Though the results of last week’s ballot measure in Ohio are being billed as a loss for the pro-life movement, they also present opportunities the movement should be enthusiastic to embrace.
Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, drove this point home with a tweet that got some attention: “The Ohio result tonight … needs to be a five-alarm fire for the pro-life movement.”
In other words, it has become increasingly clear, in Michigan, in Kentucky, and now in Ohio, that a defensive posture of the movement is unsustainable. Since the defeat of Roe by Dobbs, the pro-abortion movement has fought for what they brand as choice, as perverted a conception as it is. And pro-life activism on the state level has relegated itself to the position of reflexively responding to coordinated pro-abortion activism, offering doomed procedural special election initiatives as a foil to clear, yet seriously flawed, messaging.
As these state losses compile, the momentum of pro-life voters, legislatures, and the movement dwindles. The pro-life movement finds itself in the position of separating the strategic wheat from the chaff.
On the level of procedure, one objective should be a no-brainer for state-level movements: preventing deep-pocketed national organizations from initiating constitutional amendments.
The largest contributor to the One Person One Vote Campaign, the group organized under the Kettering Foundation that campaigned against Issue 1, was the Washington, D.C.-based Sixteen Thirty Fund, which Politico described in 2021 as “a left-leaning, secret-money group.” Sixteen
