When I think of forced abortions, I think of totalitarian regimes like China or North Korea. Not the American Midwest. And yet a deceptive ballot initiative in the Buckeye State threatens to create a regime where women will feel increased pressure to abort, with existing safeguards stripped away.
The year since the Dobbs Supreme Court decision has given the American people a voice and a choice in their state's abortion laws for the first time in half a century. The result has been, unsurprisingly, a wide variety of policies that range from protecting babies once a heartbeat can be detected to allowing abortion on demand for any reason on the taxpayer's dime until the moment of birth.
But the pro-abortion movement has been pivoting to a political strategy that circumvents voter choice altogether, ironically under the guise of voter choice. The strategy is to gather enough signatures to put a broadly worded ballot initiative directly in front of voters to permanently enshrine an extreme right to abortion. Buried in the fine print is the kicker: once passed, the proposed amendment prevents voters, either directly or through their legislators, from passing any kind of law that in any way protects girls and women or the unborn in the future. Existing health and safety standards for women will be null and void, as would parental consent or even notification provisions. Voters are essentially tricked into removing themselves from the democratic, legislative process on abortion.
Far-left special interest groups and the abortion industry have done it successfully already in Michigan, California, and Vermont, and now they've set their sights on Ohio.
Not only do the ballot initiatives permanently cut voters out of the process of self-governing on an issue of great moral consequence, but they threaten to exacerbate a climate where women feel pressured into abortion.
A recent peer-reviewed study found that nearly 70 percent of women who had abortions said the abortions were inconsistent with their preferences, or that they had been simply pressured into the decision. The study's authors termed it a "hidden epidemic" of abortions that are "unwanted or inconsistent with women's preferences." Only one in three women said they actually wanted to have their abortion; 60 percent said they would have kept their baby if they'd had more emotional or financial support.
If you're a woman who is pregnant and wants to keep her baby but feels pressured to kill it instead, this soft coercion stays hidden behind a lifetime of depression and tears.
The Ohio ballot initiative, clearly designed to be a model for other states, threatens to make this epidemic permanent by prohibiting any kind of "burden" or "interference" in a woman's "reproductive choices." While that sounds pretty and nice, it means, for starters, totally stripping away parental notification. It would remove the first line of emotional support for an underage girl—her parents and family—and potentially hand power over to abusers. So the easiest cohort of women to coerce into abortion becomes even less protected.
Women are bound to keep feeling pressured into unwanted abortions when law protects their boyfriends' wishes to wash their hands of fatherhood but does nothing to help women economically. The initiative to change state constitutions does absolutely nothing to support women who want to keep their babies, which is apparently the vast majority.
Women don't need state constitutional amendments shielding abortion clinics from basic health and safety standards or enabling men who push them to abort against their wishes. They need a pro-life safety net, and they need it now. They need to see more funding, both private and public, go to pregnancy centers that offer support in the form of diapers and formula, free ultrasounds, job training, and perhaps most importantly, a supportive voice telling a woman who wants to keep her baby that she can. They need to see their legislators unleash state resources, much like Texas and Tennessee did to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. They need beefed-up paid leave laws that don't leave them feeling forced to choose between having an abortion or going back to work 10 days after giving birth. And they need increased funding for safe and affordable child care options that make being a mom a viable long-term choice.
There is no limit to the creative options legislators and communities have in building pro-life safety nets in their states that can help to end the hidden scourge of forced abortions. Initiatives like the one on the ballot in Ohio will permanently limit pregnant women in crisis to a choice they don't want to make.
Ashley McGuire is a Senior Fellow with The Catholic Association, author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female, and co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show, "Conversations with Consequences."
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
