As Election Day nears, the stakes of the vote on whether to amend the state constitution to make abortion a fundamental right become clear.
On the site today, we have an excellent article by Carrie Campbell Severino and Frank Scaturro about this fall’s ballot initiative on abortion in Ohio. Ohioans will vote (and are voting, or have already voted, given that early and absentee voting began on October 11) on Issue 1. A yes vote would amend the state’s constitution to make abortion a fundamental right; a no vote would maintain the status quo in the state.
The yes side has waged a deceptive campaign, attempting to present the proposed change as moderate. But that is not the case. As I explained (with help from Ohio pro-life activists I interviewed) in an article for National Review this month, the amendment is designed with a strategic vagueness that would make it not only a sledgehammer to be used against the state’s existing abortion laws but also a means to impose on the state an abortion regime more extreme than that entailed by Roe v. Wade.
In their article, Severino and Scaturro focus on one of the more worrying possibilities: that Ohio taxpayers would be made to fund abortions. As they explain:
Recall the breadth of the proposed amendment’s text, which provides the following regarding the “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” covered by the amendment: “The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either: 1. An individual’s voluntary exercise of this right or 2. A person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right.” Not only would the state constitution explicitly protect abortion and other procedures involving the human reproductive system, but it also would do so in such absolute terms that even indirectly burdening, interfering with, or discriminating against their provision would be verboten.
They go on to cite ominous legal precedent, likely to gain renewed salience in the event of Issue 1’s affirmation, which would support the classification of financial obstacles to procuring abortion as a kind of burden and therefore require public remediation.
To secure victory, the yes side is not above prevarication. Some of it is intended to confuse Catholic voters, of whom there are many in the state. Earlier this year, the pro-abortion side aired an ad that included an image of a man kneeling inside a (Catholic-looking) church as a narrator cites “our faith” as a guide to making “personal medical decisions.” Unsurprisingly, the group that misleadingly calls itself “Catholics for Choice” has entered the fray. Catholic News Agency reports that the dubiously named pro-abortion organization is conducting an advertising blitz on behalf of Issue 1, putting up billboards across the state. “Pro-choice Catholics: You are not alone,” reads one such billboard. “Vote Yes on Issue 1.”
Catholics for Choice has been up to such dissimulating shenanigans for a while (and has been condemned and repudiated by the Catholic Church for them). In 2021, the group claimed, in direct defiance of Catholic teaching: “Abortion is not a sin. It’s okay to get an abortion because you want an abortion.” And last year, the day before the March for Life, the group projected pro-abortion messaging onto the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Its latest campaign is just as offensive, not just because of the Church’s clarity on the matter of abortion but also because the Catholic Church in Ohio has taken a very strong and public stand against Issue 1. Ohio voters should not be deceived, and they should reject the extremism of Issue 1.