According to abortion rights advocates and abortion advocates, the future of reproductive rights will continue to be challenging given changes in the presidential administration, the makeup of the nation’s congress, and even Ohio’s statehouse.
Following Ohio’s general election, anti-abortion groups and advocates struck a triumphant tone with the second election of President-elect Donald Trump and Republican Bernie Moreno over Democratic Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown. Columbus-based Heartbeat International said voters gave Trump and Congress a “pro-life mandate to protect life.”
“Thanks to pro-life leadership in the White House and Senate, this election marks an important moment for advancing life-sustaining policies,” said Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International.
Still, the group acknowledged a “national divide” on the issue of abortion. The group called the successes of reproductive rights constitutional amendments in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York “part of the systematic dismantling of the value of life in American culture.”
Voters in only three states that put reproductive rights measures on the ballot defeated the measures: South Dakota, Nebraska and Florida. Approval of Florida’s dissolution received a majority vote, but fell low of the 60% approval required to amend the state constitution.
Six other states, including Ohio, have approved similar voting initiatives in past elections. Ohio’s voting law passed with a 57% vote last November.
Susan B. Anthony’s national group Pro-Life America celebrated the success of Ohio Senator-elect Bernie Moreno, whom the SBA Pro-Life American Candidate Fund supported in June.
The group also boasted its “largest-ever voter outreach program” that reached more than 10 million “persuasive low-turnout voters” to support Senate candidates like Moreno in all of the battleground states they considered: Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The group said it made more than 1.2 million “target voter visits” in Ohio, sent nearly 1.5 million pieces of mail and sent more than 2 million text messages to voters in the state.
Reproductive rights and abortion groups, however, say that while the election results, especially in the top-ticket races, were a defeat, the voters who turned out showed hope for the movement.
“Despite the presidential election results, a majority of voters supported gender issues.” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “Millions of people across all demographics voted for reproductive freedom, affordable child care and a decent economy – issues that NWLC will continue to fight for.”
Supporters fear the consequences Project 2025a conservative policy playbook produced by the Heritage Foundation that was associated with President-elect Donald Trump throughout the election. The author of Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC has already been chosen by Trump to head this very federal agencypending approval by the U.S. Senate.
NWLC did report before the elections about Project 2025 and its impact on certain topics, including reproductive rights.
“The key theme of the entire Project 2025 is hostility towards abortion and reproductive rights,” the report stated. “This includes removing references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” from all federal policies, regulations, contracts, and grants in order to implement what Project 2025 calls the “Agenda for Life.”
It would also include getting rid of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Task Force on Access to Reproductive Health Care and “creating a ‘pro-life’ task force to ensure the department promotes an anti-abortion agenda,” the report continues.
In the policy agenda chapter on HHS — written by Roger Severino, vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and former director of the Office for Civil Rights under the previous Trump administration — the number one goal is “to protect life, conscience, and bodily integrity.”
Severino writes that the HHS secretary “should pursue a robust program to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological reality, not ideology.”
“The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are based on a deep respect for innocent human life from day one through natural death: abortion and euthanasia do not constitute health care,” Severino wrote.
In Ohio, reproductive rights are protected under a constitutional amendment passed last year that added abortion rights until viability and other rights to the state constitution, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be legal challenges.
Planned Parenthood of Ohio expressed disappointment in the overall election results but stood firm on its plans to continue its goals for the state and beyond.
“We will continue to fight for unthreatening, inclusive communities where all people have access to the health care they need, where abortion is legal and protected, where access to contraception is not compromised, and where the decision about when and whether to start a family remains unresolved ‘fundamental right,'” Lauren Blauvelt, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, said in a statement.
But Ohio’s leading anti-abortion lobby saw Republican victories as a step toward achieving its political goals and a signal from the voting majority “of their support for pro-life candidates, from the president and the United States Senate to our Supreme Court and state legislature,” according to an Ohio statement Right to Life.
“These electoral successes have given Ohio Right to Life a mandate to pursue a sturdy pro-life statewide policy, and Right to Life Ohio looks forward to working with pro-life men and women in the General Assembly, the governor’s office and beyond to defend our most sacred right – the right to life,” we read in the statement.
Democrats picked up two seats each in the Ohio House of Representatives and the Ohio Senate, but the veto-proof Republican majority held firm heading into the 136th General Assembly next year.
While legislation has been introduced that could undermine rights granted in the constitutional amendment or at least discourage funding for them, one legislative leader said rolling back the amendment’s protections was not a political priority in his view.
State Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, who was just named to succeed Sen. Matt Huffman as Senate President in next year’s General Assembly, told the Capital Journal, “the inaction on this issue speaks for itself.”
“Since No. 1 was passed last November, there really hasn’t been much discussion about it,” McColley said. “I think overall, people realize that Ohioans have spoken and that is the case today.”
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