Issue Position: Human Rights and Reproductive Freedom

Issue Position

HUMAN RIGHTS AND REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
All Virginians deserve the right to live their lives in peace without government prying into their personal lives or personal decisions. Likewise, Virginians deserve to be respected and treated fairly by others in going about their daily life.

Our Commonwealth has a troubling history of restricting the rights, privileges, incomes, housing, and reproductive choices of many people. The legacy of Jim Crow lives on in the Constitution of Virginia and in our Code.

The decision to have a child can be life altering for a woman. The ability to freely access contraception is critical for Virginia's women and thus their families to fully achieve their potential.

A woman has a constitutional right to make reproductive choices without government interference and a woman's right to end a pregnancy should be a decision between a woman, her doctor, and her conscience. Abortion should also be safe, legal and rare. While some have heartfelt beliefs that unborn fetuses also have rights, that is not the law of the United States, and would inject other people's moral judgments upon others or tell doctors how to practice medicine.

Likewise, the government has no role in telling people who they should love and who they can marry. While this is now the law of the land in the United States, Virginia still has outdated laws on its books. Moreover, private discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual persons (LGBT) in employment, housing or daily living is still not prohibited in the Commonwealth.

Virginia also stands in a position to be the 38th and final state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and truly complete the Bill of Rights. The right to nondiscrimination on the basis of sex was added to the Constitution of Virginia in 1971 and adding it to the U.S. Constitution is necessary to give men and women adequate ability to challenge discriminatory government actions.

Finally, once a Virginian has served their jail sentence, they deserve to have their civil rights restored. Virginia's constitutional prohibition on felon voting and the cumbersome restoration process was adopted as part of Virginia's 1903 Jim Crow Constitution which virtually eliminated voting by all African Americans. We must free ourselves from our racist legacy and remove the stain of Jim Crow from our Constitution.

To achieve complete human rights in Virginia we must:

Protect access to contraception
Protect a woman's reproductive freedom
Ensure nondiscrimination in housing, employment, and private transactions for Lesbian, Gay, Bixsexual and Transexual Virginians
Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment
Remove the felon voter restrictions from the Constitution of Virginia and adopt measures to allow automatic restoration of rights upon completion of one's sentence.

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