In 2024, Colorado was one of seven states where voters codified the right to abortion in their state constitution.
It was the latest development in a long and varied history of abortion in the state.
In 1967, Colorado became the first state to decriminalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when pregnancy would lead to permanent physical disability of the woman.
But just over 150 years before abortion rights were enshrined in the state constitution, a different story was unfolding — one that connects to an unmarked grave in Columbia Cemetery in Boulder.
“Well, there’s no headstone, but there’s lots of records,” says Mary Reilly-McNellan, who managed the cemetery for 17 years.
Reilly-McNellan stands beside the unmarked grave of Fredricka Baunn, who died in 1871.
Fredricka Baunn had been impregnated by Clement Knau, a married man who did not want the child.
“So he encouraged her to get an abortion,” Reilly-McNellan says.
Baunn sought care from Dr. Mary Solander, Colorado’s first licensed female doctor and a respected physician in the area.
A few days after the procedure, Solander was called back to Baunn’s bedside.
“Fredricka Baunn ended up having a uterine hemorrhage, and she died,” Reilly-McNellan says. “And so there was a manslaughter charge brought against the doctor who supposedly performed the abortion.”
The case against Solander went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court.
“It ends up becoming kind of a trial about ‘Should women even be doctors?’” says Dr. Ashley Achee, a historian who has studied the case. “That’s one of the questions that arises.”
The trial also reflected larger societal issues in the early 1870s, Achee says.
“There’s the statehood question. There’s the woman question. There’s the doctor question. And then, of course, there’s this looming abortion question that no one really wants to address.”
Achee says anti-abortion sentiment was growing nationally at the time, connected to fears of demographic change.
“There was this philosophy: If we allow abortion to continue, white people — white Protestants in particular — will have fewer and fewer kids, and these immigrants and impoverished people will have more and more kids. Soon, there will be no white people,” she says.
One response was to criminalize abortion providers. Baunn’s death gave Colorado courts an opportunity to do just that.
Solander was convicted of manslaughter, becoming the first woman imprisoned in the Colorado state penitentiary. She lost her medical license, her marriage, and contact with her children.
While Solander’s trial is remembered in history books, Baunn’s story has largely been forgotten, says Reilly-McNellan.
“I think she was portrayed in a lot of ways in the media as either kind of a whore or a victim,” she says. “But her story is so much more complicated than that. I think she lost her humanity in that trial.”
Copyright 2024 Rocky Mountain Community Radio.
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