Virginia’s Question 1 would write a scientific falsehood into its Bill of Rights and take parents out of the room.
Virginia’s Question 1 would write a scientific falsehood into its Bill of Rights and take parents out of the room.
A t the Arlington piercing studio where we take our girls, a 16-year-old cannot have her ears pierced unless a parent or guardian is in the room with a government photo ID. That is the rule for an earlobe. On November 3, Question 1 will ask Virginia voters to add a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” into the state constitution’s Bill of Rights for every “individual,” with no age limit, and to forbid the state from penalizing anyone who aids or assists in an abortion, so long as that individual “voluntarily consents.” The daughter whose ear cannot be pierced without a parent could, under the amendment, have an abortion without one.
Virginia already permits abortion — the intentional killing of unborn children — through the second trimester. Question 1 would constitutionalize and expand this grave injustice, stripping away the remaining restraints.
Even if no second human being were involved, abortion procedures would still be more serious than anything else Virginia lets a minor decide alone. Surgical and chemical abortion are invasive. Mifepristone carries a black-box warning for serious and sometimes fatal infection and bleeding. A 2025 Ethics and Public Policy Center analysis of insurance claims for 865,727 mifepristone abortions found that 10.93 percent of women had a serious adverse event within 45 days (at least 22 times the figure on the label).
But in fact, there is a second human being involved. Fertilization — not birth — is the leap from two mere cells to a new, whole, individual, and living human organism. The Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development — the global standard of human embryological research, instituted by the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Human Developmental Anatomy Center — codify fertilization as Stage 1, the start of a new human life.
After fertilization, the new human being does not become a different kind of thing. He or she continues to grow and develop as the same human organism during the embryonic period, the fetal period, and then, after birth, throughout the subsequent stages of human development. Fertilization is when a human life starts and personhood begins. Assigning relative value at any later point is arbitrary and scientifically invalid.
These are not difficult facts. Even elementary school children can grasp that “human embryo” or “human fetus” is simply the scientific name for an already-existing human being during early stages of development.
Virginia’s proposed amendment does not merely ignore these facts, it requires the commonwealth to treat them as false. By writing a fundamental right to “abortion care” into Article I of the state constitution, Question 1 makes the human embryonic and fetal stages legally irrelevant (as if they do not exist in the human life cycle), even though they are stages of the same human being whom the law currently protects. The amendment would permanently erase them from Article I so that the destruction of that human being can proceed with constitutional license.
State interest in personhood counts only if it maintains or improves the health of the individual seeking care and does not infringe that individual’s autonomous decision-making. With Question 1, the child does not count and can never count again. It also would wipe out Virginia’s existing requirement of notarized parental consent or judicial bypass for minors.
Abortion through the second trimester is already available by statute. A yes vote would do what decades of statute could not: permanently remove the child from the calculation and lock the remaining restraints on abortion out of reach.
Abortion advocates call this codification of existing law. It is not. Again, it would eliminate parental consent for minors seeking abortions. Additionally, after the second trimester, current law still requires three physicians to certify that continuing the pregnancy is likely to cause maternal death or substantially and irremediably impair the woman’s health. Question 1 replaces that three-physician check with the judgment of the abortionist that abortion is merely “medically indicated” to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual, or that the fetus is not viable. In practice, that will be no limit at all. It is a broad pathway, written into the Bill of Rights, to end the life of an unborn child in the final weeks of pregnancy, one a future Virginia General Assembly cannot close.
The ballot question will not explain this clearly to voters. It deceptively asks whether the constitution should protect “personal decisions” about prenatal care, childbirth, birth control, abortion, miscarriage management, and fertility care; protect doctors, nurses, and patients from punishment; and allow third-trimester abortion restrictions except when the patient’s health is at risk or the pregnancy cannot survive. That language is softer, narrower, and more reassuring than the text it would actually enact. The question hides the truth, and a yes vote writes the real, radical text into Article I of the state constitution.
The harm is grave. It writes one of the two human beings out of the Bill of Rights and constitutionalizes an erroneous redefinition of the human life cycle.
A constitutional republic exists so that a majority cannot vote a class of human beings out of the human family. Once the law agrees that one group of humans may be permanently erased, the question is: Who is next?