Imagine you are the parent of a 13-year-old daughter in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You love and care for your child and you and your spouse work two jobs to provide for your family. Life is busy, with work, school, sports, and other recreation. You are an involved and caring parent, but family time is curtailed and, after all, no family is perfect. Occasionally something goes awry and you face a challenge you didn’t expect — this time it’s the fact that your daughter was pregnant. Was. You only know this because you have taken her to the emergency room hemorrhaging a week after her boyfriend persuaded her to take abortion pills — sent to his doorstep with the full-throated approval of Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) and the Virginia legislature.

Sound far-fetched? We are almost in this condition now. Under current law in the Commonwealth of Virginia, passed by successive Democratic legislatures, abortion is legal in the state until birth. As bad as that law is — and data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute tells us that Virginia had the largest increase in total abortions of any state in 2025 — a new constitutional amendment on the ballot this November, on which voting has already begun, would make matters dramatically worse.

Guttmacher calculates 39,500 abortions were carried out in Virginia last year, making scenarios like the one depicted above not at all unlikely. Under the proposed amendment, however, the promotion and distribution of abortion pills to minor children — from within Virginia or from any manufacturer around the globe — would enjoy the untrammeled protection of one of the most venerated state constitutions in America.

Think about that for a moment. Home to figures like Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, George Mason, and Patrick Henry, Virginia has a special place in creating the American foundation for the notion of a constitutional right to life with which each and every one of us was endowed by our Creator. Jefferson drew inspiration and language for the Declaration from the Virginia Declaration of Rights crafted by Mason and ratified by a Virginia constitutional convention nearly a month before the Founders met in solemn assembly in Philadelphia.

The Virginia Declaration’s Section 1 affirms “[t]hat all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Legal and medical advocates of the abortion industry make much of the fact that abortion in America’s first decades was governed by English common law, banning abortion only after quickening, an evidentiary milepost that allowed a determination that a living child was present in the womb when the abortive act allegedly occurred. They contend that this circumstance means that abortion was widespread and “stigma-free” as one writer asserts.

This stands in contrast with the reality, as even an AI summary put it in answer to a search of “abortion before quickening,” that “Historically, the legal tolerance of abortion before quickening (the point when a pregnant person first feels fetal movement, around the 4th to 6th month) reflected a lack of scientific and legal recognition of early pregnancy rather than a moral endorsement of the practice.” Virginia joined the tide of states prohibiting abortion in 1847 when it abolished the pre-quickening common law standard and enacted criminal punishments for pre-quickening abortions (up to one year in a penitentiary) and post-quickening abortions (one to five years imprisonment). The changes were the result of medical advances in the understanding of prenatal development, which led to a successful drive by the American Medical Association (AMA) to enact limits on abortion across the United States.

Today’s radical feminists resort to strained arguments that the AMA’s involvement was a result of the misogyny of the almost exclusively male medical profession, as well as an abolition movement gone awry or base motives like white supremacy. The truth is that the 1900s can generally be described as the “civil rights” century when the abolition of slavery, the advancement of women’s rights, and the protection of the unborn consistent with the tenets of our founding documents all proceeded, despite massive and sometimes successful resistance, as occurred with the failure of Reconstruction and the persistence of segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. Now, of course, members of the same party that defended slavery and segregation see it as their heritage to legislate and now constitutionalize the removal of all extant rights from the unborn and from parents to know about and protect their children from lifelong harms.

The amendment now on the ballot is an appallingly sweeping and indifferent gift to the abortion industry, using needlessly unlimited language to identify whom it designates as a possessor of “reproductive freedom.” It refers to this boundless right to destroy a pregnancy as belonging to any “individual” in the commonwealth. The public image advocates seek to advance with this further radicalization of the law is a beleaguered woman facing an extremely difficult pregnancy with no personal, family, or community resources. The reality is that the amendment exposes to new harms the most vulnerable girls and women who may be driven to abortion by fear or lack of information alone.

Take the case of a Durham, North Carolina couple named Syeisha Johnson and Elijah Speight. The teenage couple (legal adults) ordered abortion pills online from Virginia. They were able to do this even though Syeisha’s pregnancy had advanced to 20 weeks by the time they sought the pills (many abortion pill websites completely ignore the Food and Drug Administration 10-week limit on use of the drugs). On July 29, Johnson delivered the by-then 31-week-old unborn child into a toilet, where the baby was left for several minutes. Alarmed, she finally called 911 and a rescue squad came and was able to resuscitate the baby, who has survived. The couple has been charged in the case and the outcome is uncertain for them. What is not uncertain is that Virginia is voting to put into its constitution an amendment that will facilitate such medical malpractice and personal irresponsibility by immunizing abortion agencies from all duties of care for women facing unexpected pregnancies.

Already 65% of U.S. abortions take place via drugs with minimal to no medical support. Remember when the mantra surrounding this issue was that abortion should be legal and “between a woman and her doctor”? Now, under these unprecedented policies, abortion, protected by so-called “shield laws” — statutes that protect abortion suppliers from any liability whatsoever for delivering potent drugs like mifepristone to patients they have never seen or examined — woman after woman is denied any opportunity for a medical exam to confirm pregnancy and the stage of pregnancy, to address Rh sensitivity (a danger to subsequent pregnancies), to rule out a dangerous ectopic pregnancy, or even to obtain counseling to rule out coercion by a boyfriend or relative.

The Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment will take an already-permissive law on abortion and make it a bulwark of indifference to the health of women, the integrity of families, and the lives of babies of all ages in the womb. Governor Spanberger has gone too far and the people of Virginia, fortified by their state’s long and honorable history of safeguarding the right to life, should say a firm no to this extremity.