From the SFLA Blog

Students for Life of America Promises To Be ‘Organized and Litigious’ Against Equal Rights Amendment

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Kristi Hamrick - 15 Jan 2020

“Abortion advocates are still trying to ram through a 100-year-old bad idea. Before I was born this failed twice. I know that abortion supporters are desperate to create a ‘right’ to legal abortion, available all 9 months and with taxpayer funding, but they need some new tactics,” said SFLA’s Kristan Hawkins. 

WASHINGTON D.C. & RICHMOND, VA (01-15-2020) – As both chambers of the Virginia legislature prepare to pass the century-old ERA amendment, Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins said that opposition to forcing the failed amendment forward would be “organized and litigious.” Hawkins continued, “The ERA should be called the ‘Everything Related to Abortion’ act as groups like NARAL push it forward to prop up the failing Roe v. Wade. The ERA is a Trojan horse for abortion, an attempt to create an actual hook for abortion in the Constitution, something Roe never did. But as the Department of Justice recently said, the ERA has failed twice to pass Congressional deadlines and is over. If ERA advocates really believed in this movement, they would start again and work the Constitutional process in a timely and lawful manner.”

Last week, as reported by the Associated Press, “The Justice Department has thrown a roadblock into efforts to revive the Equal Rights Amendment, finding that an expired pair of deadlines imposed by Congress on ratification of the measure means it’s too late for additional states to ratify it now.” In a memo by Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, the findings are that because the effort to pass the ERA failed by a 1982 deadline, current efforts to change the deadlines and cheat the system won’t allow it to be part of the Constitution.

Hawkins continued: “It doesn’t take a fortune teller to predict that once again the abortion lobby will employ their go-to strategy; forum shopping for an abortion-friendly judge. Abortion advocates are still trying to ram through a 100-year-old bad idea. Before I was born this failed twice. I know that abortion supporters are desperate to create a ‘right’ to legal abortion, available all 9 months and with taxpayer funding, but they need some new tactics.”

ERA specifically states that a person’s sex could not be considered in making a legal preference. With that in mind, consider the many protections designed for women that would be impacted and harmed including the Equal Pay Act of 1963; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; the Federal Minimum Wage Act of 1974, and the Pregnancy Nondiscrimination Act of 1964. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in Sex Bias in the U.S. Code that the ERA will change 800 federal laws including the elimination of social security benefits for wives and widows. The financial impact on women is incalculable, and ERA will do nothing to focus attention on sexual crimes against women, as a focus on women would be discouraged.

Despite the potential harms to women, NARAL recently admitted in an e-mail to supporters that they want the ERA because it enshrines 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.”

Writing in the Washington Times, Hawkins observed: “When Roe falls, the issue of abortion will return to the states where voters finally with have a voice and a vote on life-related policy,” said Hawkins.

To learn more about SFLA’s opposition to the Everything Related to Abortion act, visit https://www.exposeera.org

For media interviews, e-mail Kristi at [email protected]

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