Pro-life groups in Ohio have funded a $5 million ad campaign exposing a proposed amendment that would enshrine abortion into the state constitution as a “right.”
The television and social media ads by Protect Women Ohio (PWO) will be airing over the next four weeks while a coalition of abortion rights groups will be circulating petitions, trying to get more than 413,388 valid signatures needed by July 5 to put the issue on the Ohio ballot this November, according to Statehouse News Bureau.
PWO says it is a “pro-woman, pro-parent coalition.”
NEW: In response to the for-profit abortion industry’s new anti-parent amendment in Ohio, Protect Women Ohio has launched a $5M ad campaign to keep Ohio safe for women, girls, and babies. pic.twitter.com/GGYCFey9Gy
— Protect Women Ohio (@ProtectWomenOH) March 15, 2023
Earlier this month, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost approved the language of the amendment that would make abortion a right in the Buckeye State, according to several outlets.
The amendment reads:
- “Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.”
- “The State shall not directly or indirectly burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either an individual’s voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right, unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual’s health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.”
The Ohio Ballot Board approved the amendment’s language last week, giving the group Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom, and the Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, the backers of the amendment, the authority to begin collecting signatures to get it on the ballot.
Pro-life critics are speaking out against the proposed amendment, warning the measure would outlaw any restrictions on abortion and other operations for adults and minors, including sex-change surgeries.
In an op-ed published by The National Review on Sunday, Ed Sitter, executive director of Greater Toledo Right to Life, warned if the amendment is passed, “it would make Ohio the home of one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the country. It would enshrine radical abortion policy in our state constitution and bring taxpayer-funded abortions anytime during pregnancy — yes, all nine months.”
“Despite its fraudulent title, ‘The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety,’ the amendment does absolutely nothing to protect women and girls. Instead, it abolishes existing health and safety protections for women and girls — such as our current state law requiring abortionists to have hospital-admitting privileges or to be up to the same code as other outpatient surgical centers in case something goes wrong.”
Sitter also noted that under the amendment, a minor daughter could have an abortion without her parent’s consent or knowledge.
“The amendment language does this by clearly forbidding any law that ‘directly or indirectly’ would ‘burden’ or ‘interfere’ with any ‘reproductive decisions.’ Those specific legal terms have been interpreted by courts across the country to strike down virtually every law, including parental notification and parental-consent laws and women’s health and safety protections — not to mention laws preventing taxpayer dollars from paying for abortions,” he wrote.
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In addition, some pro-life conservatives are warning the language in the amendment would not only do away with parental consent to have an abortion, it would also “effectively obliterate most limits to abortion or sex-change surgery, among its other far-reaching consequences,” according to Judicial Crisis Network‘s Carrie Severino and Frank Scaturo’s March 13 op-ed in The National Review.
“Headlines have largely framed the proposed amendment as a means of adding a right to abortion to the state constitution. But if it became law, the measure would go much further,” Severino and Scaturo noted.
“The proposed amendment would outlaw virtually any restrictions on abortion and all other procedures, including sex-change surgeries, that touch on reproduction, for both adults and minors. It would cancel out not only parental-consent laws but also mere parental notification for minors’ abortions or sex-change surgeries; strike down health protections for people of all ages who undergo these procedures, including requirements that a qualified physician perform them; and erase any meaningful limits on late-term abortions,” the two explained.
Ohio Pastor J.C. Church told Frontlines Ohio that this is more than simply fighting a proposed amendment, “it’s a battle of good versus evil.”
“Planned Parenthood’s insatiable lust for money knows no boundaries,” Church said. “They do not care if our state goes backward in time with this proposed amendment to the Dark Ages. This barbaric amendment will make Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors look like child’s play. Unfortunately, I have to tell my grandbabies that ‘Yes, there are such things as monsters in this world.’ This election is all hands on deck. This is a matter of good versus evil.”
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