If anybody has any doubt about abortionists’ priorities — or Democrats’ dedication to them — one need only read Virginia House Joint Resolution 1.

Having taken control of the Virginia House of Delegates and kept control of its Senate, Virginia Democrats signaled their commitment to abortion by prefiling in symbolic first place a bill to write abortion on demand into the Old Dominion’s state constitution.

The proposed amendment guarantees abortion on demand for any reason throughout pregnancy.  Unlike Ohio’s recently adopted Issue One, it does not even feign the pretense of a post-viability limit on abortion.  Instead, any restriction by Virginia would be subject to a test that identifies a “compelling state interest” and is the “least restrictive means” to achieve that interest. 

Clearly, under this amendment, the state has no interest in the life of the unborn.  In that sense, it’s even more radical than Roe v. Wade, which paid lip service to the state’s “interest” in “potential life” (though, in practice, the Court never found any instance in which that “interest” stood in the way of an abortion). 

What is clearly behind this language (and its references to “accepted clinical standards” and “evidence-based medicine”) is the exclusion of any sort of legislation attendant to abortion that might conceivably discourage a woman from having one.  From 2012 through 2020, for example, Virginia required women to be shown an ultrasound of their unborn child and had a 24-hour waiting period prior to obtaining an abortion.  Ultrasound imagery did cause some women to change their minds.

When Democrats took control of the Legislature in 2020, they immediately repealed those requirements, which abortionists pejoratively brand as “TRAP” (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers) laws.  Given the absolute commitment of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to abortion on demand without restrictions, litigants will always be able to find ACOG “clinical standards” argument to nullify the least restriction on abortion.

If, as H.J. Res. 1 states, “every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” the amendment will also preclude any possibility in Virginia of a parental consent or notification law with regard to a minor daughter.  That language is a backdoor slap at the parental rights movement in the state, thanks to which Republicans in 2021 won the governorship and lower house of the General Assembly.  While those wins were attributable to resistance to gender ideology in public schools, the stealth language of the proposed amendment bars parental consent or notification laws on abortion without explicitly coming out and admitting that.

Speaking of stealth language, the very phraseology of the amendment imports gender ideology into the state constitution without admitting it.  No “women” get pregnant under H.J. Res. 1: only “individuals” do.  The use of that term and the indefinite adjective “one” is clearly intended to disconnect sex (as opposed to gender) from pregnancy.

The second paragraph of the proposed amendment will undoubtedly be used as a major talking point: “the Commonwealth shall not penalize, prosecute, or otherwise take adverse action against an individual [or “an individual who aids or assists another individual” regarding] “such individual’s pregnancy.”  Like the slapdash HB1786 rammed through Pennsylvania’s lower house November 15, just 22 days after its introduction, abortionists want to create hysteria about pro-life states supposedly champing at the bit to prosecute women and abortionists. 

The truth is that a close reading of HB1786 shows that the bill actually gives immunity to abortionists who commit abortions in states where they are illegal at that gestational age and/or botch their provision of “reproductive health care services” but manage to get back to Pennsylvania, which will render them immune from account for their malpractice.  What’s operative here is not real care for women’s (or children’s) health, but furthering the mantra that “abortion is health care.” 

As with similar abortion on demand amendments being pushed in other states, the ambiguities of the text are deliberate, left that way so that — under the guiding standard that there be no interference with “the fundamental right to reproductive freedom” — courts in the future will swat down any restrictions abortionists don’t like.  The almost fifty years of Roe’s jurisprudence makes that trajectory clear.

Consider, for example, the amendment’s stipulation that “effectuat[ing] one’s own decisions about all matters related to one’s pregnancy shall not be ... burdened.”  That language can, and likely will, lead state courts to say Virginia must pay for abortions under Medicaid and Obamacare state health exchanges, something the state currently does not do.  Of course, by writing such requirements into a constitutional amendment, Virginia Democrats want to straitjacket the question: not only would such taxpayer subsidy of abortion not be a policy question, but it could never be answered any other way except “yes.”

Under Virginia’s system, a state constitutional amendment must pass each house by a simple majority, a state election (in 2025) intervene, the amendment be adopted a second time, and then sent to the voters in referendum within 90 days of final passage.  Democrats are hoping to ride the abortion issue to state control by keeping the Legislature and flipping the governorship in 2025, when term-limited Glenn Youngkin must leave.  Already, pro-abortion Democrat Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger has announced her candidacy, likely to play the “suburban soccer mom” image who wants to ensure that Virginia remains at least “the only pro-choice Southern state.” 

No one should be surprised at the expedited pace with which the new Richmond majority dropped this bill.  Campaigning on H.J. Res. 1 is a political design to turn Virginia blue...and red, with the blood of its unborn.

Image via Free Range Stock.