last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, the proposal would restore a commonsense abortion protection that most Ohio voters can support.
“They could have made it clear. They could have added weeks in there for viability,” said Mehek Cooke, a lawyer working with the opposition campaign, Protect Women Ohio. “The people who are getting abortions later in pregnancy are those who have incredibly heartbreaking situations, either some awful, terrible fetal anomaly that took a while to be diagnosed or some maternal medical condition that puts the mother’s life at risk,” said Mae Winchester, a Cleveland-based maternal fetal medicine specialist.
“The idea that an abuser could, by coercing someone to obtain an abortion or to carry a pregnancy to term, somehow be protected or insulated from punishment for that coercion is simply inconsistent with the language of the second provision of the amendment,” he said. Opponents of the abortion amendment say its protection of “reproductive” decisions is unnecessarily broad and could include gender-related health care.