Alabama, West Virginia Pass Pro-Life Amendments
Amendments protect unborn human beings in case Roe vs. Wade goes away.
Unborn human beings in West Virginia and Alabama received a huge win on Tuesday when voters chose amendments that would protect their rights in utero if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade.
Without Roe vs. Wade, abortion would go to the states.
In West Virginia, voters chose to end taxpayer funded abortions. Alabama citizens voted that those unborn human beings have a right to life.
Alabama’s Amendment 2 “recognizes the rights of the unborn and ensures state funds will not go to funding abortion care.” Despite the millions poured into the state to defeat the amendment, 59% of Alabama citizens voted yes.
From AL.com:
The amendment was written by Rep. Matt Fridy, R-Montevallo, and sponsored by the Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama.
“It’s going to be a testament to the conservative values of Alabama. It’s also going to be a victory for truth because we were massively outspent $1.4 million [from Planned Parenthood] to $8,000 dollars,” Rick Renshaw, of the Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama said.
Planned Parenthood donated $1.38 million to Alabama for Healthy Families, who opposed the amendment.
Renshaw said the amendment was not given a fair shake in the media.
“We are disappointed in the outcome of Amendment 2, which paves the way to outlaw abortion in the state of Alabama,” a representative from the ACLU said in a statement to AL.com. “Our worry is that this amendment will prove to be much more insidious than it seems at face value, touching on much more about healthcare than just abortion. We hope that Alabama legislators will commit to ensuring that any clarification on this amendment will take into account the importance of having access to safe, high quality reproductive care in our state.”
Alabama already bans taxpayer funded abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The state also bans partial birth abortion and women cannot have one after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
West Virginia’s Amendment 1 overturns a 1993 rule that allowed taxpayer funded abortions. The state’s Constitution will now read, “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”
This will give the state room to make changes to abortion when it comes to taxpayer money or if Roe vs. Wade goes away.
Abortion advocates have denounced West Virginia’s amendment, but pro-life groups celebrated:
“West Virginians value life and reject abortion on demand,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. “Over the years, West Virginia taxpayers have been forced to fund the destruction of more than 35,000 innocent unborn children—including late-term abortions—at a cost of nearly $10 million. This outrageous abuse ends now.”
SBA List was one of the biggest backers of the amendment. Its volunteers visited more than 110,000 voters to support the measure. The group suffered a setback when Democratic senator and self-described pro-lifer Joe Manchin announced he would oppose Amendment 1 in the final debate before he won re-election.
“The passage of Amendment 1 is a victory for the Mountain State and we hope other states will follow their lead,” Dannenfelser said in an email.
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Tom McClusky, president of March for Life Action, said West Virginia voters supported the amendment for those very reasons. The group, which sponsors an annual demonstration to mourn the Supreme Court’s Roe decision, campaigned for the initiative to demonstrate that taxpayer dollars are used to pay for about 15,000 abortions each year. Amendment 1 was necessary to “ensure that nothing therein [the state constitution] secures a right to abortion or compels taxpayer funding for abortion,” according to McClusky.
“No one should be denied their right to life, and no one should be forced to pay for a procedure that ends a life,” he said in an email. “West Virginia’s littlest and most vulnerable citizens are safer now because of it.”
As much as I hate the murder of unborn human beings, I don’t see Roe vs. Wade going anywhere. But in all honesty, we don’t need to overturn a law to stop abortion and I wish more groups would spend more money and time on resources to change the hearts and minds of people.
I changed my mind because of science. As a former pro-abortion person, science hit me in the face and I couldn’t deny the fact in front of me that inside the womb, a woman holds a human being.
The March for Life keeps growing. The pro-life movement itself keeps growing.
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Comments
“Without Roe vs. Wade, abortion would go to the states.”
Where it properly and historically belonged, NEVER having been an issue addressed in the Constitution OR which the Feds had any business usurping.
A human life evolves from conception. A coherent nervous system forms around one month. Our Constitution rejects summary judgments, and cruel and unusual punishment. Selective-child is a wicked solution, to an albeit hard problem. We have rights, not rites, and responsibilities. Pro-Choice is two choices too late.
That said, unlike one-child, selective-child represents the normalization in a significant minority of the general population. The only viable, sustainable resolution of its progress, is education and ethical reform. And emigration reform that does not compensate for the collateral damage forced by liberalization and social progress.
#HateLovesAbortion
Not to pick too much, but…
A human being (scientifically) exists at conception. He/she does not evolve, but does develop.
I think this is an example of n.n’s strange, but charming, sense of irony.
If the abortion fiends believe abortion is a sacred right, why don’t they pay for it, instead of demanding that We the People pay to kill babies? If they really believe they are right, they should run their organizations as nonprofits that take in no taxpayer money whatsoever.
I’m pro-choice. Make your choice before you spread your legs. Once you do that, your choice has been made. Own your decisions and remember that adoption is the option at that point.
Roe v. Wade has a pro-life bias, and those who would overturn the decision need to think carefully about what future hazards exist.
Roe v. Wade provides that, for an abortion to happen, the one human being most affected, the mother, must consent. Each decision must be made on a case-by-case basis, and always by the parent carrying the baby.
This does not prevent large numbers of abortions in our society, but it does prevent a wholesale slaughter of the innocents by the government.
Transferring the power to make the abortion decision to the States would inevitably give the power to make the abortion decision to state officials whose interest in preserving the life of the child may or may not exist. Policies change over time, and once the State has a power, it can decide to exercise that power in any direction it wishes. The power will eventually result in coerced abortions somewhere.
We saw how this works in China, where coercion, mainly through social pressure and the denial of benefits. The result was the abortion of so many children, mainly females, that a marked population imbalance was produced. The current set of men of reproductive age in China has a shortage of potential wives.
Let’s not be like China.
Instead, let us arrange our policies so that, generally, any one vigorous adult can provide sufficient income to raise a family. I suspect that a proliferation of good jobs among all of our people will minimize our abortion rate.
If I’m right and the current economic status of the US is solidified, we will see a reduction in abortions without any change in the laws. It will be analogous to the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the US after we withdrew from the Paris Accord.
re: “…the one human being most affected, the mother, must consent.”
So, you would deny the humanity of the aborted child? What is that ‘mass of cells’ if not a human? A kitten, A puppy, A lizard? True, true, true…there are outliers where that ‘mass of cells’ spontaneously aborts, sometimes for reasons unknown. BUT, allowed to develop, the ‘cell mass’ become a functional child most of the time. Killing that cell mass prior to it’s emergence is akin to murder of a human being. People who kill others are called ‘killers’, not ‘pro-choice’ people.
Furthermore, the leftist throng love to define the conversation, loving to change the definition of words and concepts.
This is pure laziness and disingenuous in the extreme, calling black white and bitter sweet. The validity of an argument can oft times be discerned via the simplicity of it’s presentation. This isn’t ‘rocket science’, the world and those in it do not exist for their own pleasure. Life has consequences and responsibilities….and once in awhile, good rewards. People who murder their babies will reap the bitter harvest of that murder. I said what I wanted to say.
Roe vs. Wade was never ratified, therefore it is not part of the Constitution.