A Fairfax County, Virginia high school facilitated a minor’s abortion without parental knowledge or consent, according to stories surfacing on social media.
Fairfax County, near Washington, D.C., is part of a cluster of very blue jurisdictions in Northern Virginia (NoVA) — Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties and Falls Church City — whose schools have been embroiled in controversy for several years. Several of those counties have been notified by the Trump Education Department that their “transgender” policies (which include using alternate names and “genders” for children in school without parental input, knowledge, or consent) violate federal law. They have been told that if they do not rescind those policies this month, they face loss of funding ahead of the next school year and possible Department of Justice prosecution.
The Fairfax report suggests that school officials were involved in making the appointment and paying for the abortion without parental consent. If true, that is a criminal act, because Virginia law currently requires parental consent for an unemancipated minor to obtain an abortion. So far, there is no evidence that there was any effort to obtain a judicial bypass, the only way parental consent to a minor’s abortion can be ignored in Virginia. (A case currently in Florida is challenging the constitutionality of abortion bypass procedures, imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court when Roe v. Wade was in place, as a violation of parental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.)
Abortion will feature large in this fall’s elections. Virginia and New Jersey are two states that hold gubernatorial elections the year after presidential elections, and both states will elect their legislatures. Democrats hope to flip the governor’s mansion and control the Virginia Legislature, where they have already passed for the first time a state constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion on demand through birth into law. The amendment makes no provision for parental participation in a minor’s abortion. Under Virginia’s Constitution, an amendment must pass two separate legislatures before it is sent to public referendum.
Democrat gubernatorial candidate and ex-congresswoman Abigail Spanberger is a dedicated pro-abortion advocate. Asked about the Fairfax incident, she praised the proposed constitutional amendment while dodging the parental rights question. Saying that as a parent, she wants to participate in her daughter’s life (“I want to be involved in all the decisions my daughters make, including what they wear to prom”), Spanberger evaded the question that the amendment she endorses would remove parental consent to or knowledge of a minor child’s abortion.
Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, is staunchly pro-life.
NoVA school systems have pursued their own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” with regard to parental involvement in questions related to sex, despite the fact that the current administration of Republican Glenn Youngkin promulgated model state policies banning such practices. Appealing to local educational control, NoVA school districts have kept their policies in place, largely with Youngkin’s acquiescence. Fairfax Schools is also separately involved in controversies over its advocacy of DIE-based admissions criteria at Thomas Jefferson High School, once a nationally pre-eminent science school, and in a just-announced job search for a “security” official for its $400,000+ per annum county school superintendent. While nominally nonpartisan, the Fairfax County Public School Board is wholly Democrat-backed.
Image: jarmoluk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.