On Nov. 5, Nebraskans will decide the fate of abortion law in Nebraska: Will we protect women and babies by maintaining Nebraska’s current laws to defend life and safeguard common sense health regulations against the abortion industry? Or will we adopt a state constitutional amendment creating a “fundamental right to abortion” that would make Roe v. Wade blush?

That’s it. That’s the decision. Two very divergent paths lie ahead of us. Two radically different cultural views are on the ballot.

Buyer beware: the pro-abortion ballot initiative proposal will be worse than Roe v. Wade. But how’s that possible? After all, Roe was terrible. How could it get any worse than Roe?

What Did Roe Do? When Roe v. Wade was decided that infamous January day in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court fabricated a legal right to abortion that the justices rooted in various amendments of the federal constitution. The Court did this by concocting a three-trimester scheme for determining under what circumstances the so-called right to abortion could be regulated.

Under Roe, the state was not permitted, for any reason, to regulate abortion during the first trimester. During the second trimester, the state could regulate abortion to protect the health of the woman. In the third trimester, the state could regulate or prohibit abortion to promote a legal interest in protecting the preborn baby, but there had to be exceptions for abortion to save the woman’s life or protect her health.

While the legal framework of Roe was awful, it had holes that could be exploited. For 50 years after Roe, the pro-life movement consciously and intentionally worked to undermine the Roe three-trimester framework. We did so day by day, prayer by prayer, legal case by legal case, until Dobbs put the nail in Roe’s coffin.

Something Worse than Roe Is with Us. Last November, out-of-state and in-state pro-abortion activists introduced a ballot initiative to establish a “fundamental right to abortion” in our state constitution. When I say this ballot initiative is worse than Roe, I’m not exaggerating. The ballot initiative proposal is more rotten to its core than Roe. It would tie the hands of Nebraskans and our state legislature from protecting women and preborn babies from a financially interested abortion industry.

How so?

Here’s the language of the extreme proposal: “All persons shall have a fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient, without interference from the state or its political subdivisions. Fetal viability means the point in pregnancy when, in the professional judgment of the patient’s treating health care practitioner, there is a significant likelihood of the fetus’ sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures” (emphasis mine).

You can read more about the numerous problems of this language at our website (www.NEcatholic.org). For now, I want to focus on the language in boldface and italics, “without interference from the state.”

Just as infamous as the Roe decision was the Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision. When Casey was decided, it upheld the right to abortion in Roe, but did so under a new standard: the viability framework. This framework basically asserted that states could not regulate abortion prior to the viability of the preborn baby, but could provide, regulate and prohibit abortion after viability.

In Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized that the right to abortion crafted in Roe was never an unlimited right. The justices said: “[I]t is an overstatement to describe it as a right to decide whether to have an abortion ‘without interference from the State.’” They went on to say: “All abortion regulations interfere to some degree with a woman’s ability to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy.”

This passage in Casey is critical to understanding why the pro-abortion special interest groups inserted “without interference from the state” in their ballot initiative proposal. They want a “fundamental right” to abortion that would run over, destroy, demolish, and supersede any regulation on abortion, no matter for what reason. They want even the most minimal of abortion regulations to be struck down as an “interference” with the “fundamental right to abortion.”

This is one major reason why pro-abortion special interests are selling Nebraskans something worse than Roe v. Wade, as hard as that might be for some to imagine. Nebraska voters must beware. All of us, regardless of how pro-life or not we are, must unite and defeat this unsafe, unregulated, and un-Nebraskan attempt to flip our state’s protections for women and babies upside-down overnight.

I cannot overstate that you are needed to help from now until Election Day to defeat this pro-abortion proposal. Say your prayers, visit NEcatholic.org for more info, and start talking to family, friends, fellow parishioners, and others.

Take a stand for life today, or else we’ll be destined to lose it tomorrow.