Ohio Abortion Opponents Resort to Lying About Ballot Measure

Ohio Republicans like these lost an effort in August to boost the majority required to approve an abortion-rights amendment. Photo: Maddie McGarvey/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Republican politicians are getting desperate in their efforts to block Ohio’s pro-choice majority from approving a state constitutional amendment to restore abortion rights.

The November ballot measure, known as Issue 1, is a citizen-initiated response to the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature’s passage of a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest. It is essentially aimed at reimposing the standard on abortion law set by Roe v. Wade after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that precedent last year. As Ballotpedia explains:

A “yes” vote supports amending the Ohio Constitution to:

establish a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to” decisions about abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and continuing pregnancy, and allow the state to restrict abortion after fetal viability, except when “necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.” 

With polls showing solid majorities for this pro-choice constitutional amendment, Ohio Republicans tried to make its passage more difficult via an earlier ballot initiative offered during a low-turnout special election in August. It would have increased the threshold for such constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent. It failed by a decisive 57 percent to 43 percent margin.

A survey from Baldwin-Wallace University last week showed a solid 58 percent of likely November voters favoring Issue 1. So opponents of the initiative have resorted to highly misleading characterizations of the impact of Issue 1, as the Associated Press reports:

With Election Day closing in, anti-abortion groups seeking to build opposition to a reproductive rights measure in Ohio are messaging heavily around a term for an abortion procedure that was once used later in pregnancy but that hasn’t been legal in the U.S. for over 15 years.

In ads, debates and public statements, the opposition campaign and top Republicans have increasingly been referencing “partial-birth abortions” as an imminent threat if voters approve the constitutional amendment on Nov. 7. “Partial-birth abortion” is a nonmedical term for a procedure known as dilation and extraction, or D&X, which is already federally prohibited.

“It would allow a partial-birth abortion,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told reporters recently as he explained his opposition to the constitutional amendment, known as Issue 1.

There are several big problems with this line of argument. Characteristically, anti-abortion activists want to focus not on the vast majority of abortions that occur early in pregnancy, but on the far less common late-term abortions. As noted above, Issue 1 would allow some restrictions on post-viability abortions, and protect only those necessary to protect the life and health of the mother (the standard set out in Roe).

The deployment of the “partial-birth abortion” chestnut — it’s a nonmedical term for a particular abortion method that does not occur at or near the time of birth — is particularly mendacious. The dilation-and-extraction procedure referred to as a “partial-birth abortion” was banned by Congress nationally in 2003; among the supporters of the ban was then-U.S. Senator Mike DeWine. So how is some state constitutional amendment supposed to make it legal now, as AP asked?

Asked why the governor suggested a federal law he supported would not apply if Ohio changes its constitution, spokesman Dan Tierney said DeWine bases his position on provisions of the U.S. Constitution that prevent the federal government from regulating conduct that has no effect on interstate commerce.

You’d think if that were the case, DeWine would have voted against this unconstitutional law. But it doesn’t matter, because the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal “partial-birth abortion” ban in 2007 in the notorious Gonzales v. Carhart decision. The three current conservative members of the Court who were on it then all supported the decision (Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito). There’s zero chance today’s Supreme Court would let Ohio voters overturn the federal ban. Aside from being disingenuous, DeWine’s argument would definitely upset his anti-abortion comrades who are now pining for a federal ban on far more abortions than those banned 20 years ago.

The reality is that for all the shouting about Issue 1 representing some radical step toward “abortion on demand,” it simply restores Roe as a matter of state constitutional law and stops a truly radical six-week ban with no exceptions for rape and incest. But Issue 1 opponents know the facts are not their friends. Unless they succeed in throwing sand in the eyes of voters, Ohio is likely to become the seventh consecutive state to rebuff anti-abortion measures at the ballot box since Roe was reversed.