Brutal Ad Asks If Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Supports Forcing Children to Bear Rapists' Offspring

It was national news: a 10-year-old girl in Ohio who became pregnant after a sexual assault was not eligible to get an abortion in her home state because Ohio Republicans had passed a trigger law that immediately made abortion illegal when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. The girl eventually had to go to Indianapolis to have the procedure.

Disgracefully, Ohio’s attorney General Dave Yost immediately ran to Fox News to claim the story wasn’t true. Then the perpetrator, Gerson Fuentes, was arrested and indicted in Franklin County on two counts of felony rape for attacking the girl when she was 9 years old.

But today’s Republican Party isn’t yesterday’s Republican Party. In previous decades, Republicans accepted abortion exceptions for rape. But in today’s ultraconservative atmosphere, Ohio’s Republicans oppose such measures. 

Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine, now running for re-election, has since been playing coy about his own beliefs about whether Ohio should be forcing children to give birth to their rapists’ offspring. In fact, he has been relatively silent on the matter, a matter now the subject of a recent campaign ad supporting Democratic opponent Nan Whaley.

Jeff Crossman is the Democrat running to defeat Dave Yost.

What follows is a list of the Democrats running for main state offices with links to their campaign sites:

Ohio Governor
Nan Whaley

Ohio Lieutenant Governor
Cheryl Stephens (on ballot with Nan Whaley)

Ohio Attorney General
Jeff Crossman  

Ohio Secretary of State
Chelsea Clark  (needed to replace anti-democratic voting obstructionist Frank LaRose)

Ohio Treasurer
Scott Schertzer  

Ohio Auditor
Taylor Sappington