The Lessons of Ohio’s Abortion-Rights Victory

Starting last spring, volunteers fanned out across Ohio—at farmers’ markets, brewpubs, supermarkets, athletic fields—to try to persuade half a million people to sign a petition to get a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights on the November ballot. One afternoon, at Silk Road Textiles, in Cincinnati, among shelves of needlework books, two silver-haired volunteers sat at a table displaying stickers that said “O-H-I-Roe” and “Restore Roe,” mottos designed to indicate that the proposed amendment would be anything but radical. As one of the organizers walked in, a volunteer called out, “We’ve had a really good day!” A few dozen signatures in the book, several hundred thousand to go. The immediate goal was to neutralize a law, passed and signed by Ohio Republicans—now blocked while under review by the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court—prohibiting almost all abortions after about six weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

On Tuesday, what started as a grassroots initiative with an uncertain outcome turned into the biggest victory for abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, in June, 2022, overturned the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. In a state that has long been dominated by Republicans, more than two million people endorsed a constitutional amendment asserting that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” The amendment, which, like Roe, allows the state to restrict abortion only after fetal viability, unless a doctor considers it necessary to protect the mother’s life or health, passed by more than thirteen percentage points. Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which promotes progressive ballot measures in red and purple states, told me, “A victory in Ohio really does tell all of us in the abortion-rights movement that this is possible almost everywhere.”

Ohio was the only state this year where voters had an up-or-down vote on abortion rights, but results there and elsewhere offered fresh evidence that the issue is likely to help Democrats in 2024. In Virginia, Democrats who lambasted the anti-abortion policies of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor, retained their leadership of the state Senate and won control of the House. In Kentucky, the Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, won reëlection against the Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, who supports the state’s near-total ban on abortion. In Pennsylvania, Democrats added to their majority on the state Supreme Court, electing Dan McCaffery, who made abortion access a central part of his campaign for a ten-year term.

The results also show that pro-choice voters were not persuaded by some Republicans’ attempts to moderate their positions. Youngkin, often mentioned as a potential Presidential candidate, has said that “life begins at conception” and that he would sign any bill “happily and gleefully in order to protect life.” But, during the campaign in Virginia, the last Southern state where widespread access to abortion is protected, Youngkin’s political-action committee spent $1.4 million to distribute a video advertisement that declared support for a “reasonable fifteen-week limit,” with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, though not for cases in which the fetus has a fatal anomaly.

In Ohio, supporters of abortion rights argued that the amendment favored patients over politicians, and protected decisions not only on abortion but also on contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and “continuing one’s own pregnancy” as essential health provisions. They emphasized that there is no known medical justification for limits on abortion and framed the choice to get one as a matter of personal liberty. On Wednesday, Lauren Blauvelt, the co-chair of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, said that voters turned out “to reclaim their freedom to make their most personal decisions without government interference.”

Reproductive-rights advocates in Ohio outraised and outspent their opponents by millions of dollars, and built a coalition that stretched across parties and geography, bolstered by labor unions, pastors, and groups of motivated women. Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, and John Legend made appearances in favor of the ballot measure, known as Issue 1. “They tell us we are the minority,” Whitmer, the Democratic governor of neighboring Michigan, which approved a similar amendment in 2022, told one virtual gathering. “We are not. We are the majority.”

In the past fifteen months, voters have protected abortion rights on ballot questions six times in a row, in Kansas, Montana, Vermont, California, Michigan, and Kentucky. To win in Ohio, where abortion remained legal pending the state Supreme Court’s review of the six-week ban, abortion-rights supporters had to overcome maneuvers by Republicans who were determined to break the streak.

Last spring, as pro-choice groups began to collect signatures to get on the ballot, Frank LaRose, the secretary of state, pushed successfully for an August referendum that would raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments to sixty per cent from a simple majority, which had been the standard in Ohio since 1912. This came just months after he helped persuade the G.O.P.-dominated legislature to abolish August special elections, which historically have low turnout, calling them “bad news for the civic health of our state.” At first, he insisted that changing the rules was simply a matter of “good government.” But, addressing supporters in Seneca County, he said that the tactic was “one hundred per cent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.” Voters rejected that move by fourteen percentage points. (If it had passed, setting a sixty-per-cent threshold, Tuesday’s constitutional amendment would have failed.)

By then, the abortion-rights coalition had gathered nearly half a million verified signatures, eighty thousand more than necessary, to get the amendment on the ballot. The next step in the referendum process called for the state ballot board to determine the language that voters would see in the polling booth. The simplest approach would have been to reproduce the neutral text of the amendment, which is about two hundred words long.