The proposed abortion amendment should force Virginians to confront a grim fact: eugenic thinking does not disappear simply because the word becomes disreputable. Question 1 would expand constitutional protection for abortion while leaving the unborn child entirely outside the amendment’s protection. In a Commonwealth with Virginia’s history, that should alarm every voter.
UCLA humanities dean Alexandra Minna Stern documented the American “better breeding” movement in her 2005 book, Eugenic Nation. Stern showed how eugenics was once promoted as respectable public policy by academics, medical professionals, corporations, exhibitions, and government officials. She also documented degrading chemical fumigation imposed on Mexican workers crossing from Juarez into El Paso. Stern is no right-wing activist. Her work demonstrates that eugenics flourished when powerful institutions decided that some people and families were more desirable than others.
Virginia does not have to look to California or the Southwest for a warning. The General Assembly enacted the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924. In Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a young woman who said she had been raped. More than 8,000 Virginians were eventually sterilized under a system that called itself scientific, progressive, and compassionate. Virginia now maintains a compensation program for surviving victims of that law. Our Commonwealth has already learned, at terrible human cost, what happens when experts and political power claim authority over who should reproduce.
In the 2000s, liberal Virginia Republican senators such as John Chichester and Warren Barry reportedly decried conservative activists’ “love affair with the unborn child,” echoing former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’s complaint about Americans “having a love affair with the fetus.” Those words expose the divide. Pro-life citizens see a child worthy of love. Political and institutional elites too often see a problem to be managed, a cost to be reduced, or an obstacle to be removed. Apparently, some Virginia GOP leaders preferred that conservatives fall in love with Dominion Power, RJR Tobacco, and major donors instead.
The racial disparity should make every supposed champion of minority communities pause. The CDC’s latest national data found the abortion rate among Black women was 4.3 times the rate among White women, while the Hispanic rate was twice the White rate. Those figures do not prove that every abortion advocate intends racial harm. They do prove that abortion’s burden falls unevenly and that politicians who promote its expansion cannot dismiss the result.
House Speaker Don Scott and Senate Finance and Appropriations Chair L. Louise Lucas were among the Virginia legislators supporting the reproductive-freedom amendment. They should answer a simple question: Why should Virginia constitutionalize a policy whose effects fall so disproportionately upon Black and Hispanic families? Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, longtime supporters of abortion rights, should answer it as well. Calling abortion “reproductive freedom” does not erase the children who will never be born or the communities that lose them.
Virginia already has permissive abortion laws by Southern standards. Question 1 would go much further by moving abortion from ordinary statute into the Bill of Rights, placing future protections under a demanding constitutional test, and giving judges the final word. Virginia could become as constitutionally committed to abortion as the states of the Northeast corridor.
The language has changed, but the temptation to sort human lives by desirability has not. Yesterday’s eugenicists decided who should reproduce. Today’s abortion amendment would strengthen the right to end an unborn life while refusing to recognize that child as a person Virginia may independently protect. The methods differ, but the danger is the same: the powerful decide which lives count. Virginia has seen this before. We must not repeat our history under a new slogan. Vote No on Question 1.
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