By Marilou Johanek, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission
They’re lying. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife Fran cut a homey anti-Issue 1 ad with warm lighting and soft music that features the couple as honest-to-goodness people with heartfelt concerns about the abortion rights amendment on the ballot Nov. 7. Then the lovely pair proceed to lie through their teeth.
“Everywhere we go, folks tell us they’re confused about Issue 1,” begins the governor. (That’s because Ohioans just voted for another Issue 1 three months ago deliberately labeled by Ohio Republicans to confuse voters in an attempt to undermine the original Issue 1 on Nov. 7.) DeWine skips that inconvenient truth and presses on.
“So, Fran and I have carefully studied it.” (Trust the anti-choice extremist who vowed “to go as far as we can” to prohibit reproductive rights in Ohio for fair assessment.) Fran’s takeaway of the constitutional amendment — that essentially restores the pre-Dobbs protections Ohio women enjoyed before June 24, 2022 — is heavy on fear-mongering and fabrication.
“Issue 1 would allow an abortion at any time during pregnancy,” she intones, knowing full well the proposed amendment allows for the same reasonable abortion restrictions after fetal viability that now exist with exception for incredibly rare cases that threaten the life or health of the pregnant patient. She leans into the “late-term” anti-abortion fallacy to suggest that Issue 1 could lead to full-term infanticide in the state.
“Simply lies created to push a false narrative,” countered Ohio House Rep. Anita Somani, a practicing OB-GYN for 31 years. This is her take:
“Late-term abortions is actually not a term used in medicine. However, the gestational ages they are referring to make up less than 1% of abortions, and all of those are before 22 weeks. In fact, you won’t find data showing abortions after this age because those are deliveries and are recorded as such with birth or death certificates. If there is a birth defect that is incompatible with life or a maternal condition that is life-threatening, labor is induced and the child is then given comfort care. If the child is viable (i.e., after 24 weeks) neonatal care is provided.”
Back to the governor’s missus. And more deception. “It [Issue 1] would deny parents the right to be involved in their daughters making the most important decision of her life.” No, it wouldn’t, Fran. Nothing in the amendment, providing constitutional protections for abortion access in the state, even addresses parental rights, concluded Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. (The same phony arguments about minors were raised before Michigan’s nearly identical abortion rights amendment passed with its parental consent laws intact.)
DeWine closes his commercial against Issue 1 with patronizing father-knows-best drivel. “I know Ohioans are divided on the issue of abortion, but whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, Issue 1 is just not right for Ohio.” But a draconian six-week abortion ban DeWine immediately imposed on Ohio women as soon as the Supreme Court rescinded half a century of protected reproductive freedom in the country is??
Fran’s sign-off is blunt. “Issue 1 just goes too far.” But a near total ban on access to abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest which forced a pregnant, 10-year-old rape victim to seek out-of-state emergency medical care after it was prohibited in her home state doesn’t?? The grotesque gaslighting by the DeWines is, unfortunately, not an anomaly in the concerted disinformation campaign running to deny women a constitutional right to abortion and other reproductive health care in the state.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the sinister partisan who tried to subvert voters’ majority rights in the August election and who flagrantly distorted ballot language on the upcoming abortion rights amendment to defeat it, called Issue 1 a “sinister” plot of the “abortion industry” that was “shrouded in the clever mask of reproductive freedom.”
The slippery elections chief also falsely claimed the amendment would green-light “taxpayer-funded abortion” throughout pregnancy and “long after viability when the unborn child would survive outside the womb.” Piling on the deceptive innuendos of legalized infanticide were extremists in the Ohio Senate who posited the ballot initiative will “allow the worst atrocities imaginable,” including “the dismemberment of fully conscious children,” in an adopted resolution.
The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland tied all the prevailing lies about Issue 1 together and preached “it will put women at risk, it will take away parental rights, and it will allow for late-term abortions of fully-formed babies in the womb.” Not true. None of it. Read the full text of the proposal to amend Article 1 of the Ohio Constitution for yourself.
The 211-word amendment, simply titled “The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety,” is pretty straightforward. Issue 1 asks voters to reinforce the right of every individual to make their own deeply personal and difficult decisions about their own bodies without politicians, anti-abortion lobbyists, the Catholic Church, or the governor and wife butting in.
It doesn’t change parental consent laws, doesn’t cover sex-change surgery, and doesn’t force underage girls into unwanted abortions. Those who disseminate those myths — or misleading messaging that imply a suspended abortion ban isn’t a court ruling (or defeated ballot initiative) away — are lying through their pearly whites.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The pro-choice side is running very excellent ads. They talk about government taking away rights and women might have to forgo adequate medical care for a miscarriage. The ads hit heavy on personal freedom. The last poll about that issue was 59% would vote yes (for pro-choice).
