Restoring Ohio as Safe Ground for the Unborn
By: Chuck Donovan
As 2024 moves toward the end of an election campaign that feels like it’s lasted a thousand days, we in the pro-life movement are on the edge of our seats. Besides a portentous contest between the presidential candidates, 11 ballot measures, including two in Nebraska, are on the line. Making matters even edgier, our movement is on a losing streak of Cleveland Browns proportions. Since 2022, we have been on the L side seven times out of seven, including here in Ohio.
These losses have been devastating. Living in a state that has been for decades a standout defender of the right to life and pro-life candidates, it was stunning to see a majority of our fellow Ohioans embrace a constitutional amendment that denies a right to life to every unborn child in the Buckeye State. That impact is now being felt anew as the amendment’s ramifications unfold in state court rulings in Columbus and Cincinnati. These decisions have enjoined and effectively eviscerated health standards aimed at protecting women and consistent with standards expected of other clinics providing invasive and other high-risk procedures. Recent rulings have also struck down informed consent provisions, and even a 24-hour waiting period before the forever-consequential choice of abortion. These rulings further enshrine the ersatz status of abortion as a “super-right” that places on the chopping block even popular measures designed to ensure that women and couples know about alternatives to abortion and provide basic safeguards for women’s safety and health.
At such a time, grounds for optimism remain about our fight for life. After such defeats, the temptation to retreat into the tall or even medium-height grass is powerful. Political figures who had proclaimed their fealty to the right to life, and their recognition of the humanity of the unborn child, have downplayed the issue or, in some cases, declared outright opposition to pro–life measures. Other political figures suggest they still support protective policies but propose caution or delay in considering those measures in a hostile climate where hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it from outside their own state, flow into abortion advocacy.
In this environment, what is the prolife movement to do? Are we destined for defeat after defeat? To live in cities and states where the lives of unborn girls and boys can be snuffed out until they draw their first breath, or even beyond?
It is hard to believe that this will become the dominant rule in the United States. But it is even harder to believe that champions for the unborn will rest content with such an outcome – not in America, and certainly not in Ohio. That is not our way.
It’s also not the American way. We have a habit in our country of devotion to technology and “progress” that clouds our insight into history. Advocates of legal abortion recently scorned a protective, pro-life law in Arizona because it dated to 1868. They expressed shock that the evil practice of abortion would be governed by something so archaic as a 19th century law. Instead, I look to the major themes of the 19th century and what stands out to me are the sacrifices men and women alike made to gain medical and legal respect for the unborn child, contain and then abolish slavery, and extend suffrage to women. What strikes me now is how long these processes took no matter how compelling the cause, and how brave Americans persisted for decades to obtain justice.
Those lessons resonate especially strongly to an Ohioan. Home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati was a way station for former slaves to escape bondage in the South. Growing up there, I saw up close historical landmarks like the Harriet Beecher Stowe House where the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin lived from 1836-42 and gained experiences retold in the novel that framed the stakes in the Civil War. I saw the wrenching period of campaigns for civil rights in the 1960s and the leadership of Cincinnati-area pastors. My involvement was small but formative. A classmate and I conducted and published an extended interview with the handful of black students at our high school, St. Xavier, in 1970. We asked them to share what the school meant to them and how more minorities could be recruited.
Change came, as it almost always does, over long periods of time as attitudes develop and are transformed into resources. The life issues will best be boosted the same way.
I began my lifetime of personal advocacy for life and family in Cincinnati more than a half century ago. The grace of God put me in a family of 10 children, the son of parents who cherished the sanctity of life and sacrificed to obtain for their kids schooling that would reinforce character and conviction. They pointed us toward education in medicine and law and other fields where ethics and public policy affected every action and decision.
When Roe v. Wade was handed down, I was already versed in what to expect thanks to attending the University of Notre Dame and meeting a fellow student named Theresa Willke. Working with an amazing array of other student leaders and law professor Charles Rice, we formed a pro-life group in 1972 (now the largest at the University) and invited to the campus Jack and Barbara Willke for a talk that riveted the campus’s attention at Washington Hall. No one in the audience that night had any idea what the body of an aborted child looked like. It was a different – and yes, less violent – world of medicine then. The Willkes had obtained clandestine images from a Canadian teaching hospital that unveiled the graphic outcome of abortion.
We could not look away. Fifty-two years later, reinforced by bioethical reasoning, tutelage in medical and social history, and observations of human behavior, there can still be no looking away. Ohio was an unmatched seedbed for pursuing the calling of defending life. My own contribution began with a volunteer role with Cincinnati Right to Life and Ohio Right to Life from 1975 to 1978. Through this labor of love I met amazing people like Stephanie Varga, Peggy Lehner, Col. Wade Jackson, Paul Imhoff, and Mike and Peggy Hartshorn – as well as my beloved Margaret Short, a fellow mighty laborer in the pro-life trenches. I did the first of what turned out to be a lifelong skein of research projects, combing through government documents and discovering how many federal dollars were going to fund “family planning” clinics in Ohio. That project led me to do a national survey for National Right to Life Committee that landed me in Washington in 1978. It elevated a fight in Congress, alive to this day, to keep taxpayer dollars away from domestic and international agencies that practice or promote abortion.
