Democratic Virginia State Senate Candidate Dismisses Parental Rights, Focuses on Pro-Choice Messaging

The stakes are high in this fall’s off-year state legislative elections in the Old Dominion, where Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s PAC, Spirit of Virginia, is spending millions to preserve his party’s majority in the house of delegates and flip the narrowly Democratic-controlled state senate.

We’re watching closely to see how swing-district candidates are messaging on hot-button issues such as abortion and parental rights in K–12 schools. Here’s a curious quote from a Democrat who is running for Northern Virginia’s swing senate district 31 — the same Loudoun County district that garnered national attention during the pandemic over a transgender-bathroom controversy and mask mandates in K–12 schools.

“There’s been a lot of writing here lately about where this idea of ‘parents rights’ — where it came from,” SD-31’s Democratic candidate Russet Perry, a former prosecutor, said in a podcast interview last month. “And it actually came out of a very conservative Evangelical movement that was originally intended to try to, you know, put forward this Christian agenda and to get funding out of public schools so that kids could be, you know, get money at homeschool or in schools.”

Like most other Democratic state legislative candidates in Virginia this cycle, Perry is campaigning heavily on preserving access to abortion. Her campaign website says she believes decisions about abortion should remain between a woman and her doctor, and she does not clarify whether she believes there should be any abortion restrictions in the state at all.

Meanwhile, her Republican opponent, maternal-health-care entrepreneur Juan Pablo Segura, is taking cues from Youngkin by leaning into the parental-rights movement and calling for what he refers to as a “compassionate consensus” on abortion. “A woman should be able to have a right choose up to 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” Segura says in a video interview on his campaign website.

If Segura and other Republicans perform well on November 7 in Virginia, a state that President Joe Biden carried by ten points in 2020, expect their abortion and parental-rights messaging to take hold in federal elections across the country in 2024.