Ohio AG Gives the Green Light to Misleading Abortion-On-Demnd Amendment
The Ohio Attorney General issued a strongly worded letter explaining his ruling that the ballot summary of the proposed Ohio Reproductive Freedom Amendment is “a fair and truthful statement of the measure being proposed.”
The measure, which is modeled on the California and Michigan amendments would dehumanize the child in the womb and allow abortion and embryo destructive medical practices through all nine months of pregnancy.
Because neither the ballot summary nor the amendment text itself are clear in addressing the issue of the personhood or the right to life of the preborn, many Ohio citizens are likely to be misled into thinking that the amendment deals only with the decision of a woman to decide when to have children.
The biological reality is that once a woman is pregnant, there is another human life that hangs in the balance, and the question is no longer one involving personal autonomy.
This all-important nuance is nowhere to be found in the ballot summary or the amendment text and is typical of the euphemistic slogans used by the abortion lobby as propaganda.
By determining the amendment to be “fair and truthful”, Attorney General Yost is derelict in his duty to ensure that the voters are given language that presents the matter in a manner for them to be able to make an informed decision.
Allowing the abortion activists to claim that the amendment is about personal freedom, while absolutely and permanently stripping the child in the womb of the right to life, is the epitome of deception.
The Ohio Constitution is clear in Article XVI, Section 1 that the language on the ballot may not mislead, deceive, or defraud voters.
The ballot language shall not be held invalid unless it is such as to mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.
https://ballotpedia.org/Article_XVI,_Ohio_Constitution#Section_1
Imagine a pro-slavery group had put an amendment on the ballot in 1864 stating that Ohio citizens have an absolute right to the enjoyment of their chattel property that cannot be limited by the legislature. Would this amendment be fair and truthful? After Dred Scott v. Sanford, the US Supreme Court had stripped African Americans of their citizenship, so in effect, the hypothetical language would protect the institution of African American slavery.
Would that hypothetical “Property Rights Amendment” be fair and truthful? Of course not!
In Dobbs v. Jackson, the majority of the US Supreme Court held that what makes the “right” to abortion different from other privacy or liberty interests is the fact that abortion involves another life.
Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 150 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. But the people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently. In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be even more extensive than the right that Roe and Casey recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191(4)(b). Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.
Dobbs v. Jackson, US Supreme Court 2022
Can Ohio’s pro-abortion amendment and accompanying summary be considered “fair and truthful” when it sets out to decide the question of abortion, which the supreme court has made clear involves competing interests, by referencing only one of the interests?
Every aspect of the amendment is suffused with the usual pro-abortion euphemisms using terms such as “reproductive freedom” to cover the real intent of the amendment, which is to deny the humanity and personhood of the preborn child?
If this is not misleading and deceptive then nothing is.
The idea that the lawfulness of abortion – the intentional killing of an innocent preborn human being – should be democratically decided is in itself highly problematic. Can any man-made law erase truly fundamental, or as the declaration of independence called them, inalienable human rights, such as the right to life, and be considered lawful by virtue of a simple vote of a majority? That is a question which political philosophers and the founders of the United States will struggle with forever.
John Adams famously stated that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” By that, he surely did not mean to impose religion upon the citizens of the United States, but instead acknowledged that democracy and freedom, when unchecked by a higher sense of right and wrong, are doomed to failure.
While the people of Ohio cannot legislatively create a moral and religious people, they can demand that constitutional amendments put on the ballot not mislead, deceive and defraud them of the democratic right of self-government.
Attorney General Dave Yost has made a grave mistake in approving the Ohio Reproductive Freedom ballot summary.
Mr. Yost’s fear of being accused of bias towards the pro-life side has blinded him to the fact that the euphemistic propaganda that pretends to strip the right to life of the preborn child without mentioning the right to life or the child, is neither truthful nor fair to the voters of Ohio.
Unless this deceptive amendment is stopped in its tracks, the deadly wreckage it will leave in its wake will make the toxic fumes of the Palestine railroad disaster pale in comparison.
By approving the ballot summary of Ohio’s abortion amendment, Attorney General David Yost has abdicated his duty as Attorney General and let down the voters of Ohio.
No matter how the pro-aborts spin it, ALL instances of “eliminating a baby “ from the womb is MURDER – A LIFE HAS, OR WILL BE, DESTROYED. The solution for women, who do not want to be pregnant or do not want to have a child, offers MANY options. The humane solution is to offer the child for adoption -OR- practice abstinence. Once conception happens, the responsibility factor kicks in. Our society has not learned to respect EVERY person from conception to natural death.
It has been made abundantly clear throughout its history that adherents of Leftism will always seek to impose capital punishment upon the useful, the undefended and the inconvenient, no matter who they are, even if they are Leftists deemed to have served out their usefulness to the cause or those conscripted for human sacrifice in the cause of a “greater” inhumanity. My kinda neighbors.
This is absolutely a treaty to murder babies and must be stopped
“First-degree murder is the most serious of all homicide offenses. It involves any intentional murder that is willful and premeditated with malice aforethought. Premeditation requires that the defendant planned the murder before it was committed or was “lying in wait” for the victim. For example, a wife who buys poison and puts it in her husband’s coffee commits a premeditated murder, as does a man who waits behind a fence to attack a neighbor coming home from work. In many states, felony murder is also charged as first-degree murder.” — https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/
Comment: It is quite obvious that both the person who performs an abortion, and the mother who contracts with the abortionist to murder her pre-born child, are intentional, willful, and premeditated with malice aforethought, in planning the murder of a human person, at any time after the moment of the child’s conception in the mother.
It is also clear that depending on circumstances, many potential accessories to a first-degree abortion murder may be charged for same: the murder victim’s father, grandparent, or other relative, the mother’s employer, teacher, counselor, friend, or the distributor and manufacturer of the murder instrument or product.