When Ginger Barton boarded a flight to New York in 1970, she was 19 years old, terrified, and alone.

New York had just become one of the first states in the country to legalize abortion. For Barton, a college student in Pueblo at the time, it seemed her only option.

She had gotten pregnant after what she later described as a nonconsensual encounter. “The sex was not consensual actually,” she said. “He held my arms down and proceeded to take advantage.” There was no one she could tell– not her family, not her friends outside a small circle of confidants. “I never told my sister until years later,” she said. “I didn’t tell my mom. I didn’t tell anyone for many years to not be looked down on.”

Her roommate’s boyfriend loaned her the money for the flight and the procedure. A friend from New York arranged for her to stay overnight with acquaintances in the city — “friendly, but not supportive of abortion,” Barton recalled. “I remember walking out to get something to eat on 45th Street. … I was just a 19-year-old girl from Nebraska, far from worldly. Either I was brave or just plain naïve.”

She remembers the line outside the clinic stretching down the block — young women clutching coats, avoiding eye contact. “I stood in line for hours,” she said. “A girl came out crying, which made me really nervous because I wasn’t sure if it was because it hurt or what.” When her turn came, she climbed onto the table. “I only remember a hurtful pinch and a vacuum. It was pretty much like an assembly line.”

Afterward, she took a taxi back to Grand Central Station, where she missed her bus to the airport. “A security guard said he’d take me upstairs to the Clipper Club room so I’d be safe. Then he chased me around the tables trying to hit on me,” she said quietly. “I guess I was just used to men like that.”

When she finally boarded the plane back to Denver, she felt both guilt and relief. “Having a baby when you are not ready or able to take care of them is just not an acceptable option,” she said. “It isn’t good for the woman or the baby. If not for that abortion, I would have had to quit school and go home. Life would have been much, much different.”

As the country’s political climate grows increasingly polarized, Barton’s story represents one thread in a larger tapestry of women reckoning with change. At Boulder’s Academy Mapleton Hill, an intergenerational group of women — from activists to retirees, from lawyers to healthcare workers — are reflecting on how Roe’s fall has reshaped their lives. Some are working to guide younger advocates pushing back, while others see the issue from more conservative, life-affirming perspectives. Together, their stories reveal how the battle over reproductive rights is not confined to one generation — or one ideology.

The activist’s view

For Carolyn Schuham, another Academy resident, Roe’s fall wasn’t just a policy change — it was a generational rupture. A former psychotherapist and longtime activist, Schuham began her political life in the 1960s, working for George McGovern’s campaign and marching for the Equal Rights Amendment.

“I think I was simply born a feminist,” she said. “Radicalized from the get-go.”

She remembers her first experience with inequality vividly. As a Jewish girl growing up in a small town, she attended an Orthodox synagogue where women were separated from men and sent to sit upstairs.

“I was six years old,” she said. “My father and brothers sat on the main floor. I was supposed to go up to the balcony, and that was it for religion for me. I remember thinking — this isn’t right.”

Schuham’s activism carried her through the ERA fight and decades of social movements. When Roe was overturned, the feeling was almost physical. “I just cried,” she said. “Everyone around me was solemn, sad. It’s not just Democrat versus Republican anymore — it’s democracy versus dictatorship.”

She has lived long enough to see cycles of backlash, but the current political climate, she says, feels uniquely corrosive. “It used to be that people in Congress would argue like mad on the floor, then go play baseball together,” she said. “There was an agreement that compromise was healthy for democracy. That’s gone now. The hatred is different. It’s bad. And it’s changing all of us.”

In an earlier interview, Schuham had signed off with a rallying cry: “Don’t agonize, organize.” But this time, her tone had softened. The optimism had been replaced by weariness. “I’m heartbroken for your generation,” she told me. “My grandson just graduated college, sent out 200 applications, and got zero. I don’t know what kids are going to do.”

She said the comment wasn’t just about jobs — to her, it reflected a wider loss of stability and fairness. “It’s all connected,” she said. “When young people can’t find stable work, when women are losing rights we thought were permanent — it all feeds the same despair.”

The Denver Doula Project

In Denver, a new generation of advocates is redefining what reproductive care looks like after Roe. At the center of that work is Gina Martínez Valentín, executive director of the Denver Doula Project, a nonprofit that supports people seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare across Colorado.

When we spoke, Gina described the organization’s mission simply: “We meet people where they are.”

The group coordinates transportation, housing, and emotional support for clients traveling from across the country to access care in Colorado, one of the few remaining safe havens in the Mountain West. Since Dobbs v. Jackson overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, their caseload has grown steadily. “We don’t receive government funding,” Gina said. “Most of our work is community-funded, volunteer-run, and driven by collaboration.”

The Denver Doula Project now has around 200 trained abortion doulas, many of whom volunteer their time to accompany or virtually support people through the process. Gina walked me through how it works: an intake team helps each client navigate clinics, costs, and logistics. They work closely with the Cobalt Abortion Fund, which handles policy and legislative advocacy, while the Doula Project focuses on direct support. “Transportation is one of the most common needs after funding,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a ride, sometimes it’s a hotel, sometimes it’s just someone staying on the phone while they travel.”

