The People vote on abortion funding: Colorado and Washington.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state in the country to liberalize its abortion law when the legislature voted to allow abortions if a pregnancy threatened the woman's life or her physical or mental health, if it resulted from rape or incest, or if the fetus suffered from a severe physical or mental abnormality. At that time, most other states permitted abortion only to save the life of the woman.

On Election Day, 1984, Colorado recorded another first when its voters decided that the state would no longer pay for abortions for indigent women, as it had been doing since 1969. By a narrow margin, the voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that cut off all public funds for abortions, an action that had been accomplished in other states only through legislation or policy directives.

The amendment passed despite the active opposition of the governor, as well as opposition from the mayor of Denver, several members of the Colorado congressional delegation, two former Republican governors and the two statewide newspapers. The outcome did not appear to be an indication of voter opinion on abortion, however. Although the amendment's proponents were largely antiabortion advocates, they chose to avoid the emotional and ideological arguments associated with their cause and to champion the amendment solely as a measure that would save the taxpayers money. Opponents of the amendment did not respond to the economic issue or focus their campaign as tightly as their adversaries.

That same Election Day, an effort to end abortion funding in the state of Washington failed decisively. As in Colorado, the effort to terminate funding was led by antiabortion activists who sought to characterize the issue as an economic one. But unlike their counterparts in Colorado, opponents of the proposed ban confronted the cost issue directly and provided convincing evidence that the new law would ultimately cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Citizen-sponsored referenda to bar state governments from paying for abortions are an increasingly popular strategy of abortion opponents, particularly in states where these opponents have been unable to convince their legislatures or courts to end such funding. The federal government has paid for virtually no abortions since 1978, when a congressional prohibition on the use of federal funds for most abortions went into effect. If the success of the Colorado funding ban is repeated in other states that pay for abortions, this strategy could have a substantial impact on the ability of low-income women to obtain abortion services. Currently, 14 states (*) and the District of Columbia pay for abortions for indigent women. In 1983, state funding accounted for virtually all the publicly funded abortions performed in this country: The 15 states then paying for most abortions (+) spent $70.7 million for 215,140 abortions for indigent women, while the remaining states and the federal government restricted their paym ents mostly to life-threatening circumstances and spent $747,000 for 952 abortions. (1)

Seventeen states (#) allow voter initiatives, such as that held in Colorado, to amend the state constitution. Fifteen of these states plus six others (ss) and the District of Columbia permit citizens to enact legislation directly through ballot initiatives, and that is what was attempted in the Washington referendum. The number of signatures required for a proposal to qualify for the ballot varies from state to state, but most often, it is a percentage of the votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election. Before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, abortion reform advocates in several states sponsored initiatives to liberalize state abortion laws, but succeeded only in Washington in 1970.

In 1978, Oregon became the first state in which the citizens voted on a referendum to eliminate abortion funding for low-income women. The proposed law, which was rejected by 51 percent of voters, would have stopped all funding, with no exceptions for life-threatening situations. A cutoff attempt was also made that year in Maryland, but the state's highest court ruled that the Maryland constitution prohibits referenda on appropriations to run the state government. (2) In 1982, Alaskans defeated a proposal to terminate funding by 59 to 41 percent.