Since Dobbs, women’s dignity and human rights have been attacked in Ohio and across the country

Can you imagine American men allowing a legislature full of women or a majority female court to enact laws and decrees about their bodies? Can you imagine them tolerating female politicians imposing extreme government overreach on their private medical care decisions? Would American men put up with draconian restrictions on their personal liberties or accede to second class status in a controlling matriarchy?   

Of course not. 

You don’t have to imagine the same outrages visited on American women by a controlling patriarchy because they’re real and ongoing. After religious fanatics on the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded half a century of constitutional abortion rights for women, male politicians and lower court judges have had a field day trampling on women’s dignity, their human rights, their bodies and their agency as full and equal citizens. 

Last week an Arizona court actually put women back into the middle of the 19th century with a pre-statehood Civil War-era law that bans abortion from the moment of conception. The far-reaching consequences of that insanity — along with the ongoing national lust for government control over women’s reproductive health care choices (i.e., abortion pills, IVF, contraception) — are unimaginable.

But the question in 2024 is will American women tolerate what American men never would? While their right to abortion access may be severely restricted or eliminated in half the states, women still retain the right to vote. Reproductive freedoms nationwide may be at risk with men in power itching to pass a federal abortion ban or to revive another 19th century law (the 1874 Comstock Act) to end medical abortions, but, at least for now, American women can still sway elections.

Abortion is definitely on the ballot in Ohio. Not in a referendum, like last November, but in the stark choices of candidates seeking your vote. In 2023, an overwhelmingly majority of Ohioans approved the state constitutional right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including decisions about abortion. But the will of the people is not sacrosanct with those who campaign for office on promises to subvert it.  

Remember how the political leadership in Ohio — that tried to undermine the statewide vote on abortion rights by changing the rules mid-game — reacted after Issue 1 passed? Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman immediately raised the possibility of imposing a 15-week abortion ban in the state even though 57 percent of voters told lawmakers to butt out of their reproductive care.  

Over two dozen Ohio House Republicans signed a letter of intent to “do everything in our power to prevent our laws (restricting abortion) from being removed” regardless of a constitutional mandate to do so. A handful of radicals proposed legislation to strip courts of jurisdiction over any case related to the constitutional provision establishing the right to abortion — and leave interpretation of the laws to them. 

Ohio’s junior U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, who once supported the Texas ban on abortion with zero exceptions, floated the idea of federal legislation to circumvent the state abortion rights Ohio voters approved with Issue 1. “We can’t give in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter because if it doesn’t, then the pro-life movement is basically not going to exist.”

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who rushed to restore the state’s near-total abortion ban hours after the Dobbs ruling dropped, was in no hurry to nullify that ban after Issue 1 or reverse adjacent state laws that violate Ohio’s newly amended Ohio Constitution. Never mind that it now “forbids the state from burdening, prohibiting, penalizing, and interfering with access to abortion, and discriminating against abortion patients and providers.”

But years of medically unjustified and patronizing abortion restrictions enacted by GOP lawmakers remain stubbornly codified in state law, including 24-hour waiting periods and state-mandated information forced on patients before receiving care. Yost, an anti-abortion zealot, aims to save parts of Ohio’s unconstitutional abortion ban through protracted litigation.  

Some of those court battles on abortion access will be heard by the state supreme court. But is the impartiality of that court undermined if a 2024 candidate for the bench, Cincinnati Republican Megan Shanahan, publicly boasted about backing from an anti-abortion group that helped lead the fight against the abortion rights amendment — she will interpret if elected?  

Also on the 2024 ballot is the Ohio Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, car tycoon Bernie Moreno, who helped bankroll the campaign against Issue 1 to keep abortion illegal in the state. He favors abortion bans without exception and has publicly committed to vote for a national abortion ban. How will Moreno’s position fly with Ohioans whose hard-earned abortion rights would be overturned by a federal ban? 

Finally, can the presumptive Republican nominee for president/criminal defendant Donald Trump, who constantly brags about overturning the federal right to abortion (“we broke Roe v. Wade!”) convince women voters that the cruel abortion bans he unleashed in states across the country are “working very brilliantly”? Will his public plans for a second term (Project 2025) that lay out in painstaking detail how a Republican presidency would leverage every arm, tool, and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access, matter to freedom-loving Americans?

Can you imagine Ohio women abiding those who would control them? Or can you envision them responding in November as similarly oppressed men would by repudiating the madness loud and clear.