Bella Health alleges Colorado’s law “chills free speech” and “actively thwarts women” from stopping an abortion in progress
Bella Health specifically claims Colorado’s law violates the First Amendment and Free Exercise Clause rights of its workers because it forces them to “choose between giving life-affirming health care according to their sincerely held religious beliefs or face the loss of their licenses and severe financial penalties.” In addition, Bella Health alleges Colorado’s law “chills free speech” and “actively thwarts women” from stopping an abortion in progress.
Judge Daniel D. Domenico agreed the law “is not neutral” and that legislators knew the law would “burden religious practice.”
Judge Domenico wrote, “The target of the bill is plainly abortion bill reversal…it seems clear then, both given this legislative history and the bill’s text itself, that the legislature was aware that the burden of this prohibition would primarily fall on religious adherents…But when the practice [the state] chooses to ban is one that it knows is undertaken for religious reasons, it loses the protections.”
Judge Domenico explained that while Colorado aims to bar the use of progesterone for reversing chemical abortion, the state simultaneously allows the medication for miscarriage prevention. The judge noted that Colorado’s law is also not a “neutral and generally applicable” law in this respect.
“…the law treats comparable secular activity more favorably than Bella Health’s religious activity,” stated Judge Domenico. “The State generally cannot regulate an activity if that regulation burdens religious exercise, provides for individualized exceptions, fails to regulate comparable secular activities that raise similar risks, and otherwise targets religious activity. The law at issue here runs afoul of these First Amendment principles.”
