Virginia lawmakers have approved a constitutional amendment that would protect reproductive rights in the Commonwealth. The proposed amendment—which passed 64-34 in the House of Delegates on Wednesday and 21-18 in the state Senate two days later—will be presented to voters later this year.
“Residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia can no longer allow politicians to dominate their bodies and their personal decisions,” said House of Delegates Majority Leader Charniele Herring, the resolution’s sponsor, during a committee debate before the final vote.
The Democrat-led state Senate first passed the measure in January 2025. The House of Delegates followed a few weeks later. Virginia law requires an identical proposal to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions before a constitutional amendment can be put to voters.
Virginia currently allows abortion through the second trimester of pregnancy, or until about 27 weeks. Later abortions are allowed if the pregnancy is life-threatening. It is the only Southern state that has not passed any new abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Abigail Spanberger, the state’s Democratic governor-elect, made protecting reproductive rights a centerpiece of her 2025 campaign. In an October 9 gubernatorial debate, Spanberger accused her anti-abortion opponent Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, of wanting to “inflict upon Virginia” the kind of extreme abortion restrictions passed in nearby states.
“Women have died,” she said of those laws.
Dems prioritize civil rights
Virginia, a onetime Republican stronghold that swung Democratic in 2008’s election of Barack Obama, is often called a “purple” state. The governor’s mansion has swapped party hands regularly in the past 30 years, and in 2017, the House of Delegates became evenly split at 50-50.
In the 2025 election, Democrats won a historic 64 seats, all but ensuring voters the opportunity to enshrine reproductive rights into their state constitution. In addition to codifying the state’s current abortion access laws, the legislature is expected to pass proposals to permanently enshrine same-sex marriage and restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated people who completed their sentences for felony convictions into the state constitution.
A fourth proposed constitutional amendment would allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts to add up to four blue seats in Virginia, potentially in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
If voters ultimately approve these measures at the polls, they would all become constitutional law in Virginia.
With a Democratic governor and Democrat-majority legislature, Virginia could also join the growing ranks of blue states passing “shield” laws. These laws protect providers from prosecution or civil penalties for prescribing medication abortion to patients in states with restrictions or bans.
Regional destination
“Virginians have been loud and clear about their support for reproductive freedom,” said Autumn Celeste, Blue Ridge Abortion Fund’s communications director, in a statement to Rewire News Group.
Abortion funds help patients find clinics and pay for their abortion care. They also sometimes arrange child care and support patients’ care following the procedure. The Blue Ridge Abortion Fund serves both Virginians seeking abortions and a growing number of out-of-state patients traveling to Virginia for care.
After Roe fell, Celeste said, most other Southern states soon enacted restrictive abortion laws.
Neighboring North Carolina now bans abortion at 12 weeks. Florida and Georgia both outlaw it after six weeks, with a few exceptions. Tennessee has a total abortion ban with limited exceptions.
In 2024, people traveling from other states made up a quarter of all Blue Ridge Abortion Fund callers, up from 13 percent just before Roe was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia topped the group’s patient list, Celeste told Rewire News Group in late 2025.
Other research backs this observation. Virginia clinics performed 6,600 more abortions in 2024 than in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization aiming to improve reproductive rights. The number of out-of-state patients increased by about 4,400. A Guttmacher policy advisor attributed that spike mainly to Florida’s May 2024 six-week abortion ban.
“Enshrining the right to abortion care within our state is a necessary—and popular—step in the ongoing effort to protect reproductive freedom in Virginia, not just for today, but for generations to come,” Celeste said.
This story was originally published by Rewire News Group, a national, nonprofit media organization exclusively dedicated to reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice.
Catesby Holmes is the editorial director at Rewire News Group.
Cameron Oakes is a Staff Editor at Rewire News Group..
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.