Ohio election officials on Monday gave activists the go-ahead to begin collecting signatures to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot this November that would guarantee abortion rights in the state as advocates look to extend a streak of six straight victories on abortion that began last summer. However, the campaign to pass the measure, known as the Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety, first needs to focus on the logistically difficult task of gathering petitions before it can turn its attention to winning what would be an expensive fall battle.
The amendment’s supporters need to turn in 413,000 valid signatures—a number that represents 10% of the number of votes cast for last year's governor race—by July 5. State law makes things more complicated for progressives, though: Not only must these petitions come from at least half of Ohio's 88 counties, each of those 44 counties must provide signatures equal to 5% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election in that county.
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Because the Buckeye State’s left-leaning voters are largely concentrated in a few large urban counties, abortion rights backers will need to focus their efforts on collecting signatures in many conservative areas where Democrats make up a small minority. Even Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is the only Democrat to win a statewide partisan election in the last decade, didn’t come close to winning a majority of Ohio’s counties despite his decisive 53-47 re-election victory in 2018. That year, Brown carried only 16 counties; two years later, Joe Biden took just seven amidst his loss to Donald Trump.
However, as successes in deep red states like Kansas and Kentucky last year showed, support for abortion rights crosses partisan borders, which gives organizers an expanded pool of voters to draw on. The unsuccessful ballot measures in those two states, though, sought to roll back abortion rights rather than guarantee them; an amendment in Michigan that, like the proposal in Ohio, enshrined the right to an abortion passed with a 13-point margin in 2022—similar to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's 11-point victory.
If the amendment does make the ballot, it would then need to win a majority of the vote this November in the face of fierce opposition from anti-abortion forces. The head of the right-wing Center for Christian Virtue predicted last month, “It’s going to be a true grassroots and TV campaign. This is going to be pulling out all the stops to beat this.”
This amendment would protect the right to an abortion until “fetal viability,” which is usually 23 or 24 weeks into a pregnancy, and would roll back a law Republican legislators passed in 2019 that effectively bans abortion after just six weeks. A state judge blocked that law last fall, but while the procedure is still legal up to 22 weeks’ gestation, Republicans have asked the state's conservative Supreme Court to reverse that ruling.
Abortion rights supporters are moving forward this year, despite the smaller off-year electorate, in part because Republican legislators are working to place their own referendum on November’s ballot to require that future amendments win the support of 60% of voters instead of a simple majority. That measure, ironically enough, needs to win just a majority of the vote in order to pass and would impact any future amendments, though recent similar efforts by Republicans in other states have been rejected by voters.
