Ohioans head to the polls tomorrow to vote on whether to amend Ohio’s constitution to add a sweeping right to abortion. Ohio’s popular incumbent governor Mike DeWine appeared on Fox News Sunday to urge voters to vote “no” on Issue 1:
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. It would enshrine in our Constitution the right to have an abortion up until birth, any time during the pregnancy. Second thing it would do is threaten a law we had on the books for many years requiring parental consent if we’re dealing with a minor. The lawyers who wrote this were mindful for what they were doing. It is a radical proposal that does not fit Ohio.
News outlets from the New York Times to the Associated Press have perpetuated the misleading claim that the amendment would allow meaningful limits on abortion after viability, but DeWine’s analysis is correct that the undefined health exception would go far beyond threats to physical health. A National Review editorial explained that the “proposed amendment is extreme in ways the average voter would not know simply from reading the text”:
Nowhere in the amendment does it explicitly say anything about taxpayer funding of abortion on demand. But it is written in a lawyerly way to ensure that courts would invalidate Ohio’s version of the Hyde amendment because that long-standing popular limit on taxpayer funding of elective abortion would “directly or indirectly . . . interfere with or discriminate” against abortion.
The text of the amendment doesn’t say anything about striking down Ohio’s parental-consent law on abortion or creating a constitutional right for minors to get puberty blockers and sex-change operations, but it surely would do all of that by declaring that an “individual” — not an “adult” — has a sweeping constitutional right to “carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” that include but are “not limited to” abortion.
The average Ohioan would get the wrong impression by reading the text of the ballot measure that the amendment would allow meaningful limits on late-term abortion. The text of the amendment explicitly states that “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability.” But — and these are two very big buts — it also says (1) that physicians may determine viability on a “case-by-case basis,” and (2) that there is a right to abortion after viability until birth to protect “health” that is not limited to physical health. When a baby is clearly viable, threats to a mother’s physical health can be treated in minutes or hours by delivering a live baby, while a late-term abortion procedure takes days. So that provision is surely designed to enshrine a right to abortion until birth to protect mental health.