News
Featured Image
Judge Christian JenkinsWLWT/YouTube screenshot

HAMILTON COUNTY, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) — Cincinnati Judge Christian Jenkins has ruled that no part of Ohio’s 2019 heartbeat law can be enforced in light of last year’s constitutional amendment establishing a state-level “right” to abortion, illustrating pro-life warnings about the scope of such amendments less than two weeks before Americans across the country vote on 10 more of them.

In November 2023, Ohio voted 56% to 44% to add the so-called “Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety Amendment” to the Ohio Constitution. It asserts a “right” to make “personal reproductive” decisions, “including but not limited to decisions on contraception, [so-called] fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” which the state “shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against.”

Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost had warned that the amendment would go far beyond even the Roe v. Wade status quo activists say they are trying to restore and block prohibitions on partial-birth and dismemberment abortions, allow abortionists to target disabled babies, and end parental consent requirements for abortion as well as minors’ contraception, sterilization, and “gender transition” decisions. 

Following its passage, he stipulated that the core element of the 2019 law, the ban, was unenforceable, but sought to preserve 14 other aspects of it, among them requiring abortionists to look for a fetal heartbeat first, notify women when their babies can survive outside the womb, and a 24-hour waiting period before abortion.

Reuters reports that on October 24, Jenkins ruled that the heartbeat law was invalid in its entirety and that all of its lesser provisions were also invalid under the amendment’s language that the state cannot “burden” abortion choices “directly or indirectly.”

“Ohio’s Attorney General evidently didn’t get the memo,” Jenkins taunted, adding that “unlike the Ohio Attorney General, this court will uphold the Ohio Constitution’s protection of abortion rights [sic].”

Yost’s office, which has 30 days to formally respond, said it was reviewing Jenkins’s ruling.

The ruling underscores how ballot initiatives aimed at preserving the legality of abortion typically go much further even than that and also prevent the people through their elected representatives from imposing even far less stringent and less controversial regulations on abortion for informed patient consent and women’s safety.

The abortion lobby has had great success using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public, most visibly in the area of state constitutional amendments embedding “rights” to abortion immune from future legislation. 

Pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box, as well as a debate among Republicans over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.

This November, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota will all vote on proposals to weaken or eliminate state pro-life laws, while Nebraska also has an amendment against late-term abortion competing with the pro-abortion one.

10 Comments

    Loading...