Maryland’s constitutional amendment referendum on the ballot in November that would enshrine “reproductive” rights adds little to existing law that could not simply be accomplished by an act of the General Assembly.

It is on the ballot to mobilize the Democratic base in a presidential and U.S. Senate election year. Given Maryland voters’ acceptance of a liberal abortion law by a 62% majority in 1991, the result of the referendum is thought to be a foregone conclusion.

But maybe not. Why not? Because some voters may actually read the amendment and judge it not by personal convenience or religious belief but by its probable social consequences.

This proposed amendment forbids the state from taking any action that would “burden” or “abridge” the right to an abortion. That language potentially prohibits such measures as those many European countries have adopted that require abortion clinics to provide counseling about birth control, social benefits to mothers and adoption. The state is also precluded from “indirectly” burdening abortion, which could mean Maryland would be compelled to withhold funding from those with religious scruples, thus limiting free speech and financial assistance.

But the main objection to the amendment is not its effect on the pregnant but the message it sends to the not-yet-pregnant and their partners: free love for the women, a hunting license for the men. No longer must your partner be one who stands with you in difficulty; no longer need one take precautions: “I can always get an abortion.” Advocates claim “moral autonomy” for themselves in sexual matters, but such disregard for social interests has spillover effects — in financial morals, “Greed is good”; in political morals, “The end justifies the means.”

Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun and John Marshall Harlan II predicted the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade would reduce the tragedy of unwed motherhood and fatherless children. They could not have been more wrong. The Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof and his wife, Janet Yellen, now secretary of the Treasury, demonstrated in two articles in 1996 that Roe had produced what they called “reproductive technology shock” and that it, rather than the pill, was the ultimate engine powering the sexual revolution.

Rates of unwed motherhood surged from roughly 10% in 1970 to 40% in 2022. Less commitment by partners in the new “hook-up” culture caused the rate of shotgun weddings to plummet.

Some have argued that the dramatic change in marriage habits can be attributed to unmarried celebrities showing off their baby bumps, or socioeconomic trends that have seen the decline of industrial and rural communities. Akerlof and Yellen, however, found that the change in behavior after Roe was far from gradual.

What’s more, the consequences are felt not by Bohemian college students and graduates but by bank tellers and supermarket clerks without access to free college clinics and family means. They do not get abortions, because of motivations unanticipated by Roe: procrastination, family pressure, lack of means, residual religious conviction, fear of being unable to conceive when they want to or a maternal instinct discouraging the killing of a fetus. These people are beneath the notice of college professors and coeds.

Referenda on abortion have been determined by appeals to young voters, asking them what they would want if they or their partner became pregnant. But in other contexts, gun control for example, the same voters are quick to recognize that in a pluralistic society, individual rights must frequently yield to social interests. When the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was passed to the accompaniment of dire prophecies from the scribbling classes, the teenage birth rate plunged from 61.8 per 1,000 in 1990 to 14.4 per 1,000 in 2021 without the predicted increase in child poverty. A message was sent to the young that sexual carelessness might give rise to adverse consequences, not 18 years of government payments.

The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe, though it will not restore the morality of the 1950s, reduces the perceived certain availability of abortion and is already reported to have induced greater caution among the young. The reduction of unwed motherhood and fatherless families would make major inroads in addressing Baltimore and Maryland’s social challenges. Hopefully, young voters will at long last develop a social conscience when they go to the polls on this issue, recognizing that situation ethics should not be made a constitutional right and that freedom must be joined with a sense of responsibility to others as well as oneself.

George Liebmann (george.liebmann2@verizon.net) is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).