Vote No on Maryland Question 1: It’s Abortions Up to Birth and Denying Parental Consent

Time is ticking away quickly before the 2024 presidential election comes to a close. Early voting has started, and it’s not just candidates on the ballot that hang in the balance, but initiatives as well. In 10 states this election cycle, voters will decide what limits, if any, they want on abortion. Family Research Council has been working through each state and their respective abortion-related ballot initiative one by one to inform voters of what’s at stake.

On Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” FRC President Tony Perkins and President of the Maryland Family Institute Jeff Trimbath discussed how voters in Maryland have the opportunity to protect life by voting against the state’s abortion referendum. A vote for Maryland’s so-called Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment, Perkins noted, would be a vote “to kill an unborn child.”

According to Trimbath, this referendum would be “more aptly named the Parental Replacement Act, because this fundamentally will take parents out of the equation for these decisions that Marylanders make.” But considering “the make-up of Maryland as a very blue state,” Trimbath explained how the “effort to curb the practice of abortion” in that area is significantly low. As such, this referendum is “simply another step in this war on the family,” he contended.

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As Trimbath went on to address, the ramifications of this amendment will “[extend] to children” by giving them “the ability to make reproductive health decisions without parental involvement or even notification.” Additionally, he warned, “we know that this will open the door to transgender surgeries on minors” in the state. Ultimately, he cautioned, this is “a very, very bad idea for our families in Maryland and certainly for our daughters in Maryland.”

Regarding these ballot initiatives, whether in Maryland or the other nine states, Perkins underscored that “people need to understand what [they] do.” Those pushing the pro-abortion measures are falsely characterizing them as some form of restoration, Perkins said, but “they’re not restoring [anything].” Rather, they’re putting abortion in these state constitutions where “the legislature can’t touch it,” he observed.

Consequently, Perkins added, abortion becoming a constitutional right “means it eliminates parental notification laws. This will limit the ability of legislators to establish safeguards for mothers and unborn children. This puts it into the hands of the court. And we know what the courts do with issues like this.” Trimbath agreed, emphasizing how Maryland’s referendum, if passed, would essentially make abortion a part of “the supreme law of the state of Maryland, meaning that “it supersedes all of the other laws pertaining to this particular issue.”

“[I]t’s a very dangerous precedent,” Trimbath emphasized, and “we’re trying to fight it as hard as we can at Maryland Family Institute.” If it’s clear what a vote for this referendum would mean, Perkins asked, “What does a vote against this amendment do?” First, Trimbath asserted, “A vote against this amendment restores parental rights in Maryland.”

A vote against it, he continued, “says to the Maryland governing authorities, ‘We as parents have the right to make health care decisions for our children. We know our children best. We love our children in a way that the state or some health care authority can’t love them, and we want a priority over what our children do.’ That’s what a vote against this does.” It seems “many of these amendments [are] driving a wedge between parent and child,” Perkins noted.

As Trimbath warned, whether the issue is abortion or transgenderism, it’s all about cutting “parents out of the equation.”

“It is stunning how the Left is pushing this across the country,” Perkins concluded.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.