Pro-abortion activists in Colorado commemorated the third anniversary of the overturn of Roe v. Wade with a talk from physician and author Dr. Shelley Sella, who spent her career offering third trimester abortion care. Sella has collected a series of anecdotes from her time as an abortion provider in Albuquerque, New Mexico in her new book, Beyond Limits: Stories of Third Trimester Abortion Care.
The event was hosted by Cobalt and featured speakers such as Rep. Meg Froelich (D-Englewood). “In Colorado, why have we been successful, really it’s that there’s this infrastructure in place,” said Froelich. “That is from defeating over and over and over again these terrible ballot measures on personhood, on gestational limits, and those sorts of things, but that put in place this structure that has led to this amazing coalition sticking together, and the coalition has been blessed by really amazing leadership, people like Karen Middleton.”
Froelich described how the political landscape in Colorado has changed as abortion became a central issue for voters. “We used to have a pro-choice majority because we had several Republican women that were pro-choice,” she said. “That unfortunately has changed and now a Democratic majority is what’s needed for a pro-choice majority. That has meant that pre-Dobbs, we did the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which established abortion and all forms of reproductive care as a fundamental right. It meant that, pre- the executive order ending EMTALA, emergency medicine for pregnant folks, we put in our Senate Bill 130 that protected emergency medical access.”
During her career, Sella also saw the political landscape change. She worked under Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician who provided abortion services late in pregnancy and who was assassinated by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, where Tiller was serving as an usher. Dubbed “Tiller the baby killer” by U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan (R-CA) and demonized by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Tiller was targeted with violence throughout his career. In 1986 Tiller’s clinic was firebombed, and in 1993 he was shot five times by anti-abortion extremist Shelly Shannon.
“I think once Roe was put in effect, I think there was a little time where there wasn’t the stigma and vilification of providers, clinics, and patients seeking abortions,” said Sella. “By the time I started practicing, it was already under siege, under attack. Dr. Tiller had been under attack for many, many years before I started working with him. I mean, I think the climate just got worse, certainly in Wichita, and culminated in his assassination.”
According to research by the National Abortion Federation, Colorado abortion providers reported trespassing and protests outside their clinics in 2023 and 2024. Of the 17 Colorado abortion providers that participated, 65% experienced at least one incident of trespassing, 53% reported protestors outside, 24% experienced an incident of obstruction, and 18% received threats.
Like many pro-abortion advocates, Sella opposes gestational limits on abortion, which were a primary tactic used by anti-abortion activists to limit access to abortion. “Those who seek third trimester abortions are doing that for the same reason as those who see an abortion in the first and second trimester,” said Sella. “But they’re a lot more desperate, and they’ve had to jump over many more hurdles to access one, but there are similar reasons. As you know, more and more people are needing abortion care later in pregnancy because of all the restrictions and bans. It’s harder to access an abortion if you live in a very restrictive or a banned state, and so you have to travel, and you have to make the arrangements, and get off of work. There’s so many delays in accessing care. So now more than ever, it’s important that it be available.”
Cobalt’s abortion fund helps patients seeking abortions access care. Since Dobbs, Cobalt has seen an increased demand from out-of-state patients. “The volume of the care, the weekend of the Dobbs decision, tripled overnight and never stopped,” said Cobalt CEO Karen Middleton. “And we have scaled up.”
Among the speakers at Cobalt’s event was Jenn Chalifoux-Gene, who shared her abortion story. “I was 18 years old at an eating disorder treatment when I found out that I was pregnant,” she said. “The news was a shock to me, and it was a shock to all of my treatment providers because I was on birth control, and because the symptoms of my eating disorder totally masked my pregnancy. The moment that I saw those little lines on the pregnancy test, I knew that I wanted an abortion. And I knew I still wanted one a couple days later when I found out that I was well into my second trimester. But the timeline complicated absolutely everything about my abortion. It meant that the procedure I needed was longer, it was more complex, and it was, of course, more expensive. I scrambled to terminate my pregnancy as soon as I possibly could, growing more desperate every week that passed. And with my parent’s support, I was finally able to get it, just a couple days after my 19th birthday, at a hospital in my home state of New York. I was between 23 and 24 weeks pregnant and I remember a doctor telling me that if I had just been one week later my abortion would have been banned by New York State, which at the time had a 24-week gestational limit. Terminating my pregnancy saved my life. I know that that is true. By the time I got my abortion, I was suicidal, traumatized by the experience of carrying a pregnancy against my will.”
Despite the testimony of patients and providers, anti-abortion activists remain opposed. “I’m taking this from the science, from medical embryology texts like Keith Moore, The Developing Human, who says a new human life begins at the moment of fertilization,” said Dr. Catherine Wheeler, a former abortion provider turned anti-abortion activist, during a June 13 appearance on the Dan Caplis Show. “That’s really clear. That’s my training. And then from a very recent study, 2021, which was a survey of over 5,000 biologists around the world, over a thousand academic institutions, most were self-described liberal or Democratic and not religious. And 96% agreed with fertilization being the time when life begins.”