I learned in the course of continuing work with the Willkes and other national (and ultimately, global) leaders that Ohio’s heartland character gave it a special mission for life. I learned about the founding of Heartbeat of Toledo in 1971 by obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. John Hillabrand, Mrs. Lore Maier and others. While I made a move to Washington, DC and the policy world, my path crossed regularly with Peggy Hartshorn as she and others built out from Alternatives to Abortion International and formed Heartbeat International from a new base in Columbus, Ohio. Today Heartbeat is the largest international network of pregnancy centers in the world, reaching over 3,500 affiliates worldwide. It has become an indispensable host for innovation in pregnancy care, abortion pill reversal, maternity home care, healing after reproductive loss, and much more.
To this day, Ohio’s remains a stronghold of legislative advocates for life. But the situation is indeed dire, and we are once more at the crossroads. This is our history in Ohio, but what hope do we have to write better chapters in the years ahead? Here are a few reflections on what we might do.
Our movement needs a rebirth of education, research, maternal care and policy engagement.
Abortion is cruel dehumanization, with spillover effects in other areas of disrespect for human life. The law as interpreted by judicial elites may inhibit or even bar the sharing of information with women entering abortion facilities. We must reach them earlier with ever more excellent resources that document the dramatic beginning of life. Several states are acting to include such resources in their school curricula. No young person should reach maturity without having seen ultrasounds and presentations of the “miracle months” in their studies. I cannot begin to describe the reaction I witnessed at the Cesar Chavez Charter School in Washington, DC, when I showed a class of female students these breathtaking images. They had just returned from a school-arranged trip to Planned Parenthood and had never seen these life-affirming photos.
The public must likewise come to know what research and advanced care are doing to change the landscape of prenatal medicine. We see debates over whether abortion is legal to “term.” But term, simply put, isn’t what it used to be. Yes, pregnancy naturally extends to 40 weeks, but modern medical care is saving the vast majority of babies born prematurely at 22 weeks. A peer-reviewed study at the University of Iowa several years ago documented a save rate of 62% for babies admitted to the NICU at 22 weeks. An expert neonatologist tells me that a unit where he works is now attaining a save rate over 80 percent. Abortion isn’t medicine at all, but rather a primitive act of violence that subverts what expert practice can now accomplish. All babies cannot survive, but all deserve our best efforts to get them there.
Thirdly, we need to renew our commitment to policy and grassroots initiatives to pass good laws, including the diverse areas of health care, conscience rights, abortion funding, insurance and tax credits, adoption and alternatives to abortion. What is the point of elections if there are no policy plans to reach women and rescue children? In a recent article, I outlined just a few measures that could fill out an agenda for Congress in 2025. Yes, some legislators shrink from acting on abortion and adopt language about “bans” and “reproductive rights” that undermine their own case. Americans do not support abortion across the board, and they must see us as advocates for policies that are both principled and practical.
Abortion will never be just a states issue, anymore than slavery, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, the women’s vote and other issues of national import can be the sole provenance of the states. But Ohio’s pro-life history makes it fertile ground for enacting new policies to encourage fathers and come to the aid of mothers. The Center for Christian Virtue is seeking passage of a measure, SB 159, to offer tax credits for donations to pregnancy help centers, a measure that other states have adopted that increases center resources without entangling regulations. Ohio can do more, through the voices of political and community leaders, to support the mission of the centers and deter the kinds of attacks launched against them in Massachusetts, California, and other states. It should be politically impossible to attack charities that provide families and their babies with free ultrasounds, parenting lessons, diapers, strollers, and more.
I am optimistic about a rebound for life in Ohio and elsewhere for another reason as well. Advocates for abortion without legal limits have abandoned all pretense that what they seek is health care. Their platform now is abortion by pills, through the mail, with no or little medical screening, no counseling, no offering of options, no proximity to emergency rooms that a significant percentage of women will need, no parental notice or consent. Abortion will become more difficult to regulate, yes, but more women will experience its incredibly painful isolation, enduring an act that turns the home into a field of sorrow, as pop star Britney Spears describes it so starkly in her book The Woman in Me.
Abortions may surge under our current statutory regime, but the act is ultimately self-extinguishing. Support after abortion has long been a part of pro-life work but it is entering a new phase as women and girls confront the reality in person. Groups like the Institute of Reproductive Grief Care make it easier for women and families to address the emotional and psychological challenges of all kinds of pregnancy loss. Nothing will stymie the advocates (and financial beneficiaries) of abortion more than ensuring that neither fear nor shame deters women from sharing the experience of abortion with those close to them and the wider world. Silence does equal death in abortion merchants’ scheme to conceal the true toll of the procedure.
Ultimately, my hope for the future of the right to life is rooted in a belief that Americans continually strive for something better, even as it may take decades to achieve it. The simultaneous campaigns for the unborn, for the freedom of slaves, and for women’s suffrage each made progress in fits and starts, with a nation proceeding 90 years beyond the Civil War before it put an end to de jure segregation and similarly stalling nearly 100 years before it ended bans on interracial marriage. So it may be with full protection for the life of every child in the womb. We were not given to know this when we signed up for the battle. But neither did our Founders know what the cost would be to their lives and fortunes when they hailed the unalienable right to life endowed to us by our Creator. For now, let us rejoice that Roe v. Wade is gone at last, and that we are free to champion in every state, and at every level of power, the most vulnerable ones in our midst.
Chuck Donovan was the legislative director of National Right to Life Committee from 1978-81, served for eight years as a writer for President Ronald Reagan, and has held diverse roles in the pro-life and pro-family movement since 1989. He writes frequently at The Washington Stand.