Ohio abortion-rights amendment isn’t yet on the ballot, but it’s already under attack: Here’s how

By Laura Hancock

On March 27, 2023

OLUMBUS, Ohio – The proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution advanced smoothly through the initial stages of the winding process to get on the ballot, but as advocates began to gather signatures to put the amendment on the November ballot, opponents began setting up roadblocks.

Any or all of the challenges could thwart the amendment’s success in Ohio – and at least make it more expensive for it to pass.

A four-week, $5 million television and digital ad campaign opposing the amendment is underway. Two abortion opponents are suing a state board that cleared the amendment for the signature-gathering process.

And Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman wants to put a proposal before voters on Aug. 8 that, if passed, would preempt the abortion-rights amendment in November and require a 60% supermajority for any changes to the state constitution to pass. Right now, a simple majority of 50% plus one vote is required.

The amendment proposal, called “The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety,” would guarantee that patients could make decisions about reproduction, including birth control, fertility treatment, continuing a pregnancy or abortion and miscarriage care until viability, which is around 22 to 24 weeks.

Under current law, supporters need to gather approximately 413,000 signatures from registered voters by July 5 to make the ballot in November.

Amendment backers expected a fight, having watched constitutional amendment campaigns in Michigan and other states, said Jeff Rusnak, a political strategist with the amendment campaign.

“They’re trying to change the rules because they know they can’t win,” he said.

But opponents believe the proposal is too broad and that abortion is the taking of a life.

“The foundational goal of what we’ve done today with Protect Women Ohio is to educate the public on what the ballot language actually says,” said Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, which is a member of the opposition coalition. “And that’s why we’ve made a significant investment into educating the public via our airwaves, both television and digital.”

Protect Women Ohio said the amendment campaign will be well-funded by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, but the group plans to tell voters that the amendment is “anti-parent” and “includes its direct assault on parental rights, its elimination of current health and safety standards for women, and the fact that it includes zero protections for the unborn.”

“The activists pushing this anti-parent amendment have gone too far and we’re confident that Ohioans will see this for what it is – an extreme agenda that completely eliminates parental rights and endangers women in our state,” said Protect Women Ohio’s spokeswoman, Amy Natoce.

Smooth sailing

The amendment proposal began without any hiccups.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, on March 2 certified the petition as a fair and truthful summary of the amendment, the first step to get on the ballot. Yost, a Republican who opposes abortion, wrote in his letter to supporters that he was bound by law and duty to certify the amendment as long as it met legal requirements.

“The rule of law necessarily means that there are limits to the decision-making of those who temporarily exercise public authority,” he wrote in a letter to the coalition. “This is true of prosecutors who will not enforce criminal statutes with which they disagree, or presidents who wish to take actions not authorized by the Constitution or Congress.”

He continued: “It is also true of attorneys general required by a narrow law to make a decision about the truthfulness of a summary.”

Then members of the bipartisan Ballot Board, overseen by its Republican chairman Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, determined March 13 that the proposal contained only one amendment, which cleared supporters to begin gathering signatures.

The Republicans on the Ohio Ballot Board, including LaRose and state Sen. Theresa Gavarone of the Toledo area, said the vote wasn’t about the merits of the abortion proposal but about the more narrow question of whether the proposal should be broken up into separate ballot questions.

Lawsuit

But on Monday, residents in Hamilton and Montgomery counties asked the Ohio Supreme Court to force the Ballot Board to look at the amendment again, saying that the proposal needs to be divided up into multiple ballot questions.

They argued that some activities described in the proposal would establish individual constitutional rights, but others concern “the interests and rights of a third party, i.e., the unborn child.”

Amendment backers have asked the Ohio Supreme Court to expedite the deadlines for briefings — with the final responses due April 7. But the Court hasn’t yet even ruled on whether it will accept the case.

The stakes in the case are high. If the amendment were broken into multiple issues, backers would have to gather the required 413,000 signatures for each one, and convince voters to approve several questions rather than just one. That would require more time and resources from abortion-rights activists who so far have mostly relied on volunteers to collect signatures.

Ohio Physicians for Reproductive rights, one of the amendment backers, called the case meritless and unprecedented, saying no one has ever asked the Ohio Supreme Court to reverse a unanimous Ballot Board vote over whether a proposal contains one or more amendments.

