As you barrel up I-79 from West Virginia, a cerulean blue sign with fanciful white lettering salutes you: “Welcome to Pennsylvania! Pursue your happiness.” This chirpy tourist slogan recalls the famous Declaration of Rights from Pennsylvania’s original 1776 Constitution, only slightly altered in the version used today:
All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeasible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing and protecting property and reputation, and of pursuing their own happiness (Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – 1968, Art. I, §1).
These stirring words, along with Art. I, §26 and Art. III, §32, comprise the equal protection provisions of the state constitution, intended to establish the inherent rights of citizens. In 1971, Pennsylvania changed the Constitution to prevent those rights from being denied on the basis of sex, nearly a year before the federal government passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Today, Pennsylvania possesses some of the most robust civil rights protections of any state in the Union, guaranteeing that its citizens are well-positioned to embrace their varied quests for happiness.
Unless, of course, you are a preborn infant tethered to your mother’s placenta.
On April 20, 2026, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court filed a shattering decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, declaring that Pennsylvania’s long-standing ban on using state taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion violated the state’s Equal Rights Amendment and equal protection provisions. Even more catastrophically, the justices declared, by a 4-3 margin, that the Pennsylvania Constitution contains an inherent right to abortion.
Seven years in the making, this horrific abuse of judicial authority could never have happened without the machinations of the plaintiffs, a coterie of Philly-area health centers and state Planned Parenthood affiliates bent on getting paid for dealing death to the children of low-income women. These radicals gained momentum from the pro-abortion politician heading up the Department of Human Services, who brazenly switched sides, effectively leaving no one to speak for the interests of the state. In order to justify an act of judicial overreach, Pennsylvania judges connived to set aside a forty-four-year-old State Supreme Court ruling, reached unanimously by a bipartisan bench.
The story has its heroes as well. Numerous amici such as the Thomas More Society, Democrats for Life, and the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation stepped up to draw attention to this pivotal case. Republican Attorney General Dave Sunday stepped into the breach left by the Secretary of Human Services, determined to demonstrate three compelling reasons why saving babies through the Coverage Exclusion was in the interest of all Pennsylvanians. Perhaps most significantly, a handful of erudite Republican women held the line when their colleagues were preaching the false gospel of abortion rights. Three of these, one on the Supreme Court and the others on the Commonwealth Court, produced dissenting opinions of magnificent truth, wit, and clarity.
How did constitutional law in the Keystone State get to this point? Unfortunately, pro-abortion activists have been attempting to rewrite the Constitution for a long time. In 1985, the plaintiffs of Fischer v. the Department of Public Welfare sought to establish taxpayer-funded abortion as a legal requirement of the Equal Rights Amendment. Their petition referenced Sections 3215(c) & (j) of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, which limited Medicaid funding for abortion to a handful of specific cases, to wit: the state would pay for an abortion in cases of rape or incest, provided the crime had been reported to proper authorities. Similarly, the state would fund the abortion of a woman deemed in danger of death from continuing to carry her child to term—with appropriate documentation by an impartial physician.
Notably, the judicial bench on the day that Fischer was decided included four Democrats. Foremost among them was Robert Nelson Cornelius Nix, Jr., the first African-American Chief Justice to serve on the Supreme Court of any state. Upon the occasion of his inauguration, this longtime civil rights advocate had told The New York Times, “There comes a time when you have to break with precedent—no man can stand by and watch a practice that is morally wrong.” Nix would later be inducted into the Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope St. John Paul II.
Nix’s Democratic colleagues were John Paul Flaherty, Jr., whose findings in the controversial case Paul Aitkenhead v. Borough of West View reportedly made him an outspoken opponent of water fluoridation; Nicholas Peter Papadakos, who obtained his law degree from Catholic University and intervened during the 1983 crisis in the steel industry, freezing mortgage payments for workers crippled by widespread layoffs; and finally, Rolf Larsen, who lost his position on the Court after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy to fraudulently obtain prescription drugs. Another justice was Stephen Zappala, Sr., a member of the Knights of Columbus and the son of an Italian immigrant father. These illustrious men were joined by Republican James McDermott, who wrote the majority opinion, and his party compatriot William D. Hutchison, who would later be nominated to a Federal Court seat by President Ronald Reagan.
Notwithstanding the varied backgrounds, experiences, and philosophies of these men, they resolved this case in complete unanimity. The Fischer ruling concluded that though abortion was the law of the land under Roe, no consideration of equal rights between men and women could require the state to fund these procedures through Medical Assistance. Furthermore, McDermott averred, Pennsylvania law had already established clear precedent for favoring childbirth over abortion:
By subsidizing the medical expenses of indigent women who carry their pregnancies to term while not subsidizing the comparable expenses of women who undergo abortions (except those whose lives are threatened), Congress has established incentives that make childbirth a more attractive alternative than abortion for persons eligible for Medicaid…To say that the Commonwealth’s interest in attempting to preserve a potential life is not important, is to fly in the face of our own existence.
