Ohio’s Issue 1 failed when 56% of the voters rejected it. The measure would have made it easier to change the state’s constitution.
The measure required 60% of voters to enact any new amendments to the constitution instead of a simple majority. It would have also changed how people can gather signatures for citizen amendments.
The vote is important because it affects abortion and saves the lives of unborn human beings.
The Republicans admitted the proposal was to protect life in November.
That’s because November’s ballot has abortion on it. It will likely pass because 57.6% of people polled support it.
It means a woman can terminate the child at 23 to 24 weeks:
The proposed amendment would protect access to abortion and other reproductive decisions through viability, which is when a doctor determines a fetus can survive outside the uterus with reasonable measures. That is typically 23 to 24 weeks into pregnancy. Abortions could be performed after that point to save the patient’s life or health.
We have seen numerous cases of premature babies surviving, including those born as early as 19 weeks.
Stanford Medicine Children’s Health wrote in 2022 that the survival rate for premature babies is climbing! 55% of those born at 23 weeks survived:
This study showed that even those delivered at 22 weeks — 18 weeks early — had a chance of living. With active treatment, about 28% of them survived; among those born at 23 weeks, 55% survived. “When I was in residency in the mid-1980s, babies born at 500 grams [about 1.1 pounds] and 25 weeks didn’t survive; it just didn’t happen. Now we see the borderline of viability dropping to 22 weeks,” said neonatologist Krisa Van Meurs, MD, a Stanford Medicine emerita professor of pediatrics and a co-author on the study. “With all of these new treatment strategies we’ve developed, we’ve seen an amazing impact.”
Ohio’s legislature has passed many human-saving laws in the past decade. In 2019, one restricted abortion to when a doctor can detect cardiac activity. Any woman who has been pregnant knows that happens at her six-week appointment.
If the abortion measure on the November ballot passes, that means those laws are out the window.
But again, be careful what you wish for, abortion advocates. That addition might go away in the future.
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