“The extremists who filed this action are attempting to circumvent the law and the Constitution in a desperate attempt to prevent the people of Ohio from voting on the Reproductive Freedom amendment,” the group said in a statement. “They are, in essence, asking the Court to ignore precedent and use partisan politics as the rationale for overturning the determination made by the three Republican and two Democratic members of the Ballot Board.”

The opposition campaign Protect Women Ohio is not associated with the residents who filed the request at the Ohio Supreme Court, said Natoce, coalition’s spokeswoman.

Coalition creation

The coalition that is backing the abortion-rights amendment is called Protect Choice Ohio. The coalition opposing it chose a similar name, Protect Women Ohio.

A quick search for the amendment’s backers returns high results for its opponents. But that’s where the similarities end.

The coalition of supporters includes grassroots organizations, such as Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, and long-established abortion rights groups, such as PreTerm-Cleveland and Planned Parenthood, which has been in Ohio for over 100 years.

The opponent organization running the $5 million ads on Wednesday announced members of its coalition. It includes Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue, influential anti-abortion organizations on Ohio Capitol Square, as well as dozens of local right-to-life groups, the Ohio Christian Alliance and the Catholic Conference of Ohio.

“Today’s coalition rollout shows what we have known all along: Ohioans refuse to sit back and watch as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood bring their war on parental rights to our doorstep,” said Molly Smith, a board member of the opposition campaign, in a statement. “This extreme and dangerous anti-parent amendment removes existing health protections for women and children and erases parents from the conversation. We won’t let that happen.”

The opposition ads incorrectly claim that if passed, the abortion rights amendment would allow children to get sex change surgeries, with their parents would be powerless to stop it. While the amendment protects contraception, it does not guarantee a right to hormone replacement therapy or gender-confirmation surgeries.

Expect more from the opposition campaign after the current ad campaign is finished, said Gonidakis, of Ohio Right to Life.

“We’re going to run a robust campaign both from the get-out-the-vote effort to educating the public,” he said. “The other side is going to be doing the same thing, and we will run a very effective and efficient campaign to educate the public because we believe, regardless of whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, when you understand and appreciate what the language actually does, a vast majority of Ohioans will reject it.”

The amendment supporters say they are planning a public information campaign to educate about their amendment.

“I think this is a pattern of behavior from them (the opposition), just in general,” said Rusnak, who is working for the amendment campaign. “I think what we saw this week is more examples of this multi-million dollar disinformation campaign that they’re waging against our amendment because they can’t win at the ballot box and they’re desperate.”

60% supermajority

Last week, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who is the state’s most powerful lawmaker, said he wants a proposal to make it harder to pass a constitutional amendment on ballots in August, so that the abortion amendment would have to win more than 60% of the vote in November.

That’s a high bar. In conservative and purple states, amendments to either enshrine abortion rights or to defeat proposals that allow the government to decide abortion rights have passed or failed in the 52% to 59% range.

An August special election is expected to cost $20 million – taxpayer money Huffman said is worth it to save fetuses from abortion.

In December, lawmakers passed a measure to generally end August elections, due to the high cost and low voter turnout, which usually hovers around 10%.

State Rep. Brian Stewart, a Pickaway County Republican who is sponsoring a resolution in the House to require the 60% supermajority, said he wasn’t pushing an August timeline and that those decisions were above his “pay grade.” Although in December, he supported the legislation to end August elections. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state’s chief elections official who was also a proponent of getting rid of August elections, is also letting Huffman take the public wrath, saying the timeline for 60% is up to the legislature.

LaRose and Stewart were the architects behind the 60% idea last year, a week after the Nov. 8 election, when abortion rights won in several states.

It’s unclear whether an August special election will even occur though. Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Lawrence County Republican, said late last week that he opposes the expense and extra work that an August election requires of elections boards, especially since the legislature voted to largely end August elections.

“Let me be abundantly clear,” Stephens posted on Twitter on Friday. “I am and have always been 100% Pro-Life. I will stand for life at every turn; however, I am not for changing the rules willy nilly at a whim when it comes to changing our constitution.”

Over 100 voter rights and civic groups and unions oppose raising the threshold to 60%.

Rusnak said the abortion-rights campaign is prepared to run through the new roadblocks.

“We will fight the frivolous lawsuit. We will present the facts and educate voters around the truth of what’s on the ballot and what our language says,” he said. “And the 60% amendment, if for some reason they manage to put it on the ballot, they’re going to lose because voters are going to see what it is. They see it right now.”

This piece was republished from MSN.