Ohioans voted Tuesday night to make abortion rights part of the Buckeye State’s constitution, the latest in a string of defeats for anti-abortion activists at the ballot box.
The ballot outcome illustrates the thorny nature of abortion politics for Republicans — even in solid red states — as they grapple with how to handle the issue ahead of next year’s presidential and congressional elections.
Issue One specifically asked voters if they wanted to amend the state constitution to guarantee a right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.”
An effort by Republicans to raise the threshold for approving the amendment to 60% from 50%-plus-one was soundly defeated in August of this year.
After the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, many states — including Ohio — enacted so-called “heartbeat bills” all but prohibiting the procedure after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, which pro-life advocates say can occur around the six-week mark of a pregnancy.
Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who approved his state’s heartbeat bill and won re-election in a landslide last year, cut a TV ad opposing passage of Issue One alongside his wife Frances.
“I think whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, the constitutional amendment that we will be voting on in a couple of weeks just goes way, way too far,” DeWine told Fox News Digital last month.
“It would allow abortion at any point in the pregnancy,” the governor insisted. “It would negate Ohio’s law that we’ve had on the books for many, many years that prohibits partial birth abortion … It also really strikes at parents rights and the relationship between a parent and in this case, a daughter.”
Since Roe was overturned, at least six states — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont — have voted on abortion ballot measures. In all of those states, the abortion rights side prevailed.
Additionally, Republicans massively underperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections, something many political analysts pinned at least partly on backlash over the abortion issue.
A mélange of polling has also shown that the vast majority of voters nationally trust Democrats over Republicans on the issue of abortion.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 62% of registered voters say that abortion should be “always” or “mostly” legal, while just 30% said the procedure should be “always” or “mostly” illegal.
However, only 29% of voters said social issues such as abortion were of the utmost importance in choosing who to vote for, as opposed to economic issues like jobs and taxes.