On Tuesday, Ohioans voted 57 to 43 percent in favor of adding a sweeping right to abortion to their state constitution. This result was not unexpected given the results of Ohio’s August referendum on raising the threshold for enacting constitutional amendments (a fight that became a proxy battle over abortion), but the loss nevertheless stings for advocates of the right to life. The pro-life side is now zero-for-seven in abortion referenda since the Dobbs decision in June 2022, and Ohio marks the first time a red state has added a pro-abortion amendment to its constitution.
The adversaries and false friends of the pro-life movement will undoubtedly use this loss to try to convince pro-lifers that their cause is politically toxic and that they just ought to give up. In the mind of anyone who knows the truth that abortion deliberately kills an innocent human being, giving up on the most important human-rights cause of our time is unthinkable. After five decades of Roe and less than two years from Dobbs, the fight for life in the democratic arena has barely begun.
But the loss in Ohio does occasion a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges the pro-life movement faces now and what will likely be a long battle ahead.
Since the Dobbs decision, pro-life candidates who are mainstream Republicans have fared well in general elections despite pro-life losses on up-or-down ballot questions. Ohio governor Mike DeWine, for example, signed a bill banning most abortions later than six weeks of pregnancy, when a baby’s heartbeat is detectable, and he won reelection by 26 points in a state that Trump carried by eight points two years earlier. Polling in 2022 that underestimated Republican support showed voters evenly divided on Ohio’s six-week abortion ban. Those numbers can be squared with Tuesday’s loss in part by the misleading language in the Ohio abortion amendment. The amendment was written in a way to give voters the wrong impression that it would permit meaningful limits on abortion after “viability.” Ohio voters who want some limited right to abortion may have a hazy understanding of what viability means or when a heartbeat begins. Ohio voters were also misled about the amendment’s true implications for taxpayer funding of elective abortions.
Moreover, the task of pro-lifers was complicated by the fact that the referendum covered multiple different topics, some of them only marginally related to abortion, such as “contraception, fertility treatment,” and “miscarriage care.” This led to extensive debate and litigation over how to describe the referendum on the ballot, ultimately requiring the intervention of the Ohio Supreme Court to strike some language it found “misleading.” An Ohio Northern University poll found significant changes in support for the referendum based upon how it was described. WDTN in Dayton found that “Ohio voters are still confused by the language of Issue 1.” Even the New York Times complained that “the abortion ballot question in Ohio is confusing voters,” which it naturally blamed on “misinformation” from pro-lifers. The entire process has been an object lesson in the pitfalls of making policy by ballot question.
The big split between the results for pro-life candidates and abortion ballot measures can also be explained by the simple fact that general elections rarely serve as single-issue referenda. Consider the example of a fiscal fight from a decade ago. In 2011, Ohio voters repealed via referendum the state’s law limiting the collective-bargaining power of public-sector unions 62 percent to 38 percent. Although Wisconsin is a more Democratic state, it does not allow voter-driven referenda, and when the same collective-bargaining issue was at the center of two gubernatorial elections in 2012 and 2014, Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker easily prevailed. A similar phenomenon is now playing out on the abortion issue: Georgia governor Brian Kemp easily won reelection after signing a heartbeat bill into law, and Georgia’s pro-life law is not threatened because the state does not allow voter-driven referenda.
Pro-life laws will, however, be threatened in 2024 in several more states that do allow referenda. Pro-lifers will fight to protect those laws everywhere, but they should focus resources and energy on states where they have the greatest likelihood of success. In Florida, for example, a pro-abortion constitutional amendment would require 60 percent of the vote for passage. Pro-life laws across the country will be threatened by congressional Democrats’ radical federal abortion bill, and pro-lifers would be wise to focus on denying Democrats the Senate seats needed to eliminate the filibuster and impose their extreme law on the whole country.
In the long term, the pro-life movement needs to change many more hearts and minds of Americans to win a long-lasting victory across the country. Such change will likely involve seeking incremental gains and prudent legislative compromises. It is telling that a large percentage of abortion stories in the mainstream media focus on the very small percentage of hard cases involving rape, incest, or fatal fetal-health conditions. It is also essential that pro-life officials everywhere counter the lies of the abortion-industrial complex that hospitals may need to delay treatment of conditions that threaten the life of the mother due to pro-life laws. No law requires waiting until such a threat becomes imminent to act. There has been some progress in countering such misinformation, but there is more work to be done.
It’s hard to predict the future or how long this fight will last. Advocates of same-sex marriage suffered a string of 32 losses at the ballot box before succeeding for the first time, in the bluest of states, in 2012. We disagreed with their objective, and both sides are more entrenched on the abortion issue, but their success serves as a reminder that a string of defeats at the ballot box is no reason to believe a cause is lost.
The pro-life cause will ultimately succeed in this country only when many more Americans truly appreciate the dignity of every human person. It will succeed when many more Americans understand that voluntarily targeting the weakest among us for death is always wrong, and when they know that such killing is never necessary because there are resources to support pregnant women and that adoption is always a positive alternative to abortion. In other words, it will succeed when many more Americans see that life is always better than death.