Why Voters Are Reversing Reproductive Freedom Amendments

As midterm elections sweep the country, Missourians rallied to preserve constitutional protections for the unborn, children, and women, reflecting a national tide of constitutional attacks and safeguards that will be determined Tuesday.

In Virginia, Idaho, and Nevada, voters will decide whether constitutional amendments that strip safeguards for these groups are enshrined in their states’ constitutions. In Colorado, Proposition 135 would prohibit gender surgeries on minors under a state statute.

Her Health Her Future, Coalition Life, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, pro-life legislators, transition victim Chloe Cole and transgender abuse whistleblower Jamie Reed publicly rallied in Arnold, Missouri, decrying the leftists overtaking Missouri’s legislative process, the deceptive language voted into the state’s Constitution in 2024, and the potential reinstatement of basic protections for the unborn, women and children through ballot measure Amendment 3.

Canary in a coal mine

Missouri should serve as a stark warning to states considering open-ended abortion and undefined sex-rejecting rights amendments. Two years after enshrining “a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom” into the constitution, constituents are fighting an uphill battle to reverse the radical, expansive language. Current state law banning transgender surgery and treatment of minors is set to expire next year, leaving minors vulnerable to abuses under the open-ended amendment. The reopening of Columbia’s Planned Parenthood in 2024, after a scandalous closure for noncompliance with health and safety standards, indicates how quickly businesses can capitalize on laws that favor their extreme agendas.

Under Missouri’s newly proposed version of Amendment 3, transgender surgeries and procedures for minors would be illegal, parental rights would be reinstated, and abortion would be strictly limited.

Hijacked institutions

Cross-sex hormone experimentation and gender mutilating surgeries on minors have become a national crisis. More than 40% of people 13 years or older identifying as transgender live in the 18 states with “sanctuary” laws or executive orders that “protect” their right to transgender care. For the most part, these “shield” laws cannot supersede parental rights to push sex-rejecting treatments and procedures on minors, unless a child is emancipated or separated from their parents by the state.

And hijacked institutions work that loophole.

In a private briefing hosted by Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC), executive director Craig Hansen said accounts of minors sequestered away from their families in the name of “transgender rights” are regularly reported to the legal non-profit.

“The entirety of our firm is occupied with parental rights and the entirety of our cases revolve around the encroachment of the transgender agenda on parental rights or women’s sports and spaces,” Hansen said.

An anonymous Massachusetts parent said she supports dozens of local families whose children have been captured by transgender ideology and taken by the state. Getting detransitioner cases to court is problematic because of statutes of limitations and sometimes a period of repose.

“If we could get these cases to court, we know that we would win, but getting them to court is a problem,” she said. Constitutional “right to reproductive freedom” laws tend to favor gender transition practitioners over their victims, legally blocking reparations for harmed minors.

Federal and congressional efforts

While voters consider amending basic protections for minors this November, federal and congressional efforts are underway.

Nearly one year after demanding accountability, the federal government again directed organizations to submit proof of the safety of sex-rejecting treatment and procedures on minors, demanding a response to written inquiry within 10 business days.

Members of Congress have introduced a significant countermeasure in the form of the “Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act,” legislation that would cut federal funding to states with hijacked institutions that penalize parents for affirming their child’s biological sex.

Sponsored by Representative Mary Miller (R-IL) in the House, with a twin bill in the Senate, the “Yaeli Martinez Child Protection Act” honors the memory of Yaeli Martinez, a gender-confused youth who was taken from her mother, placed in foster care, and ultimately committed suicide.

If passed into law, the Yaeli Act would “absolutely help a lot of people not suffer this fate,” said Joe Kutzko.

Local, state, and federal funding

In most states, state, local, and federal dollars fund Child Protective Services with varying levels of contribution.

Most federal funding comes from Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Social Services Block Grant, and Medicaid. The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) is another source.

Miller’s Act would restrict funding through Titles IV-B and IV-E of the Social Security Act, CAPTA, and the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program if states violated certain parental rights. Federally funded programs could not legally take children from capable parents or file abuse charges against parents who affirmed their child’s biological sex, used federal funds for sex-rejecting procedures and treatments for minors in the system, or ignored a state’s custody order for a child crossing state lines for transgender treatment.

The Act would also require separate housing and privacy protections for biological males and females in state care, and allow for private right of action against noncompliant organizations.

Cutting federal funding for noncompliance would likely have a very variable impact across the states. Data on child welfare agencies’ funding sources found that some states’ programs are heavily funded by the federal government, while others run primarily on state and local dollars. Arkansas and Mississippi rely heavily on federal funding, for example, while states like Wisconsin rely more on state and local dollars.

Expenditures on states’ programs, while significant to many states, make up less than 1% of annual federal funding and would be a negligible cost savings for the federal government. Passage by Congress would indicate significant support for parental rights, while leftist state leadership has effectively decreased these rights in blue states.

Promising cases

In August, a motion to reconsider whether a school district violated First Amendment rights was granted to Michigan parents whose initial lawsuit against the district had been dismissed. The Meads uncovered the treatment of their seventh-grade daughter as a male by school staff through documents that referred to her as a boy. The school allegedly concealed this treatment from the parents by using male pronouns on internal school documents while altering documents sent to the parents. The Meads did drop the lawsuit in September.

The Meads’ case comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in March and appellate courts that denounced California’s gender secrecy policies as violating the First Amendment rights of parents. The landmark win for parents should bolster lawsuits in favor of parental rights against school districts attempting to hide children’s rejection of their biological sex.

In July, a Texas Supreme Court case favored a woman’s right to sue the health practitioners involved in her mutilating gender surgery, paving the way for a reevaluation of the statute of limitations in the case of complex, long-term damages from transgender treatment.

Mounting pressure from federal funding cuts and the Yaeli Act is long overdue, and Miller expects full support from U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson for her legislation.  “I believe that he and others will do as much as they can to get this pushed through, hopefully before the first of the year,” she said.

The responsibility of the state

In Missouri, Cole reiterated the abuses she suffered at the hands of transgender practitioners.

“If I had a protection like Amendment 3, those doctors would not have been allowed by law to prescribe experimental drugs at 13, or to amputate healthy body parts at 15,” she said.

She reminded voters that transgenderism in medicine is medical abuse with no path for justice.

Reed said the tide is turning in Missouri. She believes many Democrats will vote to reinstate protections for minors next week.

Former Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones, event emcee, questioned the validity of state rule, when radical laws overrule rights.

“If the state does not take a vested interest in its children, in its children to be, in its future citizens, then what in the world is the purpose of the state itself,” he said.

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Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker, the Ascension Press blog, and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer, and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. She and her brilliant engineer/scientist husband homeschool their six children.

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