Bob Marshall | Roanoke Times
Democrats in the 2025 Virginia General Assembly are pushing HJR 1, a “Reproductive Freedom Constitutional Amendment,” (RFA) which provides that, “… every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom … relating to one’s own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.”
These “reproductive” rights apply to “individuals” with no age minimum, so they necessarily include young teenage girls and boys.
When spelled out, the specified reproduction rights include surgical/drug induced sterilization, sex/gender changes, surrogate pregnancy, creating and destroying live embryo stage humans, gene-editing, and cloning now illegal under state law (VA Code, 32.1-12,21-22).
That results in boys and girls under 18 being able to exercise “reproductive freedom,” to access birth control, abortion, sterilization, sex changes and more without parental notice or consent. Therefore, the Democrat’s RFA necessarily abolishes the age of sexual consent.
Virginia’s criminal sexual trafficking laws protecting minors from predatory adults will be unenforceable because minors would have the legal capacity to “consent” to such sexual behavior. Any pornographic pictures, films, sexual devices, etc., legally available to adults will be legally available to seventh graders!
Laws prohibiting prostitution would be unconstitutional restraints on “reproductive freedom” because individuals, including minors, would have a fundamental right to sexual relations of any type under the Democrats RFA.
Likewise, parents would have no ability to sue Planned Parenthood or adult sexual predators including school counselors securing sex changes for minor students behind parents backs because the RFA states, “The Commonwealth shall not penalize, prosecute, or otherwise take adverse action against any individual for aiding or assisting another individual in exercising such other individual’s right to reproductive freedom with such other individual’s voluntary consent.”
Secondly, claiming that abortion is safe (for women) is a successful though false marketing claim used to keep abortion legal which derives from severe limits on collecting and identifying abortion complications.
Neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control nor Virginia developed a comprehensive abortion complication reporting system to identify more than a miniscule portion of abortion complications occurring during an abortion.
This makes it impossible to link induced abortion with any adverse maternal mortality or problems with delivery.
The CDC and Virginia covered up abortion complications. In 1990, I and a George Washington Medical School faculty member surveyed Virginia doctors who might have treated women in 1989 for abortion complications known at the time of the abortion. We found 230 complications for 33,200 abortions, or 676% more complications than CDC/Virginia officials reported in a similar time period.
Planned Parenthood went to court to oppose abortion complication reporting laws: 1976 Danforth v. Missouri, 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 2005, South Dakota Planned Parenthood … v. Mike Rounds, Governor, 2018, Planned Parenthood v. Wasden (Idaho), 2018, Whole Women’s Health Clinic v. Rokita.
Women lie about their abortions. PP’s journal notes, “Underreporting of abortions is a persistent problem … irrespective of the research design or study population. … underreporting appears to be ubiquitous … .” (Richard Udry, Family Planning Perspectives, Sept./Oct. 1996, 228-23.) Eight other federally paid for surveys show between 41% and 71% of women lie about their abortion.
Women who lie about their abortions don’t report any complications and they cannot be very happy about their “reproductive” freedom.
As a General Assembly member I asked Virginia’s Medicaid director to cost match similar groups of Medicaid women — 325 who had their children vs. 325 who had abortions.
For the period from 1989-94, “The women with legally induced abortions had 532 claims for subsequent health interventions. The women with normal deliveries had 307 claims … for subsequent health interventions. … reimbursements for … women with abortions was $123,800 and for … women with normal deliveries was $66,900.”
Reject Democrats Reproductive anarchy Amendment HJR 1!
