(LifeSiteNews) — A bipartisan group of over 100 Black pastors in Ohio released a letter on Tuesday urging state voters to reject a radical amendment that would enshrine a “right” to effectively unlimited abortion.
The faith leaders warned that the amendment, which would allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, is an existential threat to the Black community.
The amendment will appear on the state’s November 7, 2023, ballot as Ohio Issue 1, when voters will decide whether it should be adopted and override all present and future abortion laws from the Ohio legislature.
READ: Radical Ohio abortion amendment would allow partial-birth, dismemberment abortion: attorney general
The group of pastors called on not only Blacks but “all Ohioans who believe in the inherent value of every person to vote NO on Issue 1 this November.”
“The future of our state, our society, and our race is at stake in this amendment, and we must protect them,” wrote the pastors, going on to highlight the disproportionate harm the measure would have on the Black community.
The leaders emphasized that Issue 1 is not a “Republican or Democrat issue,” but a “moral issue and for the Black community in particular, it is a life-or-death matter.”
While only 13 percent of Ohio’s population is Black, 48 percent of abortions are performed on Black women, “a tragic and difficult reality that our community cannot ignore,” the letter continued.
The faith leaders went on to point out that Blacks have been deliberately targeted by the abortion industry from its very start, “beginning with the deplorable ideology of racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, whose Planned Parenthood organization purposefully established abortion mills in minority neighborhoods and targeted our communities for abortions.”
READ: 7 shocking quotes by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger
“Sanger’s mission was to kill Black babies before they entered the world, and Planned Parenthood and the for-profit abortion industry have allowed that mission to continue to this very day.”
The pastors pointed out that Issue 1 is “more extreme than Roe v. Wade,” and in fact, it is, and would allow second-trimester dismemberment abortions as well as late-term and partial-birth abortions.
“It will permit our children to undergo abortions without parents knowing. And it will continue to rob generations of Black women and men of the insurmountable joy of parenthood,” wrote the faith leaders.
Pastor Brian Williams in Columbus, Ohio, who spearheaded the letter, told Fox News that, as a father of “seven beautiful children,” he can’t imagine “living in a state where abortion is allowed up to full term.”
“Upon learning about the extreme goals of Issue 1, I was reminded of a quote from Edmund Burke who said, ‘The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’ I decided at that moment, I must do something,” Williams said, explaining what inspired him to initiate the letter.
READ: Ohio archbishop urges Catholics to vote no on ‘dangerous’ pro-abortion, pro-transgender amendment
The proposed Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety Amendment posits a “right” to make “personal reproductive” decisions, “including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” which the state “shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against.”
The amendment’s language “covers any burden” on the “right” to abort, “apparently however slight,” and it would end “fetal life” or “medical ethics” as legitimate state interests relating to abortion because they are distinct from “advanc[ing] the [pregnant] individual’s health,” according to a legal analysis from the office of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
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