Abortion messaging roils debate over Ohio ballot initiative

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%. 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 who urgently advanced the measure said it had nothing to do with thwarting an abortion rights questionworking toward the ballot this fall. However, 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% 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 U.S. Supreme Court could limit rights to at-home contraception and Issue 1 would make it harder to enshrine those in Ohio’s state constitution, “the direct, immediate issue is abortion,” said Susan Burgess, a political science professor at Ohio University. The divergent abortion communications around Issue 1 reflects a big problem Republicans in Ohio must confront: holding an increasingly diverse voting bloc together, Burgess said.