Abortion likely to dominate Ohio’s November election

Monday’s revelation of a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a keystone of abortion rights since 1973, has touched off a firestorm, assuming the court adopts Justice Samuel Alito’s reasoning: The net effect could be to let each state’s legislature virtually end abortion inside that state.

Should the General Assembly move to further limit or even ban abortion in Ohio the Statehouse and Capitol Square will see the biggest turnout ever of angry partisans.

If the Supreme Court does in fact overturn Roe, abortion may the issue in November’s election to fill the Ohio House’s 99 seats and half the state Senate’s 33.

In Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, Ohio has a rightto-life governor, who has said he’d sign an abortion ban. And given its legislative record, the Ohio General Assembly has a de facto right-to-life majority. At a minimum, Roe v. Wade’s reversal would likely let Ohio’s heartbeat bill take effect.

It’s hard to believe, given those factors, that if a Supreme Court majority does in fact give states power to limit abortion, Ohio wouldn’t be among the first to try.

Politically speaking, given Ohio’s divisions, that’d be like lighting a match near gasoline, with mass demonstrations and the like at the Statehouse, thronged committee hearings and marathon floor debates

— all unfolding amid a male-dominated, still-gerrymandered, legislature in an Ohio whose population, the Census says, is 51% female.

Alito’s draft stressed that assigning a state’s full authority over abortion didn’t mean that the high court would also let the 50 states individually decide whether to obey or ignore other Supreme Court opinions. A good example: Obergefell v. Hodges, the case, originating in Ohio, that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Really? There’s a word for someone who thinks that canning Roe v. Wade wouldn’t threaten Obergefell: Naïve.

And when, not if, the legislature acted to all-but-ban abortion in Ohio, legislators would surely strive to insulate the in-Ohio ban from going to the ballot via voter-petitioned referendum.

That’s why voters should focus on this year’s elections for the Ohio Supreme Court, where lawsuits over any abortion-ban laws would likely end up. Of course, incumbent justices and people running for justice can’t say what stances they’d take. But cues (wink, wink) and endorsements wouldn’t be scarce.

Of course, all that assumes DeWine is reelected. He is certainly the most determined anti-abortion governor

Ohio has had.

Be it noted, though, that former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, whom Democrats nominated to challenge DeWine, is 100% prochoice, which could make of November’s gubernatorial election a kind of Ohio referendum on abortion, if the U.S. Supreme Court does overturn Roe, whether wholly, as the Alito draft would have it, or partially, in a compromise Chief Justice John Roberts is said to seek.

Especially if the court opts for Alito’s draft, fasten your seat belts, Ohioans: Your ride to November will be bumpy.