FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 21, 2021
Contact: Prudence Robertson, [email protected], 240-672-2828
Justice Department & Obama-Appointed Judge Have Stated: ERA Is Dead, Cannot Be Revived
Washington, D.C. – In their ongoing push to enshrine a so-called “right” to abortion on demand in the U.S. Constitution, House Democrats today will hold a hearing advocating removal of the long-expired deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
The hearing comes as U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced nine appropriations bills without longstanding Hyde protections earlier this week. The Hyde Amendment and its family of pro-life riders stop taxpayer funded abortion at home and abroad and have saved millions of American lives.
House Democrats voted in March to remove the ERA deadline. SBA List denounced the vote and announced that votes on the legislation would be scored and double-weighted in each member’s profile on the National Pro-life Scorecard.
SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser slammed the hearing, saying:
“Democrats in Washington will stop at nothing to expand abortion on demand, paid for by taxpayers, up to birth – even trying to revive the Equal Rights Amendment after its ratification deadline expired decades ago. Democrats’ push to bring back the ERA has little to do with empowering women and everything to do with enshrining a ‘right’ to abortion – the greatest human rights violation of our time – in the U.S. Constitution. As written, the ERA would indefinitely block state and federal policies that protect unborn children as well as their mothers. It ought to be called the ‘Abortion Rights Amendment.’
“American women have achieved historic gains as abortion rates have declined to their lowest point in fifty years. In 2021, no mother need be forced to choose between her dreams and her children’s lives. We thank our pro-life allies in Congress, especially Reps. Yvette Herrell, Ralph Norman, and Andrew Clyde for standing up to the extreme Pelosi-Biden agenda, which is a political liability with the strong majority of Americans.”
In January of 2020, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel published a decisive opinion stating that the 1972 ERA has expired and that new efforts to ratify it would be considered null and void. Then in 2021, an Obama-appointed federal district judge concurred that recent attempts to ratify the ERA by Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018), and Virginia (2020) have no legal effect and do not count towards the required three-fourths states needed to ratify the constitutional amendment.
SBA List is tracking the abortion extremism of the Biden-Harris administration at sbaprolife.org/biden-harris.
SBA List is a network of 900,000 pro-life Americans nationwide, dedicated to ending abortion by electing national leaders and advocating for laws that save lives, with a special calling to promote pro-life women leaders.
###
