DESTROYED: Louisiana Defeats Pro-Abortion Legislation By Wide Margin

Groups like NARAL and NOW have openly admitted that they want to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (Everything Related To Abortion Act) in order to protect abortion from pro-life legislation and a judiciary that is more open to allowing states to protect preborn life. So they’ve been hopping from state to state to try to find the 38th state needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (which is really a pipe dream anyway, since the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment has long passed). Louisiana just sent those pro-abortion forces a message: It’s not going to happen here.

In a 9-26 vote, the Louisiana Senate utterly destroyed the Equal Rights Amendment’s chances of passing.  Republican Senator Beth Mizzell explained why she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment; “There is a connection to abortion and the ERA.”

This is another setback for the Equal Rights Amendment, which also failed this year in the Virginia legislature. Additionally, North Dakota has passed legislation acknowledging that they once supported the ERA, but that the deadline has passed. In Virginia, Students for Life and other pro-life and pro-family groups hosted a press conference to explain the many problems with the Equal Rights Amendment.

There are many reasons why pro-lifers should oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Information can be found at our website, ExposeERA.org. Some of the reasons include:

• The ERA helps the abortion industry worm their way into the Constitution.

  • NARAL recently admitted in an e-mail to supporters that they want the ERA because it enshrine a right to abortion into the Constitution. In an e-mail sent in March 2019, their chief lobbyist wrote, “In order to protect our reproductive freedom today it’s essential we pass the newly re-introduced bill to ratify the ERA. With its ratification, the ERA would reinforce the constitutional right to abortion by clarifying that the sexes have equal rights, which would require judges to strike down anti-abortion laws because they violate both the constitutional right to privacy and sexual equality.”

• Abortion is not found in the U.S. Constitution, but this would provide constitutional cover for abortion, and in fact, similar language has been used at the state level to justify taxpayer-funded abortion.

• “Both the basis of the privacy argument and even the technical, technological underpinnings of [Roe] always seemed likely to expire,” said Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, Women and Democracy Fellow at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.“Technology was always going to move us to a place where the trimester framework didn’t make sense.”

• “If you were rooted in an equality argument, those things would not matter,” she said.

• The Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit sex discrimination the way the Constitution currently prohibits discrimination based on race, religion and national origin, could do just that. The ERA would provide the framework for an equality argument: Women’s equality necessarily requires reproductive and bodily autonomy, and without control over our bodies, women cannot participate as full and equal citizens in this country.

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