Anti-Abortion Advocates Struggle to Accept the Lessons of Ohio’s Issue 1 Victory

In the wake of the resounding approval of an Ohio constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to abortion Tuesday night, many anti-abortion advocates seemed to want to avoid confronting a central reality: a majority of Ohio voters, and voters nationally, clearly appear to support the right to abortion.

“They [Republicans] do not seem to realize how out of touch they are with the voters,” said Jessie Hill, a professor at Case Western University. “Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into power and have been there for so long, and they've been living in this echo-chamber for so long that I think they just kind of can't accept this defeat.”

In a lengthy post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Ohio GOP Sen. J.D. Vance was one of the rare Issue 1 opponents to acknowledge that the defeat came because of the substance of the proposal rather than tactics.

"I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible," Vance wrote. "This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality. I've seen dozens of good polls on the abortion question in the last few months, many of them done in Ohio. Give people a choice between abortion restrictions very early in pregnancy with exceptions, or the pro choice position, and the pro-life view has a fighting chance. Give people a heartbeat bill with no exceptions and it loses 65-35."

But most anti-abortion advocates contended that Issue 1 passed because of political disadvantages — that voters were sold lies by Democrats and because the anti-abortion side was outspent. Despite the significant loss - and the eighth straight at the state level since Roe v. Wade was overturned - anti-abortion advocates remain undeterred, continuing to stress that they will try to repeal the newly passed measure. 

Said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement: “Issue 1 passed because abortion activists and outside Democrat donors ran a campaign of fear to Ohio voters: vote for this ballot measure or women will die.”

Dannenfelser added that this pro-abortion “pervasive lie” was “propped up by massive ad spending, funded by George Soros and a left-wing media machine which operated like Planned Parenthood’s PR department.”

In response to the claims of outside funding and lies, Anita Somani M.D., Ohio State Representative and an obstetrics and gynecology specialist, simply said, “People are not lying and it’s not because of outside money that Ohioans voted yes.”

Anti-abortion group Protect Women Ohio similarly said in a statement: “We know that Issue 1 does not represent Ohio values. It took $35 million in out-of-state funding and ads filled with fear and deceit to push through the most radical abortion agenda in the country.”

In an email to The Messenger, Mark Harrington, president of Created Equal, an anti-abortion organization, said that the side opposed to Issue 1 was “underfunded and therefore unable to respond to the misrepresentations in their [pro-Issue 1] ads.”

While it’s true that pro-abortion rights groups outraised anti-abortion supporters, Hill said that Republicans had something abortion rights advocates didn’t, which is what she describes as the “entire machinery of the state government right behind them.”

“I think we can talk about money,” said Hill, “but you can't discount the sort of power of marshaling the entire executive and legislative branches of government to try to defeat this.” 

One clear example of this, Hill explained, is August’s special election, where voters rejected a measure, also known as Issue 1, that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution by raising the threshold to pass a voter-initiated amendment. But the measure and the election were largely understood as simply a means to prevent the abortion amendment from moving forward. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose admitted, according to reporting from the Ohio Capital Journal, that the failed Issue 1 was “100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

Another example is the battle over the measure’s Republican-written ballot language summaries, which reproductive rights advocates say is part of a larger anti-abortion strategy to convince voters that such measures are extremist. A reproductive rights group filed a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court challenging the ballot language, and arguing that the wording was “a naked attempt to prejudice voters against the Amendment.”

The success of last night’s abortion measure comes against the backdrop of a string of consistent anti-abortion defeats, in both blue and red states, since the Supreme Court struck down the national right to abortion in 2022, highlighting, as Hill noted, that anti-abortion activists are on the losing side of the abortion debate.

Despite the defeat, Republicans in Ohio have said that they will continue to fight against Issue 1.

Ohio Republican Senate President Matt Huffman, for example, said, in response to last night’s election: “This isn't the end. It is really just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1.”

And Ohio GOP House Speaker Jason Stephens similarly said that the “legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life.” He added: “This is not the end of the conversation.”

In response to a question about whether or not last night’s anti-abortion defeat will impact future messaging of the movement, Harrington said that the message needs to be “children are killed and women are harmed by abortion.”

But Hill doesn’t think that Republicans have a messaging problem or a money problem. Instead, she said, it’s simply that voters are “just not buying what they are selling.”