The New Yorker:

Tuesday’s election results in that state and elsewhere offer fresh evidence of how the issue is likely to help Democrats in 2024.

By Peter Slevin 

Starting last spring, volunteers fanned out across Ohio—at farmers’ markets, brewpubs, supermarkets, athletic fields—to try to persuade half a million people to sign a petition to get a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights on the November ballot. One afternoon, at Silk Road Textiles, in Cincinnati, among shelves of needlework books, two silver-haired volunteers sat at a table displaying stickers that said “O-H-I-Roe” and “Restore Roe,” mottos designed to indicate that the proposed amendment would be anything but radical. As one of the organizers walked in, a volunteer called out, “We’ve had a really good day!” A few dozen signatures in the book, several hundred thousand to go. The immediate goal was to neutralize a law, passed and signed by Ohio Republicans—now blocked while under review by the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court—prohibiting almost all abortions after about six weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

On Tuesday, what started as a grassroots initiative with an uncertain outcome turned into the biggest victory for abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, in June, 2022, overturned the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. In a state that has long been dominated by Republicans, more than two million people endorsed a constitutional amendment asserting that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” The amendment, which, like Roe, allows the state to restrict abortion only after fetal viability, unless a doctor considers it necessary to protect the mother’s life or health, passed by more than thirteen percentage points. Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, which promotes progressive ballot measures in red and purple states, told me, “A victory in Ohio really does tell all of us in the abortion-rights movement that this is possible almost everywhere.”

Go to link