On Issue 1 anniversary, Ohio leader and advocates say the fight continues

The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.

Abortion was a key talking point in Ohio’s November election last year, and in the special election held one year ago this week.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose even said last summer that the special election held Aug. 8, 2023 — which proposed to raise the threshold for voters to pass constitutional amendments — was “100%” about stopping last November’s reproductive rights amendment.

Democrats and reproductive rights advocates said Thursday the fight over abortion rights will continue with candidates on the 2024 ballot holding differing views on what the future of abortion should be in the state and country.

Ohio Minority Leader Allison Russo maintained a message that Democrats and others have brought up since the anniversary of the Dobbs decision , the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 that put abortion rights into the hands of the states, undoing the national legalization that had been in place since the 1970s.

“It is clear that abortion rights are once again on the ballot in 2024,” Russo said in a Thursday press conference hosted by U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign.

Russo was joined by Cleveland OB/GYN Dr. Maria Phillis, Reproductive Freedom For All chief campaigns and advocacy officer Elizabeth Schoetz, and Ohio resident Kaitlin Rizk, who spoke about the abortion she had five years ago.

“I was very fortunate that I had the freedom to make that decision for myself,” Rizk said.

After the Dobbs decision came down and the Ohio Attorney General hurried to get a six-week abortion ban out from under its legal entanglements and back into enforcement, doctors like Phillis, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, said they were “left scrambling, trying to figure out what we could and couldn’t offer to our patients.”

She said physicians were referring patients to out-of-state facilities, only for the patients to return when the state they went to had similar bans on care.

“We watched physicians that we were trying to recruit reconsider training and practicing in our state, and we already had swaths of maternity care deserts in our state,” Phillis said.

Now that reproductive rights, including abortion, are a part of the Ohio Constitution, Phillis said she’s interviewed physicians who are “being drawn to the state” because of the rights cemented into law.

The women spoke on the anniversary of the first Issue 1, the ballot initiative brought last year by legislative leaders and championed by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose , which would have raised the threshold needed to pass a ballot initiative like the Issue 1 that followed it, the constitutional amendment to enshrine reproductive rights in the Ohio Constitution.

“We faced lies, deception and an onslaught of money spent against us, and yet that did not shake Ohioans,” Russo said.

August’s Issue 1 was soundly rejected by 57% of the voters in the special election, the same percentage that would go on to approve November 2023’s constitutional amendment for reproductive rights.

Opponents of the August effort, like Russo, urged a vote against it because it would make measures like the reproductive rights amendment unnecessarily harder to pass.

And, they said, it was planned that way on purpose, a claim LaRose verified when he said the August measure was “100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution” at a Lincoln Day dinner in May 2023.

But the passage of the reproductive rights amendment doesn’t mean the fight is over in Ohio or elsewhere, according to the women who spoke on Thursday.

Russo and the other speakers set their sights on the U.S. Senate race that pits Brown against Bernie Moreno in November, with the Democratic leader’s support unsurprisingly behind incumbent Brown, and those that support abortion rights urging voters to get to the polls in November.

“The stakes of this election in November could not be higher,” Phillis said.

There is still a concern about a national abortion ban, something that has been floated on a federal level, though candidates, including former President Donald Trump have waffled on publicly claiming their support.

Moreno rejected the idea of a national abortion ban during a primary debate , but also floated a 15-week limit on abortions. Moreno has been quoted as saying he’s “100% pro-life with no exceptions” and was endorsed in June by the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Candidate Fund, as part of a planned $92 million investment in races in Arizona, Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, according to a statement released when the group endorsed Moreno.

Moreno also has the endorsement of Ohio Right to Life, a leader in the opposition campaign against the reproductive rights amendment, according to Moreno’s website.

Sherrod Brown, for his part, said in June that he “will always support a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.”

Ohioans watching the state supreme court races see those races as another a way to set the state up for legal challenges when it comes to abortion laws and regulations, some of which are already being litigated.

Lawsuits are currently pending in Franklin County Common Pleas Court, one of which seeks to eliminate the six-week ban once and for all (for which enforcement has been paused as the suit goes through the courts), and another looking to eliminate a 24-hour waiting period and mandatory two-visit minimum for abortion services , both of which are still codified in Ohio law.

Russo said the amendment is a step in the right direction for the state, but it doesn’t mean the war is won.

“While these rights are in the constitution, we still have all of the language in the Ohio Revised Code that puts restrictions on abortions, so a lot of this will play out in our state courts and at the state supreme court,” she said on Thursday.

Even if those suits land in favor of the challengers and the laws are undone, legislation and active opposition to the amendment language is still expected to continue to come from the Republican supermajority, according to the minority leader.

“Republicans are not dumb, they’re not going to do anything before November,” Russo said. “But you better believe that the desire is there to keep the attacks and to undermine what the voters passed twice last year.”