Abortion is obviously a polarizing topic. While this column touches on the subject, it’s not the actual focus. Rather, it’s about something I hope we can all agree on: transparency. Government officials should not be hiding information from us based on what they think is good for us to know, or for some ideological reason; a lesson the Larimer County Coroner recently learned the hard way.
In February 2025 a young woman died due to complications from a late term abortion. According to reports in various pro-life media outlets (regular progressive Colorado media, of course, have run from this story like the plague), along with the autopsy report that followed, Planned Parenthood in Fort Collins performed the procedure and noted something was wrong while the young woman was in the recovery room. They sent her to the hospital via ambulance, where she later died.
Larimer County Coroner Stephen Hanks performed an autopsy on the young woman. Later that year (November of 2025), Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, filed a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request for the autopsy report. The coroner’s office went back and forth with Mr. Newman regarding what they thought was appropriate to release and what wasn’t, ultimately handing over a redacted copy. Mr. Newman disagreed with the redactions and took the coroner to court.
It took until April of this year to get a judgment, but a Larimer district court judge (rightly) sided with Mr. Newman, ordering the coroner’s office to release an unredacted copy.
A right to know
Redactions are common in public records, and not without good reason. There are some things that I think we can all agree on as being too sensitive to share publicly. For example, my salary as a state employee is public record, my home address and health history are not.
There is substantial case law around the kinds of things that you can and cannot access via a CORA request, with much of it hinging on an injury to someone’s privacy vs. the injury to the public interest in government transparency. From examples I’ve seen in other places, along with some of the things noted by the district judge in his ruling, I think most of what I’ve seen threads the needle reasonably well.
The Larimer County Coroner, however, had a new take on things. Hanks argued that the young woman’s reproductive healthcare history is private, in addition to citing Colorado’s “strong public policy in favor of protecting reproductive healthcare [read: abortion].” He also voiced concerns that someone might not seek an abortion if they knew an autopsy report from a botched one would be public.
In response, the judge noted that while it’s legitimate to protect someone’s private health information, autopsy reports are legitimate public records, thus any medical history relating to the person’s death is fair game. For example, a record of someone suffering from hemorrhoids the size of gumballs might be protected, unless that somehow relates to how they died.
As suggested by Mr. Hanks’ arguments, I think it’s fair to say that his worries relate as much to abortion itself as to privacy. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that pro-life groups would use this autopsy report in their advocacy, any more than to figure pro-abortion groups would want to sweep this whole story under the rug. I don’t know Mr. Hanks personally, but I doubt someone rises to be coroner without being intelligent; he can’t not have known all of this.
Transparency matters
Complete Colorado had their own lawsuit against the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) over withholding information, almost certainly done with similar motives–protecting information the bureaucracy thought was likely to be used in a way they didn’t like.
Closer to home for me, salaries at my school (including mine) are frequently sought by union organizers as part of their advocacy work.
All three of these examples share something in common. All three relate to things that someone might not want shared, but which are nonetheless legitimate public records: Mr. Hanks trying to avoid sharing information about complications from a Planned Parenthood abortion, HCPF trying to avoid embarrassing their employees and politicos, and my own distaste for public unions and not wanting to aid them.
Any one particular government employee’s biases, concerns, or ideology should not enter into the public’s access to records. It’s not their job to stand at the gate and decide what goes out and what stays.
Recently a group of transparency advocates tried (and failed) to get an amendment on the ballot enshrining the public’s right to know in the Colorado Constitution. Attempts such as Mr Hanks’ and HCPF’s only serve to bolster the need for this measure, for stronger language around the public’s access to government records and transparency.
Whether the issue is a highly-debated and polarizing one like abortion, emails which might embarrass someone, or more picayune topics like a physics teacher’s salary, public records belong to the public. We ought to have a right to them regardless of who is in control of the levers of power, or their ideological bent.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.
