Tuesday’s “Yes” vote on Ohio’s Issue 1 adds another tick in the “W” column for abortion rights, as anti-abortion forces have now lost every single time the people have been directly asked whether the government should be able to force us to stay pregnant against our will. It’s a tremendous relief: Ohioans have enshrined the right to access abortion and other essential reproductive care in their constitution, effectively blocking the enactment of a six-week abortion ban that has been looming over Ohio families for years.
Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights (OURR) deserve tremendous credit for making this happen. With Issue 1, the coalition overcame Republicans’ dogged determination to keep Buckeye State voters from advocating for their own bodily autonomy at the polls. The victory is all the sweeter given how hard GOP leaders — especially Gov. Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Attorney General David Yost — worked to quash support for abortion rights. Looking back on their efforts provides a delightful opportunity to experience a little schadenfreude; indeed, it’s kind of amazing how spectacularly these guys whiffed the vote, considering how much money and power they had at their fingertips.
Despite — or perhaps because of — reproductive rights advocates’ successes, Republicans further worked to twist the literal words in front of voters in November.
It started back in December 2022, almost from the first moments Ohio advocates conceived of plans to put the question to voters. Ohio Republicans and their out-of-state and dark-money donors immediately began trying a host of tactics to stymie the reproductive rights amendment.
The amendment language initially came together in February, and the bumpy ride to this month’s vote began in earnest after the proposed amendment garnered its first approval from the attorney general. In March, the Ohio Ballot Board cleared abortion rights advocates to move forward with gathering petition signatures. But those efforts were stalled by a lawsuit from Cincinnati Right to Life that ultimately fell to a ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court in June.
Around the same time, Ohio’s GOP establishment approved and began spending tens of millions on a separate special election to be held in August with the hope of raising the threshold to make changes to the state constitution. After initially pretending this was a coincidence, the secretary of state admitted the August vote was explicitly meant to make it harder for Ohioans to approve the abortion rights amendment in November. Opponents of the state GOP’s efforts filed two lawsuits, and in June, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled partially in their favor, forcing some minor changes to the language around the special election for what was then termed “Issue 1.” But the special election would move forward.
Undeterred, the reproductive rights contingent secured well beyond the 413,000 signatures necessary to get their amendment on the November ballot. Then, voters in early August overwhelmingly rejected the GOP’s efforts to hamstring future constitutional amendments.
Despite — or perhaps because of — reproductive rights advocates’ successes, Republicans further worked to twist the literal words in front of voters in November. OURR argued that voters should be able to read the full amendment’s text at the polls, but the Ohio Ballot Board took the GOP’s side, approving “misleading” anti-abortion summary language that replaced terms such as “fetus” in favor of “unborn child.” The court also upheld a number of other changes favoring Republicans’ preferred — and inaccurate — anti-abortion verbiage. To further muddle the issue in front of voters, Republicans named OURR’s November abortion amendment “Issue 1” — introducing potential confusion after pro-abortion-rights groups had previously encouraged Ohioans to vote “no” on the August “Issue 1.” And just in case the semantic tomfoolery were not enough, LaRose quietly booted over 26,000 voters from the rolls last week.
That these efforts didn’t work is no reason to suppose the GOP will give up and play fair the next time around.
Amid all this legal and bureaucratic finagling, a wild battle over messaging played out, with state Republicans fighting to convince voters of what the Akron Beacon Journal editorial board described as “outright lies” about Issue 1. Ohio GOP officials repeatedly made dramatic and patently false assertions about later abortion, the loss of parental rights and “abortion on demand” in an attempt to scare and shame voters.
That these efforts didn’t work is no reason to suppose the GOP will give up and play fair the next time around — if anything, we can expect to see them play even dirtier. Republicans cannot win with voters unless they cheat, lie and weaponize misogynist, racist and classist notions about abortion providers, people who have abortions, and American families writ large in order to achieve their ends. They have manipulated American voters and turned us against one another, convincing us to sacrifice our most cherished rights and tried to make us believe that people who have abortions are not our friends, our mothers and sisters and daughters, our wives and our co-workers, or our neighbors or our baristas or our lawyers or doctors or military service members or legislators.
They want us to believe that people who have abortions are ghoulish banshees who have post-birth abortions for fun, sluts who refuse to submit to the calming dictates of motherhood, or greedy gold-diggers who thrill at the chance to bilk the government out of cash for a trip to the abortionist. They want us to believe that anyone who has an abortion is anyone other than us, regular folks, who have abortions for a thousand reasons to which no one, ever, is entitled.
And they certainly don’t want us to go to the polls, together, to see just how craven and desperate their lies are as we cast our ballots alongside our friends and neighbors. Because we will expose them every single time.
