planned Parenthood-supporting Republican Protestants in the Colorado Senate joined a young Denver Democrat in the House named Richard Lamm to make the Centennial State first in the nation to formally legalize abortion. It would be another five years before the United States Supreme Court extended a similar guarantee nationwide with its Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly a dozen times since, anti-abortion forces have asked voters to roll back Colorado’s abortion access either all or in part. Each time voters rejected these requests with inexorably growing majorities. The only Republican governor elected during the past half century was Bill Owens, a Catholic who offered lip service to pro-life zealots but avoided significant lifting to assist proponents.

Colorado Democrats roused themselves as it became apparent earlier this year that the newly ensconced conservative majority on the Supreme Court, courtesy of former President Donald J. Trump and the Federalist Society, appeared prepared to reverse its longstanding constitutional abortion ruling by returning responsibility for setting abortion policy to each state. A coalition of female legislators firmly codified the privacy of personal medical decisions through the Reproductive Health Equity Act (HB 22-1279). Following the finding that Roe v. Wade as well as Pennsylvania v. Casey were “wrongly decided,” Governor Jared Polis issued an executive order last week directing all state agencies to safeguard access to abortion services. There is substantial irony in the vocabulary used in the Governor’s order which assiduously avoids gender designation for “…a pregnant person’s right to choose.” The Supreme Court’s decision addressed Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Mississippi abortion services were assumed to be targeted for women. There is also sloppy word-smithing in the executive order that may become grist for disputes in future court challenges. By way of example, “Colorado is experiencing a workforce shortage in many professions, and disqualifying people because they were prosecuted for taking actions in other states that are fully legal under Colorado law would hurt our economy and our state,” is meant to prevent precisely what? Presumably, prosecutions elsewhere should not be allowed to prejudice employment decisions in Colorado, but that’s a guess. It’s not difficult to imagine a lawsuit brought by Mississippi Right-to-Life v. Polis or, more likely, Texas v. Polis, where the state legislature has authorized bounty hunting. Bounty systems are designed to avoid the rule of law, substituting vigilante justice for the courtroom.

When “Wanted” posters on the American frontier advertised bounties ‘”dead or alive,” it was understood that dead was usually better. As more than one wag has noted, though it is true that history rarely repeats itself, it has a propensity for rhyming. The members of Congress who supported the Fugitive Slave Compromise of 1850, including Daniel Webster, had no idea the Dred Scott decision in 1857, followed by Ableman v. Booth in 1859, would elect Abraham Lincoln, a little known one-term congressman, president and ignite a Civil War.

As Michael Trachtman notes in his book, “The Supremes’ Greatest Hits,” the Dred Scott decision is viewed today “…as the poster child for those who decry judicial activism,” for having gone well beyond the issues of ownership and involuntary manumission. Chief Justice Roger Taney and a majority on the court overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, stripping all blacks, both freemen and enslaved, of their right to citizenship by establishing the supremacy of federal law over state statutes. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested his colleagues also stretched their authority with Dobbs.

Denying black Americans access to state or federal courts enabled slave hunters to kidnap freedmen and sell them to bondage. For several years prior to the Civil War, more free blacks were being dragged to slave states than were actually escaping. I review this sordid history since it is entirely possible Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress might legislate a universal ban on abortions and, once signed by a Republican President, would reprise the fugitive slave fiasco with the pursuit of pregnant women. I can’t imagine anything more likely to precipitate a meltdown between red and blue states.

Democrats should have codified Roe v. Wade when they controlled the White House and majorities in Congress. It’s entirely possible the unanimous decision in Ableman v. Booth asserting the supremacy of federal courts on issues of federal law would be brandished by the originalist majority steering our current Supreme Court. Several weeks ago, I waited in a checkout line at Target. A young woman ahead of me was purchasing a Plan B treatment with several other items. The clerk asked her whether she’d ever used Plan B before? When she replied no, the clerk whispered, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll just have a heavy period.” Bio-technology has outfoxed theological precepts. A government that fails to control fentanyl, isn’t likely to control Plan B either.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.