LOS ANGELES (RNS) — California will codify the appropriate to abortion within the state’s structure after voters on Tuesday (Nov. 8) overwhelmingly authorised a measure that Catholic bishops and different Christian leaders rallied in opposition to and prayed for its defeat.
With the passage of Proposition 1, the California Structure will declare that the state “shall not deny or intrude with a person’s reproductive freedom of their most intimate selections, which incorporates their elementary proper to decide on to have an abortion and their elementary proper to decide on or refuse contraceptives.”
Early Wednesday outcomes confirmed 69% of voters authorised the measure.
RELATED: California Christian teams struggle post-Roe measures to broaden abortion rights
As Election Day approached, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez led Catholic bishops throughout the state in urging residents to vote in opposition to the measure, which was positioned on the poll quickly after the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s resolution this summer time to overturn Roe v. Wade. Critics, who additionally included conservative Protestant religion leaders, alleged that Proposition 1 “would take away all restrictions on abortion in California” and permit abortions up to date of start.
The modification doesn’t spell out which, if any, sorts of abortions would nonetheless be prohibited. State legislation already restricts third-trimester abortions, and California authorized specialists have mentioned they don’t count on courts to interpret the modification as expressly allowing them.
Poll measures supporting abortion rights have been additionally authorised by voters in Vermont and Michigan, which in each locations made each abortion and contraception a proper. In Kentucky, a proposed modification declaring that no proper to abortion exists went all the way down to defeat, although abortion is banned by legislation within the state.
California’s resolution represents a second disappointment for American Catholic bishops, who took a robust stand supporting a proposed “no proper to abortion” modification in Kansas in August, solely to see voters flip it again.
In a video shared Monday, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino mentioned the measure “promotes a tradition of loss of life” and “doesn’t affirm the sweetness and worth of a life that God has given us.”
Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose, Bishop Kevin W. Vann of Orange, and Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Freyer of Orange printed a column Friday in America, a Jesuit journal, through which they referred to Proposition 1 as “excessive” and “pointless.”
“California already has a few of the most permissive abortion legal guidelines within the nation,” they wrote, including that it could pave the way in which for “a few of the most permissive abortion insurance policies on this planet.”
The California Household Council, a nonprofit aiming to advance “God’s design for all times, household and liberty,” led a vigil Tuesday on the steps of the state Capitol. Pastors Jed Dahlen of Calvary Stable Floor, Joe Pedick of Calvary Chapel of the Harbour and John Randall of Calvary South OC have been amongst religion leaders who prayed for the defeat of the measure.
