Both Sides Look for Tips for Future Abortion Battles in Aftermath of Ohio’s ‘Issue 1’ Defeat

The after-action analysis is well underway in Ohio in the wake of the resounding defeat of 'Issue 1' earlier this month, which marked the latest in a string of losses for the anti-abortion movement.

Abortion rights supporters and scholars say the main reasons behind the vote - which removed a major hurdle for the passage of an abortion rights amendment on the November ballot - are pretty clear: anti-abortion measures are simply unpopular, in Ohio and elsewhere; the anti-abortion movement is increasingly divided; and anti-abortion messaging following the Supreme Court’s June 2022 verdict in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, ending the national right to abortion, has been ineffective.

Anti-abortion activists argue that the measure, which didn't impact abortion policy directly but would have increased the threshold to amend the constitution from a simple majority to a 60% majority, was hard for voters to understand and that constitutional amendments on any topic face an uphill battle.

But the Ohio result has clearly only increased the anxiety in the anti-abortion movement. “It is a sad day for Ohio and a warning for pro-life states across the nation,” anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said in a statement in response to the failure of Issue 1. “Millions of dollars and liberal dark money flooded Ohio to ensure they have a path to buy their extreme policies in a pro-life state.”

The clearest reason why the anti-abortion movement lost is that Ohioans overwhelmingly support abortion rights. 

According to a recent poll of 500 Ohio voters from USA Today and Suffolk University, 58% of participants support an amendment that enshrines the right to abortion into the state constitution. And more broadly, across the country, per recent Gallup polling, 85% of Americans believe in abortion in some situations. 

But, general abortion support is something that anti-abortion groups simply haven’t reckoned with, explained Daniel Skinner, professor of health policy at Ohio University. Anti-abortion activists, he added, often operate in an echo chamber, and prior to this month’s special election, these groups weren’t conducting on the ground polling or tracking sentiment  

“When you're doing this kind of broad-based policy work, you need to get a sense of where your support actually is,” said Skinner, “I think they [anti-abortion groups] just blew it.”

In an email to The Messenger, Mark Harrington, president of Created Equal, an anti-abortion organization, which conducted a door to door phone banking campaign in support of Issue 1, said that he was “not necessarily” surprised by the outcome of the election. “We knew it would be an uphill battle from the start,” he added. 

Harrington thinks that the reason Issue 1 failed is because the “yes side” or a vote in favor of Issue 1, is always at a disadvantage when it comes to constitutional amendments because “a lot of people don’t often want to change the status quo.” And, he added, he doesn’t believe that Ohio voters “were convinced that there was a big enough problem currently to be remedied by the proposed change.” 

Also contributing to Issue 1’s failure, is, in part, that the anti-abortion movement isn’t unified on messaging in a post-Roe landscape. 

“Anti-abortion folks are really struggling to find a message,” said Jessie Hill, an attorney representing the ACLU of Ohio and Planned Parenthood against the state’s six-week ban and a law professor at Case Western University. “They can't get their message together on the merits of the abortion issue because they know that the majority isn't with them.”

Following the Dobbs decision, abortion restrictions are no longer theoretical, she explained. So, in a post-Roe world, Hill added, anti-abortion advocates realize that they can’t keep messaging “fetal life” or “unborn children” in the abstract.  

“Since Dobbs, there have been just so many stories about people really suffering because of these bans,” Hill said. “In the face of that, I think that whatever their rhetoric has been about how ‘nobody ever needs an abortion, abortion's never medically necessary,’ etc. just really falls flat.”

Similarly, Skinner identified, what he described as “an interesting existential moment right now in Ohio where they might actually ban abortion.” 

The problem, he explained, is that anti-abortion advocates aren’t in agreement about what an abortion ban might look like practically. There’s disagreement, for example, amongst anti-abortion advocates on weather or not there should be exceptions for abortion in cases of rape or incest. 

“These groups who've talked about abortion endlessly for decades,” he said, “they still haven't figured out exactly not just what they want, but what's practically workable in a society where people get pregnant under a whole range of different conditions.”

Harrington, acknowledged that the anti-abortion movement is diverse, with “individual organizations representing states or regions doing different things,” but called the diversity a good thing. He added that  “we have a strong coalition in Ohio,” who is “unified behind defeating this radical and extreme amendment.”

It’s also worth noting, as Hill does, that Ohio’s special election wasn’t solely about abortion. Yes, it was a significant part of the messaging on both sides, and can, to some degree, be considered a proxy fight about abortion, but, Hill said, the election was also more broadly representative of a kind of hypocrisy on the part of the legislature. And it was this hypocrisy that some Ohioans also voted against, she explained. 

This past May, the nonpartisan coalition One Person One Vote, filed a lawsuit in the state Supreme Court, challenging the legality of August’s special election because only months prior, Ohio Republicans implemented a law to do away with August special elections. But, in June the court, rejecting this argument, allowed this month’s special election to proceed. 

Generally, Hill said, Ohioans did not like what looked to them like “a dirty trick” on the part of the state legislature. “Just the utter hypocrisy—that factor's not lost on Ohioans,” Hill said. “The legislature had just gotten rid of special elections and then tried to sneak this issue past them in a special election.”

Despite a disappointing outcome for anti-abortion activists this month, Harrington is expecting a different outcome in the November election, where voters will decide on a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the state’s constitution. 

“The pro-life, pro-parental rights message is more persuasive than the 'protect our constitution’ message,” he said. Religious congregations will also be “more activated” than they were about Issue 1 also, Harrington added. “So, if we can turn out our base, we can win.”

And his organization Created Equal has been educating voters since early spring, and “the message is more clear and persuadable,” he said. “We also have the advantage of being on the no side in November.”