Ohio: Pro-life group launches $5 million ad campaign against proposed amendment giving “right” to abortion for whole of pregnancy, fears about legalizing sex-change for minors without parental consent

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – The Protect Women Ohio (PWO) pro-life group in Ohio is launching a $5 million ad campaign against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would make abortion at any stage during pregnancy a statutory “right,” and which conservatives fear will also be used to justify sex-change surgeries and abortions for minors without parental consent, CBN News reports.

The amendment was approved by the Ohio Ballot Board last week, leaving a coalition of pro-choice groups to petition for the over 413,388 valid signatures needed by July 5 to put the issue on the Ohio ballot in November.

Although the amendment makes no reference to sex-change surgeries or to abortions for minors without parental consent, conservative groups are concerned the language in the proposed legislation can be easily manipulated. The amendment reads:

“Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion…The State shall not directly or indirectly burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either an individual’s voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right, unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual’s health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.”

In a March 13 op-ed in The National Review, pro-life conservatives an op-ed Carrie Severino and Frank Scaturo from the Judicial Crisis Network organization wrote: “The proposed amendment would outlaw virtually any restrictions on abortion and all other procedures, including sex-change surgeries, that touch on reproduction, for both adults and minors,” Severino and Scaturo assert. “It would cancel out not only parental-consent laws but also mere parental notification for minors’ abortions or sex-change surgeries; strike down health protections for people of all ages who undergo these procedures, including requirements that a qualified physician perform them; and erase any meaningful limits on late-term abortions,” the two write.

The television and social media ads by Protect Women Ohio (PWO) will air over the next four weeks. “In response to the for-profit abortion industry’s new anti-parent amendment in Ohio, Protect Women Ohio has launched a $5M ad campaign to keep Ohio safe for women, girls, and babies,” the group said in a Twitter post on March 15.

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