Abortion politics roil debate over Ohio ballot initiative

Vote would raise threshold to alter state constitution

COLUMBUS — The fraught politics of abortion have helped turn an August ballot question in Ohio that would make it harder to change the state constitution into a cauldron of misinformation and fear-mongering.

State Issue 1, the sole question on the ballot, calls for raising the threshold for passing future changes to the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent. Starting next year, it also would double the number of counties where signatures must be gathered, from 44 to all 88, and do away with the 10-day grace period for closing gaps in the total valid signatures submitted.

Republican state lawmakers and the GOP elections chief urgently advanced the proposal as an abortion rights question was working its way toward the ballot this fall. However, they insisted it had nothing to do with thwarting that measure.

But early summer messaging on social media and in churches has consistently urged a yes vote on the August amendment “to protect life” — and that’s just one example of the loaded messages confronting voters during the campaign.

Protect Women Ohio, the campaign against the fall abortion issue, is airing pro-Issue 1 ads suggesting that abortions rights proponents at work in the state “encourage minors to get sex change surgeries and want to trash parental consent.” The fall abortion amendment would protect access to various forms of reproductive health care but makes no mention of gender surgery, and the attorneys who wrote it say Ohio’s parental consent law would not be affected.

Groups opposing Issue 1 also have played on voters’ fears with their messaging against the 60 percent threshold. One spot by the Democratic political group Progress Action Fund shows a couple steamily groping in their bedroom, then interrupted by a white-haired Republican congressman who has come to take their birth control. It closes with a caption: “Keep Republicans Out of Your Bedroom. Vote No On Aug. 8.”

While the ad is based in fears that the US Supreme Court could limit rights to at-home contraception and Issue 1 would make it harder to enshrine those in Ohio’s Constitution, “the direct, immediate issue is abortion,” said Susan Burgess, a political science professor at Ohio University.

“That is a complicated coalition that includes evangelicals; it includes people on the far right, it includes libertarians,” she said. “They need to be able to talk about abortion to hold a certain part of their coalition together, but it’s not a political winner at this time for them to stick to a hard-line abortion argument.”

Issue 1 supporters’ conversations in more targeted settings reflect that duality.

Mark Caleb Smith, a political science professor at southwest Ohio’s Cedarville University, said abortion is emotionally charged and easy to understand — and can therefore engage Ohioans to donate, volunteer, and vote when they otherwise wouldn’t bother with an off-season election about something as esoteric as how to amend the Constitution.

Calling Issue 1 abortion-related also reflects the truth that its passage is pivotal to whether November’s abortion ballot issue passes in Ohio, Smith said. Amendments protecting access to abortion in other states have typically passed — but with less than 60 percent of the vote. AP VoteCast polling last year found 59 percent of Ohio voters say abortion should generally be legal.

Kayla Griffin, Ohio state director of All Voting Is Local Action and an opponent of Issue 1, said her side wants to keep the messaging on Issue 1 broader than just abortion.

“While abortion is on the ballot right now, minimum wage is next,” she said. “We are bigger and our democracy is far bigger than a single issue, and we have to be able to navigate that.”