Pro-life groups are stepping up to sound the alarm over Virginia’s radical new abortion amendment proposal. Old Dominion’s Democrat-dominated General Assembly voted last week to advance a proposed amendment to the state constitution, declaring a legal “right” to abortion.

If approved by a simple majority of Virginia voters in November, the measure would amend Virginia’s constitution to assert that “every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including the ability to make and carry out decisions relating to one’s own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.” The proposed amendment also permits abortion even in the third trimester, provided that a “physician” either claims that the pregnancy jeopardizes the mother’s life or health or that the unborn baby is “not viable.”

The Family Foundation of Virginia recently launched a “Stop Unlimited Abortion” campaign targeting the proposed amendment before it goes to voters later this year. “If passed, the no-guardrails abortion amendment would legalize abortion up to birth, erase parental consent and stop reasonable safety standards,” the Family Foundation warns. According to information published by the organization late last year, the annual volume of abortions in Virginia has grown by 126% in the last seven years, and the state has seen a 30% increase in women from out of state seeking abortions in Virginia, since pro-life laws in neighboring states went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.

Family Foundation President Victoria Cobb appeared on “Washington Watch” this week to address the dangers posed by the proposed amendment. “There’s no question what you will hear when they pump the millions of dollars into our commonwealth to put up radio ads is that ‘All we’re doing is solidifying Roe v. Wade.’ That’s going to be the selling point,” Cobb warned. “And they’re going to say that this is the alternative — that there would be a full ban on abortion in Virginia,” she added. “We are an incredibly permissive state for abortion as it is right now. This amendment would just make it worse.”

“For example, where we currently have at least a sense that when a young girl considers an abortion, that her parent would have to be involved — parental consent — for abortion, this amendment would essentially override that,” Cobb explicated. “There’s no question this impacts far more than the unborn. The unborn are already in a very vulnerable state in Virginia, and that will continue to be the case when this amendment passes, but … it’s important to understand that women will not be able to count on any kind of safety standards around their abortion,” she continued.

Cobb noted that while every abortion is the taking of a child’s life, “we still don’t want to have the possibility of losing two lives when she walks into that abortion facility.” But the proposed abortion amendment “would eliminate the possibility of having any kind of reasonable safety standards for that woman, because they would be viewed as impeding on her right to an abortion.”

“Same thing with late term abortion,” Cobb noted. Under current Virginia law, three physicians must agree that a pregnancy is a threat to a mother’s life or health or that an unborn baby is “not viable” before a third-trimester abortion can be permitted. Cobb explained, “But after this amendment passes, you’ll have a situation where the only person making that decision about whether an abortion is allowed at the very latest moments is the abortionist, the one who profits from the procedure.” She continued, “This is an industry-written bill, there’s no question. The only people that benefit from this bill — it’s not the unborn, it’s not the women, it’s actually Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma that distribute the chemical abortion pills.”

Virginia’s proposed abortion amendment is a product not of a democratic system, Cobb contended, but of industry-backed elites. “This amendment isn’t being brought by the people. In some states, there are petition efforts, and that’s how these things move forward,” she noted, referring to abortion amendments passed or at least presented to voters in other states. “This is a bunch of politicians who are funded by the industry, and they’re bringing it forward to increase volume and to reduce any kind of cost that would be around safety for women. I mean, that’s the ultimate situation here,” she continued. “So even people who aren’t pro-life have 100 reasons to vote against this amendment.”

Cobb also warned that the abortion amendment, if passed, would shield abortionists from prosecution for committing abortions, potentially even thwarting pro-life laws in other states. “There’s also this idea planted into our amendment that … people who engage in helping a woman receive an abortion would basically have no prosecution from the Commonwealth, that there’d be basically no way to ever hold them accountable if something goes wrong,” she cautioned. “So we’re deeply concerned about the sort of protection that it’s putting around the industry.”

“When it gets to the ballot box, it isn’t going to benefit anyone other than the industry itself, and it does damage in other states where we have situations, as you know, where doctors are mailing chemical abortions into pro-life states like Louisiana and Texas and other places,” Cobb observed. Both Louisiana and Texas have attempted to prosecute abortionists in California and New York who have mailed the abortion drug mifepristone into the red states, where pro-life laws protect unborn children, but the blue states have blocked the prosecution efforts and refused to extradite the abortionists, citing “shield laws” protecting abortionists from prosecution.

“So our amendment is actually of national interest. Every pro-life state ought to care that we block this amendment because we’re harming other states,” Cobb emphasized. “Of course, they’ve held up Virginia as being the place where the entire South can come to get an abortion, because states south of us are doing a better job of protecting life.”

Heritage Action also urged Virginians to reject the proposed amendment, which the group said “would amend the Virginia Constitution to allow for unrestricted abortion through the third trimester of pregnancy — repealing and preventing widely supported abortion regulations that enjoy broad support from the American people.” Heritage Action added, “There is no right more fundamental than the right to life. More than 7 in 10 Americans support protections for life, and the vast majority of Americans reject abortion on demand throughout pregnancy.”

Students for Life Action issued a similar plea to Virginians, warning that the proposed abortion amendment would “transition” Virginia “from a birthplace of America to vacation destination for death by abortion,” according to Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. She added, “The reckless fealty to abortion can be seen in the fast-tracking of a vote to amend an historic document to allow for a quick death for the preborn. As Virginia is the home of our national headquarters, we will prioritize this fight…”