Ohio voters head to the polls this coming Tuesday, August 8, to vote on “Issue 1”—whether to raise the threshold to change the state constitution via ballot initiative from the current simple-majority requirement to 60 percent of votes cast.
The imminent significance of the August vote is a deceptively framed ballot measure to be decided in November. In that upcoming election, the vote will determine whether Ohio will add a radical pro-abortion amendment to the state’s constitution.
Conventional wisdom holds that the August effort to raise the threshold is very unlikely to prevail: The opposition to Issue 1, spearheaded by the abortion lobby, has outraised supporters by a three-to-one margin, and a recent Suffolk poll showed that Ohioans oppose Issue 1 by a whopping two-to-one margin — 57 percent to 26 percent.
But a new poll by Ohio Northern University shows the race to be a dead heat: “Among the 675 polled registered voters, 42.4% approve of Issue 1, while 41% disapprove.”
While opponents of Issue 1 argue it would be unfair to raise the threshold before the vote on the abortion amendment, supporters of Issue 1 argue that the abortion amendment is a prime example of why it should require greater consensus to rewrite the constitution via ballot initiatives. As a National Review editorial recently observed, “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.
When Virginia delegate Kathy Tran admitted under questioning in a 2019 state-legislative hearing that her abortion bill would allow abortion in months five through nine of pregnancy when a lone physician said the abortion was for reasons of mental health, the public was horrified at the prospect of such a right to infanticide, and Tran’s legislation died in a Democratic legislature. Where is the debate and deliberation about what Ohio’s abortion amendment really means? It’s practically nonexistent. The mainstream media are more than happy to parrot Planned Parenthood’s talking points.
The editorial concluded by refuting overwrought progressive arguments about Issue 1:
Ohio is unusual in that it currently allows constitutional amendments to be passed with a simple majority. In the 50 states, 32 do not allow outside groups to propose constitutional amendments, and half of the remaining 18 have greater requirements than a single simple-majority vote. On August 8, Ohioans will vote on whether to raise the threshold to 60 percent, which would put Ohio in line with Florida.
Raising the threshold for constitutional amendments to 60 percent would not prevent Ohioans from enacting laws via ballot initiatives with a simple majority. True, voter-initiated laws may be repealed by the legislature, but legislators would think twice before flatly reversing an initiative without making any concessions. And special-interest groups would think twice about slipping extreme and deceptive provisions — discernible to judges but not many voters — into proposed amendments if a greater consensus were needed to enact them.