Last month, I called attention to a wild ruling by Ohio common pleas court judge Christian Jenkins that held that the Health Care Freedom Amendment adopted by Ohio voters in 2011 had the wholly unforeseen and undebated effect of creating a state constitutional right to abortion and that the Ohio heartbeat law violates that right. Jenkins entered a temporary restraining order barring state officers from enforcing the heartbeat law.

Last week, Jenkins predictably imposed a preliminary injunction to supersede his TRO. Jenkins repeated his holding that the Ohio constitution confers a constitutional right to abortion. He further found that “the diversity of views on the issue of a fetus’s moral status” somehow means that Ohio does not have a compelling interest in protecting potential [sic] life as early as six weeks” into pregnancy.

Jenkins seems not to recognize that Ohio legislators resolved the diversity of views by enacting the heartbeat law and, in so doing, discerned a compelling interest in protecting the actual (not merely potential) lives of unborn human beings. Through his deceptive wordplay, he uses the “diversity of views on the issue of a fetus’s moral status” to impose what is obviously his own view—that the unborn human being is not entitled to any significant legal protection.