The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are on the Ballot, and Winning

While political campaigns rarely persuade voters to change their minds on social issues, ballot measures may be an exception, researchers say. And Keeler thought she had a head start. The City Council shake-up proved that many residents in Mason fell into the camp of, “OK, I’m pro-life, but they’re going too far,” she says. In July, a poll backed her up, showing that a third of Republicans in Ohio supported the initiative. Those voters just needed to decide they felt strongly enough to turn out in November.

When she knocked on doors or talked to people around town, Keeler thought about the type of messaging that would be most persuasive. She leaned on the phrasing “reproductive freedom” to characterize the value at stake. Sometimes voters weren’t sure exactly what that meant, but that was an opportunity for a conversation. “You have to catch people up,” she says.

When Roe was in place, voters often supported restrictions, like waiting periods or mandatory ultrasounds, that made abortions more difficult to obtain. But the post-Roe world looks different. The choice for Ohio voters is now stark — pass the November initiative, or face the probability of a near-total ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. “When you ask voters to choose between everything or almost nothing on abortion, at the end of the day, most people say, ‘I want this right, and if that means a few partial-birth abortions, oh well,’” says Mitchell, the Republican pollster, using an anti-abortion term for the procedure later in pregnancy.

Confronted with this dilemma, abortion opponents in Ohio are focusing on an issue that still polls well across political parties — parental rights. A March ad by Protect Women Ohio, the group leading the anti-abortion campaign, suggested that the initiative would allow minors to have abortions — and, in a bit of anti-trans baiting, “sex changes” — without the consent of a parent or guardian. “Your daughter is young, online, vulnerable. You fear the worst,” the voice-over intoned. “Pushed to change her sex or to get an abortion,” the narrator continued as an image flashed of someone lying on an operating table, “you have some right to help her through this, but activists want to take all that away.”

The text of the Ohio initiative does not reference or challenge the state’s parental-consent laws or gender-related medical treatments. Nonetheless, Protect Women Ohio claimed that by giving “every individual” the right to make “one’s own reproductive decision,” the initiative would sweep away a parent’s ability to withhold consent. “The word ‘woman’ doesn’t appear” in the text, Amy Natoce, the press secretary for the group, told me. “The word ‘adult’ doesn’t appear. If this anti-parent amendment is truly about protecting a woman’s right to an abortion, why not say that?”