A recent bill in the Ohio State Legislature, filed by the Republican Party, seeks to prohibit state funding for abortion-related services, for which similar laws and regulations already exist.
State Rep. Josh Williams, a Republican from Sylvania, introduced House of Representatives Bill No. 475 last week. The bill “would prohibit state funds from going to entities that support, promote, or provide abortions.”
The bill would also require counties and municipal corporations to report abortion-related expenditures and to “withhold and reallocate state local government funds from a county or municipal corporation that makes such expenditures to pregnancy resource centers.” language in the bill.
The bill would deprive local governments of funding if counties or municipalities are found to be providing reimbursement for abortion services or “for any related activities, including travel and donations to entities that support, promote or provide abortion.”
The bill does not specify the definition of “pregnancy support centers” but may refer to “pregnancy crisis centers” that are supported by religious organizations and Republicans.
This term is often used in reference to heavily criticized objects that don’t provide information about abortion services, and some don’t include medical services in their packages beyond ultrasounds. Crisis pregnancy centers in Ohio have also been found to apply debunked medical information, such as an increased risk of breast cancer in pregnant women who have abortions.
The bill would establish an “abortion adjustment fund” to receive deposits from local government funds that are withheld if the funds are used to reimburse the costs of abortion services or if a county fails to report to the state auditor and tax commissioner on abortion-related expenditures.
Local government funds have long been burdened by the burden of using increasingly smaller funds to support increasingly larger budgets. Over the past 10 years, localities have had more than $1 billion in funding gaps needed to fund police and emergency medical services, as well as other entities on which their residents depend.
In its 2022-23 budget, the Ohio General Assembly set the local government fund at 1.66% of the state’s general revenue fund, up from 1.68% in 2020-21. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich blamed the economic downturn on his decision to raise the local government fund from 3.68% to 1.66% during his term.
The local government fund represented 1.7% of the state’s GRF in the fiscal year 2024–25 operating budget.
“When revenues distributed through LGF decline, it puts communities and their taxpayers in a difficult position — forcing local leaders to consider raising local taxes, cutting services, or both,” the Ohio Municipal League wrote in a statement White Paper on LGF in August 2023, immediately after the adoption of the latest budget.
The bill would be an addition to previous laws that already regulate state funding for abortion services. There are already laws on the books that prevent Ohio Department of Health Funding used for the Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act program, grants distributed under the “HIV/AIDS Minority Initiative,” the “Personal Responsibility Education Program,” and funds for infant mortality reduction or “infant vitality” initiatives to be used to promote or perform “abortion without treatment.”
The Act also provides for a statute Ohio Department of Job and Family Services General Provisions which explicitly states that “state or local public funds may not be used to subsidize abortion,” except in the case of rape, incest or endangering the health of a pregnant woman.
But Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who is also a lead attorney in lawsuits challenging state abortion laws, says the changes to the law in this recent bill “would be even more sweeping because it would provide that no state funds could go to any entity that performs, promotes, or supports abortion, even if it does not use state funds to do so,” and abortions are not narrow to “nontherapeutic” abortions under the bill.
“Therefore, under the proposed law, a public hospital could likely lose all state funding simply for performing an emergency abortion to save a woman’s life,” Hill told the OCJ.
The bill must still go to committee, where it will be subject to a public hearing.
