Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) published a legal memorandum this week, revealing that California’s Proposition 1 could have severe ramifications, even beyond the gruesome limitless abortion it would legalize.
Proposition 1, which is on the November 8th ballot in California, will amend the State’s constitution, adding:
“The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.” (emphasis added)
According to ADF, the nation’s premier legal advocacy group, the broad scope of the text leaves room for a plethora of far-reaching and freedom-infringing consequences.
ADF Legal experts assert that the term “reproductive freedom,” according to past court precedent, though widely applied to abortion, can also include “access to contraceptives, sterilization, mother and child-related healthcare, paternal rights” as well as “any person’s sexual activity.”
Similarly, courts in the past, including the US Supreme Court, have defined the term “individual” as applicable to “any human being or person, male or female, adult or child.”
“The proposed amendment,” ADF underscored, “uses intentionally vague terms that threaten the public health, safety, and general welfare of Californians.”
Below are just a few of the ramifications, beyond late-term and partial-birth abortion, that would result from Proposition 1.
Parental Rights and Endangering Minors
Alliance Defending Freedom’s legal analysis showed that Proposition 1 would endanger vulnerable and impressionable minors, by providing them with the “reproductive freedom” to mutilate their bodies to suit their so-called “gender identities” and obtain abortions.
“The proposed amendment would create an unprecedented right for minors to procure abortions, sterilization, and other medical procedures related to their reproductive capacities, with no ability to the state to provide regulations or rules to protect minors pursuing these procedures,” ADF stressed. “Minors could also argue that the right to reproductive freedom includes the right to sterilization and the right to undergo sterilizing gender transition surgeries that remove healthy reproductive organs.”
“This could allow girls to demand medically unnecessary hysterectomies and mastectomies; for boys, it could include penectomies and orchidectomies. For both, the proposed amendment could create a right to access puberty blockers and hormones that affect their sexual development,” they described.
“Moreover, giving minors a new right to have these procedures would undermine the fundamental right of parents to raise and educate their children,” the legal experts warned. “Not only would parents be cut out of their rights and obligations as parents, but children would also be left vulnerable to industries that profit from children who can be persuaded to pursue these procedures—all while prohibiting the state from protecting the health, safety, and wellbeing of Californian minors.”
Enshrining this “freedom” in the state’s constitution is especially dangerous considering the widespread manipulation imposed on children, particularly within public education, pushing them towards LGBT lifestyles.
Karen England, Co-Chair of the Stop Prop 1 campaign, underscored that “if Prop 1 passes, all this chaos will be legal, and it will be allowed without the knowledge or consent of parents.”
Sexual Immorality and Abuse
Another concerning consequence surrounds the legalization of limitless and lawless sexual immorality.
“At a more general level, ‘reproductive freedom’ could mean any conduct related to sexual activity because of the relationship between sexual activity and reproduction,” ADF explained. “Forbidding any state interference of any person’s sexual activity in California would mean that any law regulating sexual conduct, including statutory rape laws and incest laws, could be subject to strict scrutiny analysis.”
“California’s statutory rape law makes it a crime to engage in sexual acts with a person under 18 years of age. California code also forbids sexual conduct between members of the same family. These laws forbid sexual activity with certain people, e.g. children and family members, and therefore they impose a limit on the ‘reproductive freedom’ of adults and family members who want to exercise their ‘reproductive freedom’ by engaging in sexual activity with minors or members of their own family,” they noted.
“While it may sound grotesque to contemplate such activities, enshrining ‘reproductive freedom’ as a fundamental right would give criminals who violate statutory rape and incest laws a defense for their heinous acts,” ADF asserted.
Freedom of Religion and Conscience
Alliance Defending Freedom’s legal experts also highlighted that having “an individual’s reproductive freedom” in the state’s constitution would “conflict with other fundamental rights.”
“[The amendment] would undermine the state’s ability to protect other fundamental rights, like conscience rights of doctors and nurses to not participate in ending a human life,” ADF warned, adding that it would also endanger the “rights of association for hospitals and care centers to hire mission-oriented employees, [and] the free speech right to advocate for life-affirming care.”
‘Everyone In The Nation Should Have Their Eyes On California’
Karen England, who serves as Executive Director of the Capitol Resource Institute, underscored that “every voter must be aware that Prop 1 signals a vast shift in current law, even beyond the issue of late-term abortion.”
“Everyone in the nation should have their eyes on California,” she implored. “As we have learned, what happens in California doesn’t stay in California. We are witnessing the progressive blueprint for the rest of the nation.”
A new survey conducted earlier this month, showed a seven percent shift since August, in those who no longer support Proposition 1 and those who now consider themselves to be pro-life.
Despite 56% of California voters still saying they are in favor of the constitutional amendment, only 14% agree with what it would legalize regarding limitless abortion. The promising movement in the polls further underscores the need for increased efforts to educate those in the state and beyond of Prop 1’s vast ramifications.
According to Jack Hibbs, Senior Pastor for Calvary Chapel Chino Hills and Founder of Real Impact, those efforts to educate should start in the church.
“Silence is approval,” Hibbs warned pastors.
“Pastors are commanded to be the watchmen on the wall. We are to blow the trumpet when evil is approaching,” Hibbs urged in his recent Stand up For The Truth interview with David Fiorazo. “This is the greatest evil that’s going on in America today.”
“How is this happening? Because pastors are not equipping their people with practical knowledge that the Word of God is useable, practical, and functional today in the 21st century and in our everyday life,” he asserted. “You may hear people say, ‘we preach the Gospel at our church but we don’t get involved in politics,’ but murder is a spiritually addressed issue and it does entail politics.”
“You and I know well that the God of the Bible instituted marriage, He instituted the church, and He instituted the government,” the pastor explained. “These are divine institutions that God created, but the Christian church has avoided it, pastors have avoided it.”
“We are under attack, this is a spiritual fulfillment of the last day’s infiltration of doctrines of demons and evil spirits that Paul warned Timothy would come and seek to perpetrate evil,” Hibbs described. “We just need pastors to be fearless and speak truth, and then you will see their congregations rise up, vote, speak up, rescue their children, and rescue their homes.”
