Rini Jeffers, The Chronicle-Telegram
Nov 04, 2023
When she found out she was pregnant last year, Katie was thrilled.
She’d always wanted kids, plural, and she and her husband already had a beautiful little girl, born the year before. The first pregnancy had gone normally and their daughter was healthy; there was so much to look forward to for the Lorain County couple.
Then came the blood tests.
Continued: https://chroniclet.com/news/371148/one-womans-story-shows-why-abortion-rights-matter/
Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher
(New York Times)
Sat, November 4, 2023
Abortion has emerged as a defining fault line of this year’s elections, with consequential contests in several states Tuesday offering fresh tests of the issue’s political potency nearly 18 months after the Supreme Court ended a federal right to an abortion.
The decision overturning Roe v. Wade scrambled American politics in 2022, transforming a long-standing social conflict into an electoral battering ram that helped drive Democrats to critical victories in the midterm races. Now, as abortion restrictions and bans in red states have become reality, the issue is again on the ballot, both explicitly and implicitly, in races across the country.
Continued: https://news.yahoo.com/abortion-dominate-2024-elections-tuesday-151158875.html
The GOP still hopes that the only voters who care about abortion rights are women.
Oct. 28, 2023
By Andrea Grimes, MSNBC
Americans haven’t forgotten that the ability to decide if and when to become a parent is one of the most essential, personal and life-changing decisions we’ll ever make. And we especially haven’t forgotten that the GOP is primarily responsible for wresting that decision away from many millions of us.
Because we remember both of these things, the issue of abortion remains a common thread in upcoming elections around the country — much to the consternation of Republicans. A year after the issue boosted Democrats in the midterms, the GOP is struggling to convince voters that the abortion bans the party has pushed for decades are some sort of collective fever dream. They want us to think abortion bans are a mass hysterical event that has caused us to hallucinate traveling far from home for abortion care, to invent the state-mandated traumas of forced birth, or to imagine that the pregnant people we’ve lost to poor maternal care were always ghosts, irrelevant and expendable, and never our living, loved ones.
Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/election-2023-abortion-republicans-rcna122327
October 24, 2023
BY GINNY RICHARDSON
On Nov. 7, Ohioans will vote on Issue 1, which would establish a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including decisions about abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and continuing pregnancy. Free access to birth control, including abortion when necessary, is a fundamental prerequisite to the emancipation of women and, therefore, all working people.
To contextualize this vote within the history of the struggle for reproductive rights, People’s World has collected three previously unpublished personal stories. Each one addresses an individual woman and her experience in obtaining reproductive care, as well as the impact of the prevailing laws at the time on her decisions and treatment.
Abortion rights have won on the ballot in red states before, but here's how Ohio's Issue 1 measure is different.
Grace Panetta
October 10, 2023
COLUMBUS, Ohio — On a cloudy recent Friday morning, thousands of protestors descended on the Ohio statehouse for the March for Life, many holding signs with sayings like, “Ohio is Pro-Life” and “Vote No on Issue 1.” That measure, Issue 1, would guarantee a constitutional right to an abortion and other reproductive health care.
All eyes were on Ohio, said Jeanne Mancini, president of the national anti-abortion March for Life. They were at a “cultural crossroads, she said, and Ohioians would be judged on their vote on November 7.
Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/10/ohio-issue-1-abortion-ballot-measure-november/
Advocates were surprised by the results of a vote that could have made it harder to protect access to abortion — but they're not letting that make them overconfident.
Sept. 16, 2023
By Megan Lebowitz
BURTON, OHIO — Abortion rights activists shocked themselves and the Ohio political world when they resoundingly defeated an August proposal that would have made it more difficult to enshrine abortion protections in the state’s constitution.
The next test comes on Nov. 7, when voters will decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment to preserve access to abortion in a state that has veered increasingly to the right since 2016.
Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/democrats-ohio-abortion-second-win-rcna103897
Wording can affect a measure’s support among voters
BY: ZACHARY ROTH
AUGUST 31, 2023
Abortion-rights supporters filed a lawsuit Monday against what they call “deceptive” ballot language produced by Ohio officials for the state’s closely-watched upcoming referendum on the issue. But it isn’t just the Buckeye State that’s lately seeing fierce battles over the once-obscure topic of ballot language.
In recent weeks, officials in Missouri — where another abortion-rights measure is at issue — and Idaho also have been accused in lawsuits of seeking to thwart citizen initiatives they oppose by using biased and negative ballot language to describe the issue to voters. Arkansas last year saw a similar court fight after a state board rejected a proposed ballot measure that had gained the required number of signatures, claiming the ballot language didn’t explain the issue in enough detail.
Continued: https://coloradonewsline.com/2023/08/31/biased-language-ballot-measures/
"For my own life and my family’s, I did what I never thought I would have to do – I ended the pregnancy," Emily Savors
Emily Savors, Guest Columnist
Aug 31, 2023
As a mother of two beautiful daughters, I can say with confidence that the incredible family I currently have would not be possible without abortion. My pregnancy journey has been incredibly long and difficult — it is the reason why my two daughters are nearly nine years apart.
It was early 1997, and I was newly married with a 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. My husband and I wanted more children, and by late spring, I was pregnant. My first pregnancy being uneventful, we settled in for an easy few months with expectations of a baby due in March 1998.
By Ed Kilgore, Intelligencer
Aug 9, 2023
After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last summer, Ohio voters put an initiative on the ballot to amend the state’s constitution to protect a right to an abortion. They were following in the footsteps of voters in several other states who have done the same in the face of Republican-led efforts to ban abortion outright. But then Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature (whose own near-total ban on abortion is snagged in the courts) tried to pull a fast one.
Republican lawmakers created a single-issue August special election in which voters would confront a constitutional amendment called Issue 1 that would raise the threshold for voter approval of future amendments (beginning immediately) from a simple majority to 60 percent. The idea, of course, was to make passage of the abortion-rights amendment in November significantly more difficult. On Tuesday night, though, their sneak attack failed, and Issue 1 was defeated. The Associated Press called the race for “No on Issue 1,” with the initiative being rejected by a 3-2 margin with a bit less than half the expected vote counted. Eventually the “no” vote wound up winning by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin. Turnout was over a third of the voting-eligible populations, about double the turnout in the last Ohio statewide single-issue special election in 2018.
Managing your own abortion is not a crime in Ohio, but a politically motivated prosecutor might believe Julia should be punished for what she did.
By Alanna Vagianos
Aug 7, 2023
SOMEWHERE IN OHIO — It’s a pretty short drive to the polling site from the cabin where Julia has been self-managing her abortion. Julia took the last of her abortion pills the day before, which she believes have ended her unwanted pregnancy. She still has some minor cramping and is tired from the whole ordeal, but she feels reasonably OK — well enough to go vote on a ballot referendum that could help decide the fate of abortion rights in Ohio.
Issue 1, a ballot initiative to raise the threshold to alter the state constitution from a simple majority — the standard in Ohio for over a century — to 60%, is a preemptive attempt to block a pro-choice constitutional amendment that Ohioans will vote on in November.
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