The Democratic-dominated Virginia legislature wants to expand abortion in the Commonwealth through a referendum marketed as a “right to reproductive freedom,” as if there should EVER be a constitutional right to annihilate one of our helpless unborn children. What Democrats do not want discussed is the historic connection between legal abortion and Communist population policy in Soviet Russia and Red China. Communist regimes did not follow one consistent abortion policy. They legalized, prohibited, promoted, and even compelled abortion whenever party goals demanded it. The constant principle was that children, marriage, and human fertility belonged to political power rather than God, the family, and the individual person.
Historian Sean McMeekin discusses Communism’s assault on inherited moral order in his book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Soviet Russia became the first modern state to legalize abortion on demand in November 1920. The Bolsheviks also sought to remake traditional marriage and family life according to revolutionary ideology. The regime later reversed itself. After famine, terror, and collapsing birthrates, Stalin prohibited most abortions in 1936. In 1955, the Soviet government legalized them again. The policy changed whenever the state’s demographic needs changed; the unborn child never possessed an unchanging right to life.
Historian Frank Dikotter has documented the horrors of Communist China, and the People’s Republic later waged war on children through its one-child policy. In 1983, during one of the most coercive enforcement campaigns, China recorded approximately 14.4 million abortions, 20.7 million sterilizations, and 17.8 million intrauterine-device insertions. Unauthorized pregnancies were often met with abortion, while couples who exceeded state birth limits faced sterilization and other punishment. This was not reproductive freedom. It was reproduction commanded by the Communist state.
Red China’s population has now declined for four consecutive years. At the end of 2025, the population stood at approximately 1.405 billion after falling by another 3.39 million, while 23 percent of the country was age sixty or older. The one-child policy is not the only cause of China’s demographic crisis; urbanization, delayed marriage, economic pressures, and cultural change also matter. But decades of coercive population control helped create an aging nation with fewer young workers and a deeply distorted view of family. The rulers who once punished unauthorized births are now begging women to have more children. That is the bitter harvest of treating human life as a state-planning problem.
Virginia Democrats are not proposing forced abortions or a Chinese one-child law. But they are embracing the same secular premise that made Communist population control possible: unborn life has no permanent claim against political power. Question 1 would elevate abortion autonomy to constitutional status while refusing to identify the unborn child as a life Virginia may independently protect. The Soviet and Chinese record shows where societies travel when reproduction is severed from permanent moral limits and placed under ideology. The slogan may be “freedom,” but the child remains disposable whenever power says so. Virginia must not follow that path. Vote No on Question 1.
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