A proposed ordinance that would ban abortion in Pueblo city limits would hinder doctors’ ability to provide sufficient medical care and could harm their patients, OB-GYNs said during a work session last week.

“The ordinance you’re considering would impede our efforts to provide comprehensive medical care to women and detract from our ability to routinely provide life-saving measures for your wives, your sisters, your moms and yourself, even without elective terminations of pregnancy,” Dr. Mike Growney, an OB-GYN at Parkview Health System, which does not perform abortions, told the City Council on Wednesday.

Pueblo’s proposed anti-abortion ordinance comes with legal questions

The ordinance, which seems to be the first proposed municipal anti-abortion regulation brought forth in Colorado, says it would require abortion providers in Pueblo to comply with federal law, citing an 1873 Comstock law prohibiting the publication, distribution or possession of information about or medication or other tools for “unlawful” contraception or abortions. 

Proposed ordinance requiring abortion providers in Pueblo to comply with federal law

Parts of the law banning contraception have since been overturned, but other portions regarding abortion are seemingly still on record.

Councilwoman Regina Maestri said previously she brought the ordinance before the council on behalf of residents who are concerned about a planned abortion clinic in town. There are currently no abortion clinics in Pueblo, and the nearest one is about 45 miles north in Colorado Springs.

Clinics for Abortion and Reproductive Excellence, which also has locations in Nebraska and Maryland, has purchased a building in Pueblo’s historic Bessemer neighborhood. No opening date has been announced.

Pueblo’s proposed ordinance, which Growney and other OB-GYNs from Parkview said was “overly vague,” makes exceptions for fertilization treatments, saving a baby’s life, removing a dead “unborn child,” ectopic pregnancies and emergency contraception like Plan B medication. 

But if it were passed as written, doctors said, they wouldn’t be able to adequately care for their patients because the municipal law would preclude them from using “any article or thing designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion; or any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” 

The ordinance would also outlaw using computers to order the equipment or receiving such tools in the mail.

But doctors use the same devices and medications that are used for abortions to treat patients experiencing other medical issues, they said Wednesday.

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“Everything we use to treat ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, to diagnose endometrial cancers – it can all be adapted to perform abortions,” Growney said. “Half the stuff we use was adapted for clinical practice from people that do abortions. It’s hand-in-hand. It’s tools of the trade. It’s the same equipment. It’s the same medication. We just use it in different ways – not performing terminations. But this ordinance would make it so that we can’t get it.”

Some pharmacists already refuse to fill prescriptions for a drug called misoprostol, commonly used to treat stomach ulcers, because it could also be used for an abortion, Growney said. But OB-GYNs also use the drug to reduce a patient’s bleeding after giving birth or to “empty the uterus” after a miscarriage to avoid surgery, he said.

Dr. Joseph Castelli said the council’s forthcoming decision on the proposed ordinance will affect people across southern Colorado and northern New Mexico who seek medical care in Pueblo.

“You’re actually making a decision for hundreds of thousands of lives from Alamosa to Trinidad, Raton, Lamar …,” he said. “So I just want you to understand that this decision is affecting a vast swath of southern Colorado and lowering our ability to deliver the standard of care. We will not be doing state-of-the-art medicine if this happens.”

Doctors could also do harm to their patients if the ordinance were passed, Castelli said.

“If I don’t have the proper equipment, people will lose blood. People will have to have a hysterectomy because I don’t have the right equipment to evacuate the uterus the way I should be able to,” he said. “People will lose their fertility. People could lose their lives. … This is not a fun game. There’s a lot on the line here. … I think that none of us can really think of every clinical scenario that’s going to come to pass if we lose access to just the basics.”

The ordinance could also hinder the city’s ability to recruit other OB-GYNs “because of the lack of just being able to do our job with the tools that we need to do our jobs with,” Castelli said.

The ordinance would authorize the public, not the government, to enforce the law by suing abortion providers. If it were approved, residents could sue abortion providers for at least $100,000 per violation, the document states.

Colorado’s Reproductive Health Equity Act bans public state and local entities from limiting a person’s access to reproductive health care, including abortions.

The City Council is expected to consider the ordinance Monday evening. Public comment will be allowed.

A work session is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Monday, followed by the regular City Council meeting at 7 p.m. The meetings will take place at City Hall, 1 City Hall Place in Pueblo.

The meetings can be livestreamed online at pueblo.us or on the city’s Facebook page at facebook.com/CityofPueblo. More information for how to provide public comment is available on the city’s Facebook page.

Meeting agendas are available on the city website at pueblo.us/1137/Council-Agenda. 

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