As Virginians prepare to vote this fall on a proposed constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion as a “fundamental right,” a conservative commentator is warning that the measure carries a price tag supporters aren’t advertising: taxpayer-funded abortions.
Writing in American Thinker, John M. Grondelski argues that Amendment 1 would not merely preserve the status quo in a state where abortion is already legal, but would commit Virginia to subsidizing the procedure through state Medicaid, welfare, and social services programs. The amendment’s own language, he contends, makes that outcome nearly unavoidable.
“If abortion becomes a ‘fundamental right’ (the amendment’s own language), it means the state cannot prefer or favor giving birth over abortion,” Grondelski writes. “If the state pays for Medicaid births, it is virtually certain it will have to pay for Medicaid abortions.”
The amendment, as Grondelski describes it, would prohibit the state from denying, burdening, or infringing on the right to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy. He notes that the text does not explicitly mention public funding — a deliberate omission, in his view, designed to make the proposal appear moderate to voters.
A Half-Century of Legal Precedent
Grondelski anchors his argument in the history of the Hyde Amendment, the federal provision that bars federal Medicaid dollars from covering abortions. September 30 marked the 50th anniversary of the amendment’s enactment, and he points to that history as a template for what could unfold in Virginia.
In the mid-1970s, he recounts, abortion rights advocates pushed to force federal funding of the procedure, largely by asking federal judges to order Medicaid to pay. Their argument rested on the idea that if abortion is a right, denying poor women access to it while wealthier women could afford it amounted to discrimination.
That argument ultimately failed at the federal level. The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, ruling that the government has no obligation to subsidize the exercise of constitutional rights for those who cannot afford them. Grondelski offers a comparison: Americans have a right to keep and bear arms, but no one argues the government must buy a gun for every person who wants one but cannot pay. Likewise, the right to a free press does not obligate Congress to purchase newspaper subscriptions for the poor.
But the battle did not end there. According to Grondelski, after the federal question was settled, abortion advocates shifted their strategy to state constitutions, arguing that previously unrecognized rights within those documents required state governments to fund abortions. Several activist state supreme courts — mostly in blue states — accepted that reasoning and ordered their states to pay.
New Jersey as a Cautionary Tale
Grondelski points to his home state of New Jersey as an example of how this plays out. The New Jersey Legislature passed its own version of the Hyde Amendment in the late 1970s, cutting off state money for abortions. That did not stop the state Supreme Court from ruling that the 1947 New Jersey Constitution — adopted at a time when abortion was a crime in the state — required New Jersey to fund the procedure. The state has been doing so since the 1980s.
“If Virginia frames abortion as a ‘fundamental right,’ you can bet the same push will happen in the Old Dominion,” Grondelski writes.
The critical point, he argues, is that voters will never cast a direct ballot on whether their tax dollars should pay for abortions. That decision, he predicts, will not be made by the Legislature through ordinary policy debate. Instead, it will likely be imposed by unelected judges who determine that Virginia’s newly established fundamental right cannot tolerate a lack of state funding.
Even if lawmakers wanted to reverse course, Grondelski argues they would be powerless to do so. Because the amendment deems abortion a fundamental right that the state cannot deny, burden, or infringe, the Legislature would lack the authority to restrict funding. The only remedy would be another constitutional amendment — a process that takes a minimum of two to three years.
He notes that Virginia currently has a pro-abortion Legislature and governor in Richmond, making judicial intervention on funding even more likely.
The Status Quo Argument
One of the more striking aspects of Grondelski’s argument is his concession that Amendment 1 would not change whether abortion is legal in Virginia. Abortion is already permitted in the state and would remain so whether the amendment passes or fails. That fact is often cited by supporters as a reason the amendment is unnecessary, but Grondelski frames it differently: the amendment’s real effect, he says, is to strip the state of any ability to hold a position other than enthusiastic support for abortion.
“It amputates the state’s ability to have any other position on abortion other than enthusiastic support,” he writes. “If you pay to support births, you’ll have to pay to stop births, too.”
He also contends that the amendment would abolish parental consent requirements, or even parental notification, when a minor seeks an abortion — another consequence he says is embedded in the measure’s broad language but not made explicit to voters.
Grondelski’s conclusion is blunt: the amendment’s anodyne phrasing is intentional, crafted to allow a sweeping abortion agenda to advance without drawing attention to its practical implications. Virginia taxpayers, he argues, should vote no.
The debate over Amendment 1 fits into a broader national landscape in which states have become the primary battleground over abortion policy since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. What Grondelski’s piece highlights is a question that has received less attention than bans and gestational limits: who pays. As Virginia voters weigh the amendment this fall, the argument from the right is that the measure’s most consequential effects may not be the ones spelled out in its text.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/how-a-state-forces-you-to-pay-for-abortions/