The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Pro-abortion rights advocates are taking a proposed total abortion ban in Ohio to heart. Noting the celebration of Juneteenth and Black emancipation, they say the use of the 14th Amendment to try to exert state control over individual freedom and bodily autonomy is vile.
The new bill a pair of freshman Republican House lawmakers are planning to introduce would ban abortion and criminalize it, along with in vitro fertilization and certain types of contraception. The measure’s filing was first reported by WEWS.
RELATED: Republican lawmakers in Ohio to propose total abortion and IVF ban
The bill is meant as a direct challenge to the state reproductive rights amendment passed by 57% of Ohio voters in 2023.
Bill supporters say the current constitutional amendment that enshrined reproductive rights into the Ohio Constitution “should be treated as null and void” because, they claim, it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment “by denying pre-born persons the right to life.”
The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects citizenship and due process, along with equal protection under the law.
“In appealing to the 14th Amendment, the Ohio Prenatal Equal Protection Act appeals to a higher law; the U.S. Constitution,” the anti-abortion group End Abortion Ohio, which is leading the charge on the bill, said in a statement.
Austin Biegel, a member of End Abortion Ohio, argued that yes, the bill would go against the majority public opinion of Ohioans, but he justified it by arguing that slavery was once also supported and legal in the U.S.
Lexi Dotson-Dufault, executive director of the resource and referral service Abortion Fund Ohio, called the use of the 14th Amendment as part of an abortion ban bill “vile.”
“A bill that bans abortion while citing the 14th Amendment misuses a civil rights protection to justify state control over our marginalized community members, especially Black people,” Dotson-Dufault said.
A report from the National Partnership for Women & Families in May of last year found that state abortion bans “exacerbate the existing Black maternal mortality crisis,” and “threaten” 7 million Black women nationwide.
The study found that mothers who can’t access abortion care see negative impacts to their “economic security and development of their existing children.”
‘Canary in the coal mine’
Dotson-Dufault and Ohio Women’s Alliance Deputy Director Jordyn Close believe Republican legislators are emboldened to attempt anti-abortion measures in part because of a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that reinstated a “de facto abortion ban” in May, lifting an injunction that had blocked abortion restrictions.
The decision came months after that state also approved an amendment to its constitution that protected reproductive rights.
The pro-abortion rights advocates see no legal standing for the new abortion ban bill, but they also see abortion rights as “the canary in the coal mine when it comes to … rights being stripped away from people.”
“I don’t think that this bill has any legs to stand on, but I do think that it’s very important to highlight just how gross it is that they would even try it,” Close said. “Because if it’s not this bill, it will be another one introduced in the next session … it just continues because they do not respect Ohioans.”
Ohio’s constitutional amendment, passed in 2023, protects abortion and other types of reproductive health like fertility treatments and miscarriage care, but more than 30 other regulations still sit on the books in Ohio law.
Those statutes would have to be undone one by one, even though state courts have blocked some of the laws, as well as a six-week abortion ban that was on the books before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Republicans in the state legislature are also trying to double-down on such regulations.
State Reps. Mike Odioso and Josh Williams have already filed House Bill 347, a bill which targets informed consent, requiring that 24 hours before an abortion doctors provide not only “medically accurate information that a reasonable patient would consider material to the decision of whether to undergo the elective abortion” — which abortion providers have said they are already required to do — but also “alternatives to abortion, including adoption and parenting.”
H.B. 347 also puts into law medically controversial and unproven language that “it may be possible to reverse the effects of the abortion-inducing drug” if a medication abortion is taking place.
This isn’t the first time Ohio lawmakers have attempted to include this language in state law.
The bill also requires a physician to notify the pregnant person, except in the case of rape or incest, “that the unborn child’s father has a child support obligation, even if the father has offered to pay for the elective abortion.”
According to a recent midyear analysis from the Guttmacher Institute, 13 states have total abortion bans on the books, with another 28 that have bans between six weeks of gestation and “viability.”
Ohio’s constitutional amendment places abortion legality at viability, as determined by an individual’s physician.
The institute’s report also said the first half of 2025 has given rise to anti-abortion state lawmakers who “have continued to push the envelope toward pregnancy criminalization, restrictions on bodily autonomy and laws that recognize fetal and embryonic personhood,” while also reducing funding for resources like sex education.
The state-level action comes as the Trump administration spent its first few months in office revoking Biden-era executive orders on abortion, including patient privacy protections, and rolling back guidance on access to emergency abortion care under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
President Donald Trump also pardoned nearly two dozen people convicted under a federal law that bans threats, physical obstruction or force at the entrances to reproductive health clinics.
The language of that federal law for which Trump issued pardons also bars interference, injury or intimidation for any exercise of First Amendment religious freedom, including at places of worship.
Efforts to slash federal funding have also touched reproductive health, with cuts to Title X, which funds “family planning” grants and other reproductive health services for low-income individuals, including many services in Ohio.
Pro-abortion rights groups have already started their fight against the total abortion ban bill with a demonstration on Wednesday that interrupted an anti-abortion gathering in the Statehouse.
They want to spend more time not only raising their voices in the halls of the legislature, but also educating the voters going into 2026 elections.
“Even though we had a moment of victory in 2023, the fight is far from over,” Close said. “We have to look toward the next electoral (cycle) to protect our courts, because inevitably when we have these showdowns in the state legislature, the courts is where everything ends up.”
A spokesperson for Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman said Huffman’s focus remains on the state operating budget until its July 1 deadline, and had no other information on the bill’s introduction or timeline.
A request for comment from Senate President Rob McColley on whether he would consider such a bill went unanswered on Wednesday.
Back in November 2024, just before he began his tenure as Senate president, McColley told the Capital Journal, “the inaction on the issue kind of speaks for itself,” referring to any effort to undermine the constitutional amendment. He also said since the issue had passed the year before, “there really hasn’t been a lot of discussion about it.”
“I think, by and large, people realize Ohioans spoke, and that’s the way it is right now,” McColley said then.
The Ohio Democratic Party said they were staunchly against the abortion ban measure, questioning the priorities of state Republicans, and saying the party with the Statehouse supermajority is attempting to “drag our state into the past.”
“Ohio women would die under this cruel, disastrous legislation,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Clyde.
