The Terrible Inconsistency in Ohio’s Abortion Ban

The Terrible Inconsistency in Ohio’s Abortion Ban December 8, 2016

The Ohio legislature just passed a bill banning the abortion of any fetus or embryo with a detectible heartbeat. An embryo typically has a heartbeat at six weeks gestation. Gestational age counts from the first day of their last period; most women are at roughly four weeks gestation when they miss their first period. According to the CDC, 25.3% of abortions performed in Ohio in 2013 occurred at or before six weeks gestation. In other words, Ohio’s heartbeat bill would ban well over three-quarters of abortions currently performed in the state.

I am pro-choice. I oppose this bill and others like it for a large variety of reasons. However, for the first twenty years of my life, I opposed abortion. I wanted to see the practice banned. I participated in our annual October Life Chain, put up crosses at cemeteries of the innocent, attended National Right to Life banquets, and campaigned for pro-life candidates. I even ran my university’s Students for Life chapter. While I now disagree, I do understand why many people today oppose abortion. What I don’t understand is why they are so inconsistent.

This past April, state representative Christie Kuhns introduced a bill designed to extend paid maternity leave in the private sector. This bill would have created a payroll deduction program that has been successful in other states, ensuring that a larger number of private workers in the state would be able to take time off after the birth of a child to recover and bond with their new baby without worrying where the money is coming from. As you’ve likely already deduced, this bill did not pass.

Alas, the bill died in committee.

What’s baffling is that this program was everything small-government conservatives are supposed to like—it wasn’t the government mandating private companies to pay for maternity leave out of their pockets, and it wasn’t the government paying for women’s maternity leave. It was effectively a private insurance program you would have paid for through your job.

Paid for through employee payroll deductions that, based on other states, could cost workers about $25 to $30 per year, Ohioans could get a portion of their salary paid for up to 12 weeks for qualifying circumstances. The program would be administered by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, which also would create a sliding scale to determine how much each worker contributes to the fund.

Ohio would have been the sixth state to create such a program. Republicans in the state legislature balked. It didn’t pass. Look, we know it’s good for both babies and mothers to have several months of maternity leave so that the mother can recover and the infant can grow with minimal exposure to germs. Many new mothers struggle to take any leave at all because they can’t afford to take time off work without getting paid. For individuals who claim to care deeply about protecting babies, this is a no brainer.

Ohio Republicans couldn’t find time to extend affordable maternity leave—using a plan that has worked in other states—but they could find time to ban abortion from the sixth week on. My, those are interesting priorities.

For all their rhetoric about protecting children from being murdered, Ohio Republicans also rejected a group of bills designed directly at protecting young children from being shot and killed with guns. Yes, really.

State Rep. Bill Patmon, D-Cleveland, introduced four bills last year involving firearms, including a safe-storage bill, one requiring universal background checks and another banning imitation firearms.

“We’re still laying .45-caliber handguns in the reach of children,” Patmon said. “There’s something wrong with that picture.”

These bills are designed to ensure that guns are not left within the reach of children; to ensure that criminals are not allowed to by guns; and to ensure that children are not killed because someone mistook an imitation firearm for a real firearm. These things are not hypothetical. Ohio children are dying due to problems these bills would solve. According to Toledo police, two children in that city have died due to unsecured firearms in the last two months alone. And of course, we’re all familiar with the story of Tamir Rice, who was shot while carrying an unmarked imitation gun.

The Republicans in the legislature couldn’t be bothered to pass common sense gun requirements that we know would save children’s lives—but they totally had time to ban abortion. This is complete and utter madness.

Again, I’m pro-choice. I’ll oppose undue restrictions on abortion any day of the week. But it’s hard to take seriously those working to ban abortion when there is a completely lack of consistency. I’m happy to disagree on factual questions or even on values—though I’ll definitely argue my case—but watching people who claim to care about life, about babies, about saving children from being murdered turn around and make it clear that they only care about those things when the term abortion is involved—let’s just say my civility is feeling a bit worn thin these days.


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