Tayo Ojewunmi-OjoWith the elections just 41 days away, the Montgomery County Council is leaving no stone unturned to ensure reproductive rights are enshrined in Maryland’s constitution as the measure comes up for a vote in November.
Marylanders this fall will be answering “yes” or “no” to Question 1 on the state ballot, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Constitutional Amendment.
A “yes” vote supports adding a new article to the Maryland Constitution’s Declaration of Rights establishing a right to reproductive freedom, defined to include “the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy,”
A “no” vote opposes amending the state constitution to establish a right to reproductive freedom.
The Montgomery County Council seeks to encourage residents to vote in favor of the constitutional amendment.
This commitment was made known when the Council passed a resolution affirming Montgomery County’s commitment to protecting reproductive rights on September 10, 2024.
The lead sponsor, Council Vice President Kate Stewart, brought the resolution to the floor. She told The Wash that one purpose of the resolution was to raise the profile of the ballot measure, including shedding light on the consequences of banning access to abortion care and the impact it can have on communities, individuals and their families.
“We are seeing a number of pregnant people who are coming from places like West Virginia that have an outright ban on abortion coming to seek care here; we wanted to make sure that our commitment to making sure people can access care here in Montgomery County, was clear to folks,” Stewart said.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy NGO, Maryland is experiencing an uptick in out-of-state visitors coming to town seeking care banned in their states.
The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, and more than a dozen states have since passed laws banning abortion and restricting other reproductive rights.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, Maryland receives women from West Virginia and Texas, among other states, and many end up in Montgomery County clinics to get care no longer afforded to them in their respective states.
Stewart said the council also supports the clinics with grants to cater to residents and out-of-state visitors seeking care.
Montgomery County Council recently approved a $1 million Resolution to support abortion care in the County. The grant will aid community-based organizations providing direct services that support the right to access abortion care in the County.
In her Resolution affirming the County’s Commitment to Protect Reproductive Rights, Stewart recommended that county agencies pursue opportunities and coordinate with each other to protect people and entities providing, assisting, seeking, or obtaining reproductive health services in Montgomery County.
Speaking to some Montgomery County residents about the Resolution, Serah Lyte said, “We should be doing more funding for reproductive rights in this state. I work in the healthcare sector, and I can’t begin to tell you the sad experiences people go through in an effort to bring a child to this world.”
“Not enough people know that reproductive rights is on the ballot this November, I feel the politicians should be talking more about this,” Maria, another Montgomery resident, told The Wash.
Not everyone in Maryland wants the ballot measure approved.
On Monday, the Maryland Catholic Conference created a webinar forum to promote a no-vote in Maryland specifically. Speaker Elizabeth Kirk, an assistant professor at Columbus School of Law, said the health amendment doesn’t meet women’s needs.
“I think we should vote against it because when I hear freedom, what I hear is abandonment. We’re abandoned. Abortion is abandoning women and their children to some sort of like notion of autonomy of freedom,” Kirk said.
Kirk also said, “The freedom is that it actually leaves them alone and abandoned; the reasons women choose abortion are because they don’t have support. We need to, as a society, respond to the authentic needs of women and babies. And this amendment doesn’t do it,”
Erika Bachiochi, Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center at Abigail Adams Institute, agreed with Kirk and called on men to do better.
“We should be calling men to task, to call men to be fathers, to have higher expectations of men, to take sex more seriously, all of those things. Right now, we have a structure we basically created, like a structure around abortion license,” Bachiochi said.
“It’s a structure that then feeds all of our relationships, you know, in all of our understandings, around sex, around work, around parenting, around all of these different things. And it’s like, it’s like this band aid that is put on something, and it’s like, right now, kind of gushing, and we haven’t dealt with any of the things underneath.” Bachiochi said.
Marylanders will decide “yes” or “no” to the constitutional amendment in the November elections, along with voters in other states that have similar measures on the ballot.
Some of the measures approved by the Montgomery County Council include recognizing access to abortion as a fundamental human right. The Council supports a Maryland constitutional amendment to protect the right to reproductive freedom. Here’s the full Resolution.
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