Ohioans voted on Tuesday to adopt abortion and reproductive health rights into their state constitution, with a majority voting yes on Issue 1.
The amendment takes effect immediately to enshrine the right to "make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions," which includes fertility treatments, miscarriage care, contraception, and abortions, into the state constitution.
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Pro-abortion rights groups initiated the ballot measure in response to the six-week abortion ban that was passed and signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in April 2019. At that time, the law was blocked by the courts due to federal protections of abortion in the first trimester under Roe v. Wade.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, the six-week abortion ban has been under legal review by the state's courts.
Anti-abortion advocates campaigned ardently against the amendment's prohibition of state actions that "directly or indirectly [to] burden, penalize, or interfere with or discriminate against" a citizen's reproductive choices, saying this would nullify existing state laws regulating the controversial procedure.
"Issue One is not a resurrection of the status quo [under Roe v. Wade]," May Mailman, the vice president for legal, strategy and communications at RITE, told reporters ahead of Tuesday's vote.
"Because constitutional language supersedes regular statutes, Issue One would upend long-standing Ohio laws governing the abortion process, including laws governing late-term or particularly unethical abortion practices and laws governing parental notification," Mailman said.
Advocates of the amendment say that pro-abortion rights groups will not push against existing parental consent laws in Ohio, but Mailman said these laws could reasonably be interpreted as interference against children's rights if taken to court in the future.
DeWine has been an outspoken critic of the amendment in recent weeks, calling it too extreme for the Buckeye State.
"If you look at Issue 1, it's a radical proposal, and whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, it just goes much, much too far," DeWine said on CBS News's Face the Nation on Sunday.
In previous statements, DeWine has said that although the legislature can regulate abortion after the point of fetal viability, which is when the child can survive outside of the womb, the amendment allows a mother's physician to perform an abortion if carrying the pregnancy to completion would jeopardize her health.
"There is a wide exception written into this law, which talks about the health of the mother," DeWine said. "The Supreme Court, the United States has defined this extremely broadly — [it] can mean health, can mean something having to do with her income, it can have something to do with how many children she has, and again, it is the person performing the abortion in the clinic who’s going to make that determination, and there’s no review of [that]."
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"Decisions around pregnancy, including abortion, birth control, and miscarriage care, are personal and private and should be left up to women and their families," the leading pro-abortion rights group in the state, Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, said. "This amendment is about who makes personal decisions for yourself and your family — you or the government."
While multiple state Supreme Courts have interpreted the privacy provisions in their respective constitutions to protect abortion rights, only three states, Vermont, California, and Michigan, have abortion rights enshrined explicitly in the text of their constitutions.