Despite extraordinary efforts by Ohio’s Republican overlords in 2023 to stop Ohioans from amending their constitution with a simple majority vote, they failed.
Ohio voters saw through the ruse peddled by legislative right-wingers to raise the bar for passing constitutional amendments to a 60% threshold.
GOP schemers tried to steal the majority voting rights of Ohioans in a sleepy special election in August 2023. The goal was to grab power from the people ahead of the fall election to sink a statewide vote on legalizing abortion as a constitutional right.
But by a clear majority voters said no to the underhanded attempt by Republican lawmakers to make it harder, if not impossible, for grassroots initiatives to pass with a supermajority, and yes to protecting access to abortion and reproductive freedom in the Ohio Constitution.
In a functioning democracy, sovereignty of the people is supreme; government derives its legitimacy only through the consent of the governed.
Under one-party rule in Ohio, however, entrenched, gerrymandered politicians routinely reject that foundational premise and do their own thing.
Even though 57% of Ohioans voted for the right to abortion in the state with restrictions, grandstanding anti-abortion zealots in the Ohio Statehouse have advanced a slew of bills as if voters never approved any constitutional protections for reproductive healthcare.
The election year legislation to restrict or abolish access to abortion runs the gamut of mandated 24-hour waiting periods for patients seeking the procedure to state information (scientifically unsupported) dispensed in medical consultations, prescription limitations on abortion medication, (used safely by millions of women for decades), and even a state registry to track all pregnancies, in a nod to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
A related measure (making the rounds in Republican-led state legislatures around the country) would require yearly screenings of a controversial video produced by an anti-abortion group in public schools to indoctrinate Ohio students with misinformation about fetal development.
Some, or all, of the anti-abortion measures proposed and passed by at least one chamber of the Ohio General Assembly so far, will be contested in court as unconstitutional.
Forcing women to “reflect” on their decision to terminate a pregnancy for 24-hours and arrange for extra doctor visits appears to be in direct conflict with the abortion rights amendment prohibition against the state “directly or indirectly” burdening access to abortion unless it can demonstrate it is using the least restrictive means to protect patient health with widely accepted, evidence-based standards of care.
Yet Ohio House Republicans passed Ohio House Bill 347 last week even as a court put a similar waiting period on hold in a case challenging its constitutionality.
State Rep. Josh Williams, one of five Republicans running in Ohio’s 9th congressional District to unseat longtime Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur, is a co-sponsor of the ironically named SHE WINS Act, an acronym for “Share the Health and Empower with Informed Notices,” which is one step closer to becoming law (again) in Ohio.
The MAGA climber insisted that the mandatory time-out for women — made to wait a minimum of 24 hours and receive compulsory state dogma in person before they can access their desired abortion — was in line with standard informed consent medical practice.
But the Sylvania lawmaker could not cite any other medical procedures that had legislatively required waiting periods — which may add discriminatory to an inevitable lawsuit against H.B. 347 as a blatant violation of the state constitution.
Still, Williams maintained that his contrived restrictions against adult female patients seeking reproductive health care (that he opposes) simply “gives informed consent to women who are considering undergoing an abortion procedure” because “women deserve to know what they are going through, what the potential complications are, what are the long-term effects of the decisions they’re going to make.”
Translation: The little ladies, unsophisticated as they are in these weighty matters of reproductive choice, need the state to dictate the parameters of their doctor-patient relationships for them.
The rank condescension is striking.
Yet Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman is all for the medically unnecessary and logistically burdensome 24-hour waiting period legislation and scoffs at arguments that it is an unconstitutional barrier to a legal medical procedure.
“If somebody wants to get an abortion, this (H.B 347) isn’t going to stop them or really even delays them,” said the Lima Republican who spearheaded the GOP’s unsuccessful campaigns to end Ohioans’ majority voting rights and defeat the abortion rights amendment.
Of course, state-ordered delays for women seeking abortions infringes on their constitutional right to choose without patronizing political interference.
Of course, pending legislation (Ohio House Bill 783) that would require health care providers to inform patients about medically groundless “abortion pill reversal” treatments is an affront to women best served by evidence-based facts with their health care.
Of course, another measure requiring certified reporting of all fetal life and deaths in the state would affect patients dealing with pregnancy loss for any reason.
Of course, none of these extreme anti-abortion bills fashioned by pandering politicians are what Ohioans voted for three years ago.
But until Ohioans spend as much time focused on the Ohio Statehouse as the White House, Ohio’s unchecked overlords will continue doing their own thing regardless of what a decisive majority of voters want.
On abortion rights. Legalized weed. Massive data centers. Fracking in state parks. Funding for public education. Commonsense gun reform.
Your sovereignty is not supreme in your legislature, but it should be.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.
