The California Reproductive Freedom Amendment: A New Constitutional Standard

This report provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of California’s Reproductive Freedom Amendment (RFA) and a constitutional framework for realizing its promise. It distills the RFA’s foundational principles and legal standard for challenging barriers or proposing policy reforms that can ensure reproductive freedom is accessible — in reality, not only in theory — to all people in California. The report examines the RFA’s text, structure, and ratification history, and establishes that the RFA creates a right to reproductive freedom broader and stronger than past federal or state protections. Examining and building on existing California precedent, the report proposes a new “RFA Review” standard that makes equality a necessary component of the strictest possible judicial scrutiny for reproductive freedom rights. Demonstrating how advocates, courts and policymakers can put this framework into practice, the report examines how RFA enforcement would prohibit certain California restrictions on abortion care and pregnancy policing through the medical and family regulatory systems.

Read the full report.

Read the Executive Summary.