For Gina, the heart of their work is education — both in language and empathy. She emphasized the importance of using language that accurately reflects who can become pregnant. “We use ‘pregnant people’ because not everyone who can get pregnant identifies as a woman,” she said. “It’s not just about trans inclusion — it’s about honesty. Minors, nonbinary people, so many different lives are affected by these laws.”

Her own path into leadership came after 30 years as a nanny and caregiver. Now, as an executive director managing a small staff and hundreds of volunteers, she said her approach is grounded in care ethics. “If we’re not taking care of each other while doing this work, then we’re missing the point.” Preventing burnout, she added, is just as important as helping clients navigate a system that often fails them.

Our conversation drifted to how reproductive justice connects to everything else — immigration, housing, federal aid, even airline structure. While the organization doesn’t rely on federal funds, Gina said government gridlock still hurts their clients. “If someone loses SNAP or can’t afford a flight because airlines are a mess, that becomes our problem too. Reproductive justice connects to everything.”

She told me about a college student who flew to Colorado alone for an abortion. “We put her in a hotel, stayed on the phone through the night,” Gina said. “Sometimes support is just being there when nobody else can.”

That story, she said, reminds her why the work matters. “People have complex feelings about abortion — not because they’re unsure, but because the world around them makes them feel they should be.”

For Gina and her team, the Denver Doula Project isn’t about politics or slogans. It’s about showing up — with funding, with empathy, and with the belief that no one should face one of the hardest decisions of their life alone.

The Opposition — Voices From the Pro-Life Medical Community

On Nov. 9, I attended a talk at the Boulder Public Library hosted by AAPLOG Colorado, the state chapter of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The event, titled “Challenges to the Health and Safety of Boulder Women,” centered on medical and ethical questions raised by the opening of new second- and third-trimester abortion facilities in Colorado.

The program opened with remarks from Julianna Day, founder of the organization Life Decisions, who welcomed attendees and outlined the group’s mission to raise awareness about what she described as “the significant medical risks associated with later abortions.” She emphasized that the event’s purpose was to discuss safety standards, inspection policies, and the moral implications of abortion in advanced stages of pregnancy.

The first speaker, Susan Gills, a Boulder resident and registered dietitian, began by tracing what she called the “history of abortion in Colorado.” She reminded the audience that in 1967, Colorado became the first state in the country to decriminalize abortion under limited circumstances — and described that day as “a turning point that changed the state forever.” Gills argued that despite initial promises of regulation and medical oversight, Colorado evolved into what she characterized as a national hub for abortion access, particularly with the 1973 opening of the Boulder Abortion Clinic.

She spoke at length about the clinic’s founder, Warren Hern, who performed abortions for decades before his retirement earlier this year. “Gov. Love was wrong,” Gills said, referring to the state’s former governor who believed Colorado would not become an abortion destination. “There are no safeguards in abortion practice now. Colorado law allows abortion at any gestational age, without licensing or oversight.”

Gills concluded her talk by expressing concern over a newly opened clinic, the Rise Collective, which she said was founded by former staff from Hern’s office. “We’re thankful one chapter ended,” she said, “but a new one has already begun.”

The next speaker, Dr. Kerry Cass, a pharmacist and health care researcher, shared the story of “Lexi,” an 18-year-old from Fort Collins who reportedly died following complications from a late-term abortion earlier this year. Cass described the event as “two lives lost” — both Lexi and her unborn child — and used the story to call for stricter oversight of abortion clinics in Colorado. “Birthing centers and surgical centers are licensed and inspected,” she said. “Abortion clinics performing invasive procedures should be too.”

Cass criticized what she viewed as a lack of transparency around abortion-related complications in the state, arguing that “Colorado offers women back-alley abortions, not healthcare.” She referenced the 2010 conviction of Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell as an example of what she believed could happen without regulation.

The final speaker, Dr. Catherine Wheeler, an OB-GYN who practiced in Utah for more than two decades, spoke from her experience performing second-trimester abortions earlier in her career. Wheeler said she eventually stopped after witnessing the physical and emotional toll the procedures took on patients and staff. “Most people think abortion is one thing,” she told the crowd. “But there’s a very big difference between a first-trimester abortion and one that happens much later.”

Her presentation focused on what she described as medical risks during later-term procedures, such as uterine perforation and hemorrhage, and the absence of hospital-level emergency care at some clinics. “I worked in a hospital system where we had ICU and anesthesia right down the hall,” she said. “That’s not the case for most facilities doing these procedures here.”

As Wheeler concluded, she urged the audience to consider both maternal safety and what she called “ethical responsibility” in medicine. “These are not theoretical debates,” she said quietly. “They’re human ones.”

For those gathered in the library’s Canyon Theater that afternoon, the message was clear: even in a state known for its reproductive freedoms, opposition remains deeply rooted — not just in faith or ideology, but in a belief that protecting life begins with changing how medicine defines care.

Continuing the Conversation

At The Academy, conversations about abortion rarely stay abstract. They drift into memories of marches, family debates and quiet moments of fear or pride. Barton and Schuham embody two sides of the same fight- one personal, one political- both warning that the struggle for autonomy never really ends. 

“Young women need to understand what it was like before Roe,” Barton said. “There were deaths. There were girls who couldn't have babies again. Those laws won't stop abortions- they'll just make them more deadly.” 

Schuham echoed that sentiment with a deep sign. “ It's your world now,” she told me. “ I Just hope you all stay engaged. Don't wait for someone to fix what’s broken.”