Anti-abortion activists have long pushed for gestational limits on abortion. “By the end of the tenth week from the mom’s period, the baby looks very human,” said Wheeler. “Of course, looking like a human doesn’t make you human, but the baby actually appeared very similar to us already in that short period of time. Every one of the major organs is there. The baby’s already moving, responding to touch, already has brain waves. You can already do an EKG. You can get EKG kind of patterns like a newborn. And the baby moves from an embryo stage to a fetus stage at the 10th week. But again, we’re just naming stages. And the embryo name means that the organs have already developed at that point. And we’re moving into essentially continuing growth and development and function.”
Sella and pro-abortion activists view gestational limits as arbitrary. “In the Roe decision viability was ‘the ability to survive outside the womb with or without artificial support,’” said Sella. “Really it was just about the baby, and it was about survival with no consideration of the circumstances or the outcomes. So in 1973, viability, what they considered viability by those standards, was about 28 to 29 weeks. And now … it could be 22 to 23 weeks, but about 40% of those babies will die soon after birth, and many will have long-term chronic medical conditions. It’s interesting because viability in that frame is just looking at the viability of the fetus, of the baby. It’s not looking at all on the parent, on the mother, on her health.”
Diane Ferraro, CEO of the mobile anti-abortion center group Save the Storks, argued that abortion is harmful to mothers during a June 19 appearance on the Jeff and Bill show. “Abortion should never be considered an option, never,” she said. “Obviously it takes the life of the child, but it’s harmful for an entire lifetime to that poor mom.”
Ferraro also critiqued abortion providers. “I don’t even want to call them a clinic because when a woman goes in there, they are not treated with a wonderful experience,” she said. “They are really rushed into an abortion, and they’re not always clean. They’re not taken care of. Those workers, really, they think they’re doing something good for women, but it’s the opposite. They are hurting women, not just for the woman there in the office, but for future generations. We know that women are regretting their abortions. Oftentimes they don’t come out with that story of their abortion until 27 years after the abortion took place. Because Planned Parenthood keeps telling them, it’s your body, it’s your choice, it’s women’s health care.”
Sella says the reality of abortion care is the opposite of what anti-abortion activists attempt to portray. “I met Dr. Tiller at a conference, and I was, again, very taken by his approach to caring for patients,” she said. “His concern for their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, that really spoke to me. And third trimester abortion care is not quick. It takes place over several days. It’s an induction delivery of a stillborn. And so that time allowed me and the staff to really care for people and their families and their partners and to. And that I found very, very compelling. The ability to truly care for people as they’re going through this process.”
During the last legislative session, Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs) introduced legislation to attempt to further regulate abortion providers. The bill failed to make it out of committee, but it highlights the longstanding tact among anti-abortion activists. Sella says such legislation is misguided. “I think abortion should be regulated as any other medical procedure, and in fact, the opposite, that the abortion clinics are over-regulated through the TRAP [Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers] laws, the laws that target abortion clinics,” she said. “I would say on the contrary — and I can only speak from my experience — but the care that we gave in the two third-term clinics that I worked at was exemplary. Patients often said it was the best health care they had ever received, so I don’t think that it needs to be more regulated than it already is. Abortion clinics are over-regulated, much more so than any other medical procedure.”
Anti-abortion activists reject the concept of abortion as health care. “I call [pregnancy] a miracle,” said Wheeler. “I think to myself, being an ex-abortionist, when you have abortion thoughts about things, when that’s your default, you quit seeing the miracle of development, but when you quit saying, ‘When can I kill it,’ all of a sudden it just, it really is miraculous … I think if people are looking for a line again, the question is always, ‘When can I kill it?’ And, when you quit asking that question, like there’s no point in this continuous human development that gives you a right to take a human being’s life.”
Despite the growing number of abortion bans and restrictions in the country, Sella encourages activists to keep fighting. “They have to keep going, you know, don’t give up,” she said. “Tides turn. Where I find hope is that there are so many more providers and so many people interested in providing abortion care than when I started. There are so many providers who have, or people starting to provide, who have a very expansive view of abortion care. They’re not just thinking, ‘Oh, I want to just provide up to 12 weeks or 15.’ They’re thinking all trimesters. That’s a huge shift from when I started. I’m seeing that, and so I find hope in that. You have to find hope where you can. They’re ready, and they are going to places where they can practice, but there’s certainly a need in all the country, the entire country, and not just in blue states.”
She hopes her book can encourage conversations and shift the discussion around abortion. “My book is mainly stories, and I think stories are really an effective way to reach people and to talk to people, more than political rhetoric,” said Sella. “There’s minimal rhetoric in my book and maximum stories of the people I cared for, this is why they came, this is their situation. I think that makes a difference, and in terms of hope maybe also, people are much more open about their abortions. There’s this whole movement of abortion storytelling, and I think that has an impact, but I also think we can’t give up on people. We have to be patient. Most people don’t change overnight. You know, it’s a slow process.”
