Opponents of abortion in Ohio are at odds not only over how to frame their opposition to a reproductive rights initiative on the state’s November ballot, but also over their longer-term goals for how severely they would restrict the procedure .

The disagreements, which roil the anti-abortion side just six weeks before Election Day, offer an insight into the challenges the broader movement is preparing to confront next year. Initiatives to protect reproductive rights are expected in several states, and abortion will be a central issue in candidate races up and down the ballot.

Scattershot campaign messages in Ohio point to some of the internal conflict between members of the broad anti-abortion coalition that opposes the constitutional amendment that would protect access to abortion in Ohio.

Early ads played on voters’ fears by warning that the amendment, known as Issue 1, would be a gateway to teens getting abortions and gender transition surgeries without their parents’ consent. Other efforts have focused on advancing legal arguments about the specific wording of the amendment, including the meaning of reproductive health care.”

In its first statewide TV ad, which aired last week, the opposition Protect Women Ohio campaign went in yet another direction. It combined clips of the former president

Donald

Trump and president

Joe

Biden on screen to try to unite Republicans and Democrats against the proposal’s ability to protect abortions up to the ninth month of pregnancy, even as health statistics show late-term abortions are a rarity and typically reserved for life-threatening circumstances.

Terry Casey, a Republican consultant from Ohio, said the opposition campaign’s reliance on two unpopular politicians in the ad only prolongs a disjointed approach that is ultimately unlikely to win victory with voters.

The main thing I look at is: What is the message on the no side, and is it clear and understandable?,” he said. “So far I have not seen that, nor that they have the money and resources to bring the issue to the 11.5 million residents of Ohio.”

Casey said Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, the coalition advocating for a yes vote, appears to have developed a consistent message: freedom from government interference in one’s personal reproductive health decisions, and stuck to it. That’s easier when you’re on a winning streak, he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Roe vs. Wade pushed the abortion issue back to the United States. The voters have been in since then

both

The Democratic and deeply Republican states of California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont have voted to protect the right to abortion in some form. Questions about abortion rights are scheduled to take place in more than six states next year.

David Zanotti, president and CEO of the conservative American Policy Roundtable, said it is crystal clear that the abortion rights movement was ready for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v.

S

. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and that “the anti-abortion community was not.

For 50 years we didn’t have to think about this because the big people in the black robes said it wasn’t your business, he said. Now suddenly it’s our business.

Republicans across the country are divided over how to proceed on the issue, especially as the string of defeats is supported by public opinion polls showing that about two-thirds of people in the United States believe abortion should generally be legal must be. Are Republicans taking advantage of Dobbs’ decision to push for an abortion-free future, give in to a patchwork of individual state laws or compromise on federal legislation?

Protect Women Ohio is largely funded by the campaign arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading national anti-abortion group. Last spring, the organization named Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and one-time Trump adviser

ooh

r, to put pro-life candidates on the attack during the 2024 election cycle.

Conway and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony, defined what they mean by pro-life when they wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that the anti-abortion movement should embrace a minimum standard for banning abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy.

The column appeared after Ohio Republicans’ defeat in a special election in August, when the state’s voters decisively rejected a proposed change that would have made it more difficult to pass the abortion measure and other future constitutional amendments.

The American Policy Roundtable does not support federal action after conservatives fought for half a century to return abortion decision-making to the state level. Zanotti said it has chosen to pursue its own campaign against the Ohio amendment, focusing on its wording and legal reach.

Another major player in the anti-abortion movement, the Ohio Catholic Conference, is part of the statewide coalition but is also pursuing its own parallel efforts to oppose the amendment. Executive Director Brian Hickey said the campaign focuses on three issues: parental rights, women’s safety and the fact that the amendment allows abortions during all nine months.

“I would like the Catholic Conference to support as much human life as possible and provide as many resources as possible for pregnant women, single mothers and young families,” he said. That includes tax breaks, affordable housing, social support, things like that.

Austin Beigel, president of End Abortion Ohio, does not consider the 15-week policy that Susan B. Anthony supports as pro-life. He said he calls himself an abortion abolitionist because he believes the term “pro-life” has become meaningless.

I no longer use that phrase because it appears that the pro-life movement no longer wants to achieve the goal of abolishing abortion, he said. Somewhere along the line the various groups began to give up on the idea.

For groups like his, one date stands out: May 12, 2022. Just days after a draft leaked suggesting the Supreme Court would overturn Roe, but before the court had taken action, Louisiana was poised to pass a bill that would define abortion as murder, exposing women to murder. criminal prosecution and imprisonment. More than 75 anti-abortion groups, led by National Right to Life, signed an open letter condemning the legislation.

The president of Ohio Right to Life was among those who signed the letter, which Beigel’s group criticized. The rift between the state’s anti-abortion camps widened earlier this year after an attempt to introduce a similar bill in Ohio, which would have banned abortions from conception and targeted the doctors and women involved in them criminalized.

That bill was about to be introduced this summer, when another anti-abortion activist came forward

participate actively

in the Protect Women Ohio campaign pressured the sponsor to increase it, Beigel said. Their concern was that publicity about the bill would lead to a backlash and make it more difficult to defeat the abortion rights amendment, which had just qualified for the fall vote.

Ohio’s top Republican, governor. Mike DeWine is offering yet another message to voters in an effort to strengthen opposition to the constitutional amendment. DeWine, a staunch Catholic who opposes abortion, promises that if voters lose

the amendment, issue 1,

he will work toward a legislative compromise that the majority of people are comfortable with.

For abortion rights advocates, the divisions the Ohio amendment has exposed in the anti-abortion movement are merely cosmetic, said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.

She pointed to legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to ban abortions once fetal heart activity is detected, usually around six weeks. With a Republican-majority Supreme Court, Copeland said she has no doubts about what Republicans will do if

Problem 1 the amendment

is defeated.

Regardless of who takes the lead or what they say, their goal is and remains a total ban on abortion, without exceptions, she said. What they are discussing is strategy, tactics to retain voters who are not on their side.