I’m getting well and truly sickened by this obsession with abortion. I’m maybe fortunate (apart from being a man who never has to experience pregnancy personally) in that I’ve never (knowingly) had personal contact with the issue, other than one junior staff member years ago who underwent the procedure at around 6 or 7 weeks. The US is still the most powerful country in the world (though soon it will be overtaken by China), with the ability to influence events on an unprecedented scale, yet it’s hamstrung entirely by this one issue. (One could argue gun control is a close second, but I think the issues there are very different.)
It’s not just America either, it seems to be large parts of the western world. There’s Italy headed further and further to the right, and especially Poland, on the border with Ukraine so facing existential issues with Russia, struggling to prevent abortions being banned entirely. In some ways, therefore, I’d argue that the issue is perhaps the most important one facing the world. Until people grow up and just learn to accept the fact that women are solely entitled to be arbiters of their bodily health, then we’re never going to have properly functioning democracies, essential if we’re ever going to try and solve the REAL challenges that we have in this world.
Lying is all the prolifers have… They simply don’t have the numbers.
Pro lifers lying about abortion, must be a day that ends in Y. Of course who needs the ten commandments when there are precious little babies to save and then not care about after they are born because taxes for billionaires need to be cut. Truly a terrible set of un-empathetic ghouls who believe 10 year old rape victims should carry pregnancies to term.
When politicians and lobbyists don’t have facts or the will of the people on their side, they resort to a particular kind of lying: the kind that perverts language. So, banning books–which most people don’t want most of the time–or talk about LGBT people and racial history are framed as “parents’ rights” or the “freedom to choose curriculum.” Owning enough firepower to kill all of one’s neighbors is called “gun rights” or “Second Amendment freedom,” even as the vast majority of Americans support restrictions of one sort or another on acquiring and owning firearms. And anti-abortion laws are turned into issues about the “rights” of the “unborn” or the “freedom” of girls who’ve been raped or incested not to be “forced into unwanted abortions” although even greater majorities of Americans believe a girl/woman should have the right to an abortion under those circumstances, and many others.
The Founding Fathers didn’t always practice what they preached when it came to human liberty. But they gave us, ironically enough, a framework for seeing that. And I think they would be appalled at the ways words like “freedom” and “rights” are being (mis)used.
It’s about keeping people with a functioning uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, etc, from being able to make their own decisions about their lives. Some people got bent out of shape about more women in the workforce doing higher-level jobs previously reserved for men, and a political party decided to seize on that issue to gain votes. It doesn’t escape my attention that this particular political party is trying to subvert people of color and LGBTQ people as well. Lying is just part of their marketing.
Pro-lifers lie, and they lie out of necessity because most of the public isn’t with them. In the past they’ve lied about a link between abortion and breast cancer (there isn’t one) and about most women regretting their abortions (most don’t.) Here we have more of the same.
Gabor Mate in his latest book, The Myth of Normal, helps synthesize the culture-wide distortions that allow harmful treatment of people through not only ‘laws’ but through sick practices passed from generation to generation. It is this ‘normal’ life of the everyday that we face with its overblown distortions, its language gone fully Orwellian, that permits organized religion of the fundamentalist ilk to routinely, with great pride and political hoopla, go after human rights, harm human beings ‘for their own good’ as the brilliant psychologist, Alice Miller wrote years ago. Gabor Mate probably spends little time in Ohio because the light he shines encourages us to understand myth, to reclaim ‘normal’ as honoring and respecting human beings, especially our children, not putting them through the meat grinder of the American Way and feeding them into the War Machine but allowing them through connection and love to find their own way using their own unique vision to a mature and responsible life.
Hence, I refuse to use the term ‘pro-life’ for people who do not honor human potential, hate freedom, who detest individual choice, who routinely harm the men, women and children they claim to honor. They cannot co-opt the language for me when I refuse to allow it. The dictionary is online; you don’t even need to drag around the book itself though symbolically it should be an enduring meme: Picture a televised cage-wrestling duel between two American men, one with a thick black book in his hand and the other, a comprehensive dictionary. The referee yells, “PRO-LIFE!” and that signals the start of the battle. (This, by the way, IS Ohio. It is normal life there… The preacher who took over for Gerencser when Satan claimed him, picks up children in a big church bus to deliver them to the wrestling matches so the kids can cheer on the black-book contender.)
We live in this strange world now. Normal ain’t what’s televised: The myth is televised.
@BRIAN VANDERLIP
I don’t refuse to use their self described term “pro-life” because I support the basic principle that each side of a controversy should get to describe themselves using their own terms.
I wonder how often the “pro-life” crowd gather together to picket and protest vasectomy day at their local hospitals?