All the Desperate Tactics Ohio Republicans Are Using Ahead of Tuesday’s Abortion Vote

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers celebrated the ruling for giving power back to the states. But now that voters in several states have chosen to keep abortion legal, conservatives are shitting their pants and doing everything they can to try to poison the well of direct democracy. Ohio is the next state that will vote on abortion, with an election wrapping up on November 7, and opponents’ frantic efforts to try to block Issue 1 from passing have gotten truly desperate in the final weeks.

Issue 1 would codify the right to choose an abortion in the state constitution, and would also enshrine the right to make decisions about birth control, miscarriage care, and fertility treatment; the pro-choice position is voting “yes.” Conservatives probably thought they had this one in the bag because Democrats have struggled in statewide races in Ohio, and Issue 1 asks people to affirmatively vote for abortion rights, versus rejecting further restrictions. (Other pro-choice victories in red states like Kansas and Kentucky have come via such “no” votes.)

But it turns out people like access to abortion in Ohio: a conservative effort to thwart the ballot measure failed in August and Issue 1 is currently polling with 58% support. So, cue the hysterical efforts to try to tank it.

Here are all the things conservatives have done to mislead voters about the amendment itself and what’s at stake if people vote no. As you’ll see, it’s a whole lot of nonsense...but voting doesn’t close for another week, so unfortunately there’s probably more to come.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) cut an ad for Protect Women Ohio, a coalition opposing Issue 1, in which he claimed that whether people are pro-choice or pro-life, the ballot measure is “just not right for Ohio.” And his wife, Fran, chimes in to say that “Issue 1 just goes too far.” What they don’t mention in the ad is that DeWine himself signed a six-week abortion ban in 2019—it’s currently blocked but the state Supreme Court could let it take effect at any time. If voters pass Issue 1 and protect abortion in the state constitution, there’s no legal basis for the ban to stand. If Issue 1 fails, there’s nothing stopping the ban from taking effect.

Cleveland.com reported that groups who supported the six-week ban in the past have “begun to act like it doesn’t exist” as Election Day approaches. Anti-abortion advocates are instead dancing around the issue, or telling voters that abortion is legal through 22 weeks, which is only true for now. Protect Women Ohio wrote on Twitter that “Voting against Issue 1 will not ban abortion in Ohio. Ohio’s current reasonable abortion laws would remain the same.” These are lies of omission.

The aforementioned six-week ban lacks exceptions for rape and incest; when the ban was temporarily in effect in 2022, a 10-year-old rape survivor had to leave the state to get an abortion. But DeWine said last week not to worry about that, because he told ABC6 he now supports the exceptions and he’d get the legislature to pass them. He urged people to vote no and trust that state lawmakers would add the exceptions—and if that doesn’t work, they can simply hold another statewide vote.

“If the legislature doesn’t come up with something that is acceptable to a majority of Ohioans, we can go back to the ballot,” DeWine said. He said similar in an interview with CNN, claiming that blocking Issue 1 “will give us the opportunity in Ohio to try to come up with something that the majority of Ohioans can support.” It’s a laughable claim given that the majority doesn’t support a six-week ban, and probably still wouldn’t, even if lawmakers added lots more exceptions.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) ordered the purge of nearly 27,000 inactive voters in late September but didn’t announce the move as his office has done in the past. News outlets reported on it last week after the registration deadline had closed for people to vote in this election. After local voting groups and a state lawmaker criticized the move, LaRose’s office claimed he was simply “ensuring the integrity and accuracy of Ohio’s elections.”

At the state level, the Secretary of State is the top elections official and boy has LaRose been busy. He drafted an amendment summary that appears at the top of the ballot that replaced the word “fetus” with “unborn child” and falsely claims that Issue 1 would “always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability.” The state Supreme Court—where Gov. DeWine’s son Patrick serves as a justice—upheld the changes.

Ohio currently requires minors to get consent from one parent or guardian for an abortion, unless a judge rules that involving a parent isn’t in the minor’s best interest. But in a recent podcast interview, Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno falsely claimed that Issue 1 would result in “stripping parental rights” which he claims would allow a rapist to get a girl pregnant and then “force” her into an abortion because he wouldn’t even need to pose as her father. Tracy Thomas, director of the Center for Constitutional Law at the University of Akron Law School in Ohio, told NBC News that Issue 1 only protects “voluntary” decisions about reproductive care. “Someone who is assisting in an abortion that’s not voluntary is not going to be protected by this at all,” she said. Even Republican attorney general Dave Yost noted in a legal analysis published in October that the amendment “does not specifically address parental consent.”

Issue 1 says Ohioans have the right to make reproductive healthcare decisions “including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.” Opponents have seized on the “not limited to” part. In the aforementioned podcast interview, Moreno said Issue 1 would “open a door to transgender surgeries.” Ohio Right to Life is also making this trans panic claim on social media. But lawyers have already called them out for this misleading tactic. Jonathan Entin, a constitutional law expert and professor emeritus at the Case Western Reserve School of Law, told NBC News that courts have long held that “not limited to” only covers things that are plausibly related to what’s mentioned in the law. “Gender-affirming care is a big stretch from the items that are in the list,” Entin said.

When the six-week ban was temporarily in effect in 2022, a 10-year-old rape survivor had to leave the state to get an abortion. Her mother took her to Indiana, where abortion provider Dr. Caitlin Bernard took care of her and reported the rape to police. But one state lawmaker is claiming that’s not what happened—state Rep. Gary Click (R) wrote on Twitter that it was actually the rapist who took the girl to Indiana and that “Issue 1 will protect people like him.” Thankfully the post got a fact-check via the Community Notes feature.

Not content with obscuring the existence of his own six-week ban and dangling the prospect of meager exceptions, DeWine is also falsely claiming that Issue 1 would overrule a federal ban on an abortion procedure that’s been in effect for more than 15 years. DeWine recently told reporters that he opposed the ballot measure because he claimed it would allow a procedure known as dilation and extraction, or D&X, which was previously used for both abortions and miscarriages in the second and third trimesters. “Previously” is the active word here as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal D&X ban in 2007 and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution means federal laws take precedent over state ones. But it sure sounds like Mike just wants to be a demagogue about abortions later in pregnancy as a last-ditch effort to sink Issue 1.

The Republican-controlled Ohio Senate launched a blog in late September on the chamber’s official government site that it’s been using to print misinformation about Issue 1. State Sen. Kristina Roegner (R) wrote a piece in which she falsely claims that Issue 1 would allow “the dismemberment of fully conscious children.” State Sen. Michele Reynolds (R) said that it would permit “gruesome late-term abortions of fully conscious babies.” The blog is called “On the Record,” and because it’s hosted on a government site, Google is prioritizing it in search results. One expert in online misinformation told the Associated Press said she’d never seen anything like it. “It’s a really strategic way to make something appear to be neutral information and fact when that’s not the reality,” said Laura Manley, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s really smart in a really devious way.”

It’s quite possible that all of the despicable tactics are because Republicans failed to kneecap the ballot measure via a special election held in August. Backing up: After word got out that abortion advocates wanted to put the issue to voters, the Republican-controlled legislature authorized a summer election on whether to raise the threshold ballot measures need to pass from 50% to 60%. They did so despite passing a bill in late 2022 that would end August special elections unless needed to fill a Congressional seat. (LaRose, the official who oversaw the voter purge, admitted to supporters at a closed-door event in May that the election was “100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”) That effort failed and Issue 1 only needs a simple majority to pass.