Pro-life advocates in Michigan, including Right to Life of Michigan and state legislators, have asked the federal courts to overturn the state constitutional amendment approved by voters two years ago, which enshrined abortion as a “right.”
According to Detroit News, the legal filing was submitted on Wednesday regarding Proposal 3, which was on the November 2022 ballot. Voters were asked to approve pro-abortion language that would be added to the state constitution.
In the lawsuit, Right to Life of Michigan, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Crossroads Care Center, as well as State Sen. Joe Bellion (R), and Reps. Gina Johnson (R) and Luke Meerman (R), asked that the amendment be permanently blocked.
They argue that the amendment allows unregulated abortion throughout pregnancy and revokes the parental consent law regarding abortions on minors. The lawsuit states that the language which was approved by voters creates a “super right” to abortion, which is incompatible with the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution as well as with the constitutional guarantees to a “republican form of government.” The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law to preborn children.
“At no time in our nation’s history has such a super-right, immune from all legislative action, ever been created by a popular vote outside of the checks and balances of a republican form of government,” the filing said.
After the ballot measure passed in 2021, the language became the “Right to reproductive freedom” amendment in the constitution. It states, “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.”
In other words, the right to create and destroy human beings at will.
Right to Life of Michigan President Barbara Listing announced the lawsuit during an event at the state Capitol on Wednesday at which pro-life activists gathered.
“The provisions asserted to be unconstitutional under federal law threaten legal protections for pregnant women seeking healthcare, the rights of physicians to care for patients, and the rights of parents already under attack on many fronts,” Listing said in a statement. “At issue is also the sweeping disenfranchisement both of Michigan voters and of the authority of the legislature in the days and years ahead.”
The state’s pro-abortion Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who ran for reelection on a platform of protecting abortion, aims to see the lawsuit defeated.
“It shouldn’t be lost on people that these right-wing organizations and radical Republicans in the Michigan Legislature are cherry picking courts to try to once again overturn a constitutionally guaranteed right because they can’t win with voters,” claimed Whitmer’s press secretary Stacey LaRouche.
