ACLJ Urges Supreme Court of Montana To Reject Abortion Amendment
In Dobbs v. JWHO, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned to the states (and, within constitutional bounds, the federal government) the authority to legislate on abortion. The abortion lobby responded, ironically enough, by waging war on the terrain of state constitutional amendments. That is, abortion groups have sought to win up-or-down votes to amend the constitutions of the various states to enshrine a right to slay tiny humans before birth. At the ACLJ, we have engaged the opposition in the courtroom over these initiatives. These proposed amendments typically use euphemistic language to mask – and open the door to – a much more extreme agenda, an agenda we expose in our amicus briefs. We have already weighed in on the Ohio abortion amendment and the Missouri abortion amendment. Now we have done so in Montana as well.
Montana has a rule that ballot initiatives cannot combine more than one amendment into a single ballot question. The rule is designed to prevent “logrolling,” i.e., packing multiple issues into one initiative so the voters cannot vote on particular questions but instead must accept or reject the entire package. When abortion proponents pursued an initiative to amend the Montana Constitution to add a “right to abortion,” state Attorney General (AG) Austin Knudsen’s office reviewed the proposal and declared it “legally insufficient” because it “logrolls multiple distinct political choices into a single initiative in violation” of the state constitution.
Proponents of the ballot– Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights – and Dr. Samuel Dickman, the Chief Medical Officer of Planned Parenthood of Montana, sued directly in the Supreme Court of Montana, disputing the Montana AG’s conclusion. The Supreme Court of Montana ordered a response.
The ACLJ then teamed up with SBA Pro-Life America and the Montana Family Foundation to file an amicus brief in the case. The state Supreme Court approved our request and gave us until Feb. 9 to file. We filed our joint brief on that due date.
Our brief challenges the proposed abortion amendment as “misleading” and “confusing.” For an especially egregious example, we explain:
[T]he initiative purports to allow the state to “regulate” late-term abortions, i.e., after viability. But this “exception” appears to be quite deceptive. The text creates a massive loophole: abortions done “in the good faith judgment of a treating health care professional” – i.e., the abortionist – “to protect the . . . health of the pregnant patient.” For the abortion lobby, health is a universal justification for abortion. E.g., Jennifer Wright, “Every Abortion Is A Medically Essential Abortion,” Refinery29 (Mar. 25, 2020); Ana Cristina González Vélez, “‘The health exception’: a means of expanding access to legal abortion,” 20 Repro. Health Matters 22 (2012). Thus, a restriction with a “health” exception is really no restriction at all.
This point bears repetition: “For the abortion lobby, health is a universal justification for abortion” (emphasis added). That is, the abortion industry believes that every abortion is justified by “health” concerns. (This also fits with the false claim by abortion supporters that abortion is safer than childbirth, a claim we have already refuted, most recently in one of the amicus briefs we filed in Dobbs.) A health exception is, therefore, equivalent to adding “not!” at the end of any limit on abortion.
Most people tend to support things that are good for “health.” In the abortion context, voters likely think “health” means protecting women against serious physical maladies. That is how the abortion lobby tricks citizens into supporting abortion on demand – unlimited, anytime, for any reason.
Here at the ACLJ, we believe truth is one of the strongest weapons against abortion. We aim to keep exposing the falsehoods that undergird the abortion movement.