Possibly the most striking feature about this passage from Fischer is Justice McDermott’s guarded emphasis on “potential” life, perhaps understandable given the widespread acceptance of the fetus in utero as “a clump of cells.” If the American public had had the same access to advanced medical imaging technology in 1985 that we have today, would this questionable verbiage have made its way into the Fischer decision?
“Potential” life or not, the Fischer Court found the state’s interest in preserving the lives of future voters to be compelling enough to apply rational basis review, a judicial standard that, without a landslide of evidence to the contrary, generally favors the state. It appears that abortion activists left the Medicaid Coverage Exclusion pretty much alone until 2019, when they took another swipe at the law, claiming once again that it violated Pennsylvania’s Equal Rights Amendment and equality provisions. Actually, they were after much bigger game than government-subsidized abortions, declaring that the Fischer decision was “contrary to a modern understanding of the ways in which the denial of women’s reproductive autonomy is a form of sex discrimination that perpetuates invidious gender and racial stereotypes.”
Constitutionally sanctioned “reproductive autonomy,” the ultimate goal of all this litigious floundering, is itself a curious phrase. Simple logic dictates that the choice whether or not to reproduce is well-protected in Pennsylvania, albeit occurring somewhat earlier in the process than liberal pundits encourage everyone to believe. The rare victims of rape and incest, who, one could say, have been legitimately robbed of their reproductive autonomy, have already, for a long time, had the option of abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy, although it is highly questionable whether committing a second act of violence can erase the trauma of the first.
Not to be wondered at, the powers behind Allegheny Reproductive readily embraced extremely uncommon cases (such as that of a woman in poverty who discovers that her unborn child has a fatal birth defect) to demonstrate that the Coverage Exclusion was not only incomplete and discriminatory, but undeniably cruel. They enumerated frightening statistics like the comparative maternal mortality rates for childbirth vs. abortion and white women vs. black women. Many poor women, they asserted, were being forced to choose between paying their household bills and accessing abortion care. Providers were nobly reaching into their own pockets to subsidize abortions, or else spending countless hours in pursuit of grant money to cover the procedures.
Careful to cover all their bases, the plaintiffs followed up this display of false compassion with a soupçon of ideology never envisioned in the original drafting of the Pennsylvania ERA: “Transgender men and people whose gender identity is non-binary may have female reproductive organs and be capable of pregnancy and childbirth.” It is clear why liberals must constitutionally alter the definition of sex to include multiple gradations on a gender spectrum. If they cannot, their flimsily erected house of cards can hardly be propped up on the Equal Rights Amendment, which was built on the reality that constituents are either male or female, despite characteristically broad interpretations of the 1955 Pennsylvania Human Rights Act.
Fortunately for the left, this state of affairs has been aided and abetted since 2015 by a pair of Democratic governors with glowing endorsements from Planned Parenthood. A quick glance at the “Maternal and Infant Care” Section of Pennsylvania’s official website clearly lays out current Governor Josh Shapiro’s ardent love affair with abortion: Abortion | Department of Health | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Frequent references to “pregnant persons” demonstrate his administration’s embrace of gender fluidity.
When Shapiro assumed office in January 2023, the governor-elect tapped a new Secretary of Human Services—Dr. Valeria Arkoosh. On the subject of so-called “reproductive autonomy,” Dr. Arkoosh had already proved herself to be in lockstep with her boss and had even taken a hand in scattering her own brand of propaganda. During a lackluster Senate campaign in May 2021, Arkoosh had taken aim at PA House Bill 118, the Final Disposition of Fetal Remains Act, which was intended to help grieving parents claim and bury their dead child after a miscarriage. In response to this compassionate measure, Arkoosh tweeted, “Members of the PA Legislature today voted to fine women who miscarry and force them to fill out this form. This is traumatizing for women experiencing unbelievable loss. Unbelievable.”
For unspoken reasons that can possibly be surmised, the Republican-controlled Senate failed to confirm Arkoosh’s nomination within the required 25-day window, (a rare occurrence in PA state government) although this inaction did not impede her ability to assume office. The new Secretary of Human Services hit the ground running. Within a few months of beginning her term, Arkoosh publicly celebrated the new governor’s decision to end funding for a statewide network of crisis pregnancy centers that had provided resources for struggling moms since 1995. Ironically, this initiative had been the work of another Democratic governor, a Catholic—the courageous Bob Casey, Sr. of blessed memory, who had decried abortion as “the ultimate violence.”
In response to the funding cuts, Secretary Arkoosh gloated, “The Shapiro Administration is taking a huge step forward today by ending the Real Alternatives contract after 30 years. Every woman seeking reproductive health care has the right to unbiased, medically accurate care and counsel.” Amy Stoner, a Philly-based Catholic Social Services Director, countered with common-sense logic, “The governor is taking away the freedom for these women to choose for themselves where they voluntarily want to receive services. He’s abandoning our state’s women and his promise to them.”
