LOVELAND MAGAZINE

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Tag: Nan Whaley

  • Doctors call on DeWine to answer questions about abortion laws

    Doctors call on DeWine to answer questions about abortion laws

    BY: MARTY SCHLADEN – Ohio Capital Journal

    Days after Gov. Mike DeWine said the medical community will be consulted as Ohio considers future abortion legislation, a group of more than 1,400 doctors implored him to answer questions about a law he’s already signed.

    The Ohio medical community has said that to date, DeWine and Republican lawmakers have shown little interest in what doctors have to say when it comes to abortion. Then, late last week, DeWine seemed to reinforce that impression, declining to respond to a list of nine questions that Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights sent him and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley.

    The group was formed in the wake of the June 24 U.S. Supreme Court Decision overturning the right to an abortion under Roe v Wade. In Ohio and nationally, medical groups said that decision ignores the health care aspects of abortion.

    DeWine’s non-response is unacceptable, said Lauren Beene, a Cleveland-area pediatrician and a director of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights.

    “These are very important questions that people need to know his stance on because … this can have a lot of implications on a person’s health and their ability to get medical care,” she said, explaining that Ohio’s abortion restrictions can discourage doctors from living here — or even women worried about having the full range of medical options. 

    “If you have somebody who’s running for governor who can’t or won’t answer the question of whether or not he supports a bill that would make all abortion illegal except in the most dire of circumstances,” Beene said, “from a medical perspective (that) doesn’t really make any sense. What does that even mean? It’s not good at all.”

    She was referring to proposed legislation that would go even further than Senate Bill 23, a law DeWine signed in 2019 and which took effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24. 

    SB 23 outlaws almost all abortions after about five or six weeks of pregnancy and it doesn’t make exceptions for victims of rape and incest. It makes some exceptions to protect the life and health of mothers, but doctors have complained that they’re vague and practitioners are reluctant to risk felony charges for running afoul of them.

    Several doctors interviewed by the Capital Journal have said they repeatedly tried to warn DeWine and the legislature of the hazards of SB 23 before it was passed and signed in 2019, but they were ignored. Then, shortly after enforcement began in the summertime, many of the things they warned of came to pass.

    Just a week into enforcement, an Indianapolis doctor reported that she aborted the pregnancy of a 10-year-old rape victim from Columbus who couldn’t get one under the Ohio law DeWine had signed. In the following weeks, Ohio doctors told of having to call lawyers first as patients’ lives were fading in front of them — and even then being terrified of the consequences while performing lifesaving terminations.

    Then, in sworn affidavits, doctors and other workers at Ohio abortion clinics reported other horrors under SB 23. They included two more rape victims under 18 who couldn’t get abortions in Ohio; two cancer patients who couldn’t get the abortions they needed to start chemotherapy; and three women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they, too, couldn’t get abortions in Ohio. 

    SB 23 was in force for 11 weeks before a Cincinnati judge temporarily paused it. 

    Now DeWine and Attorney General Dave Yost are in court trying to get the stay lifted. But through it all, DeWine has refused to say whether he thinks it’s a good thing that SB 23 makes women and girls have their rapists’ babies — nor has he said much about women facing the medical problems described in the abortion clinics’ affidavits.

    DeWine has refused to debate Whaley, but last week in a joint appearance with her before the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board, he gave his most extensive recent comments about abortion in Ohio.

    DeWine said policymakers will listen to the medical community as further abortion restrictions are considered. However, he only did so after seeming to repeat Yost’s false assertion that under SB 23, a 10-year-old can get an abortion based on her age alone. 

    The law mentions no age at which a rape victim is too young to be forced to have that baby. And several obstetricians told the Capital Journal that while pregnancy in a 10-year-old is riskier than the average pregnancy, that’s also the case for the obese, diabetics, older mothers — and women with a host of other conditions that SB 23 makes no exceptions for.

    But in the future, DeWine said, medical experts will be heard.

    “As we go through debates and discussions, my belief would be that that 10-year-old would have been able to have an abortion in Ohio because of that,” DeWine told Whaley and the editorial board, referring apparently to SB 23’s health exceptions. “If I’m wrong — if I was wrong — and we’re going to hear more from medical professionals, then these are the things that we’ll need to work out, that the legislature will work out as it debates this bill.”

    Despite being asked twice by Whaley, DeWine didn’t answer whether he agreed with the provision in SB 23 forcing such young girls to have their rapist’s babies. DeWine also hasn’t said whether he agrees with the law’s requirement that victims of rape and incest must carry their pregnancies to term regardless of their age.

    In their written questions, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights asked the governor to state his position on proposals that would go even further, including House Bill 704 “that would declare a fertilized egg, a single cell, to be legally the same as a human being.” 

    DeWine didn’t respond. When asked about the doctors’ questions, DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney on Tuesday said in an email, “The Governor has no additional comments beyond his previous statements at this time.”

    For Beene, one of the directors of the doctors’ group, DeWine’s silence is telling.

    “We have doctors in all specialties all across the state,” she said. “And if we have questions and he won’t answer them, what does that say to the public? For us as physicians, we’re very frustrated with him not wanting to answer.”  

    Follow Marty Schladen on Twitter.

  • A weekend of protests in Columbus following Dobbs decision

    A weekend of protests in Columbus following Dobbs decision

    Protesters gathered at the statehouse to voice opposition to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. (photo by Nick Evans)

    BY: NICK EVANS – Ohio Capital Journal

    Over the weekend protesters rallied in demonstrations large and small voicing their opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

    The Attorney General

    Saturday afternoon a couple dozen people gathered near the end of a sleepy street in Beechwold. Demonstrators brought bullhorns, pots and pans, even a vuvuzela, and organizers handed out pamphlets describing what areas are and aren’t public property. Then they marched up a narrow side street to Attorney General Dave Yost’s home.

     Protesters demonstrating outside the home of Attorney General Dave Yost. (Photo by Nick Evans, OCJ.)

    “After his workday, he comes home, kicks his feet up, has real nice evening,” organizer Mandy Shunnarah-Reed told the group before they set out. “Meanwhile, the rest of us have to live with the consequences of the decisions he’s made about our bodies and our livelihoods, 24-7, 365. We don’t get to just not worry about it, because it’s not business hours.”

    “So that is why we are annoying him on a Saturday,” she said.

    The group grew to about 50 and they made a racket of chants, whistles and smashing cookware at the foot of Yost’s driveway while a security agent from the AG’s office looked on. The cacophony was short lived though — after about twenty minutes they learned Yost wasn’t home.

    Some Ohioans employed similar tactics to voice opposition to COVID-19 restrictions and to intimidate then-health director Amy Acton early in the pandemic. But Katie McKeel and her husband John were quick to draw a distinction.

    Katie carried a sign that read “my body, my rights, my vote, my voice will be heard in 2022.” But the “22” was taped on. She first made the sign in 2018 for the women’s march in Washington D.C.

    “If my right to my choice and my self-autonomy and what I do with my own body is not as important as the airspace of our elected officials, I find that to be completely out of whack,” Katie said.

    “We haven’t threatened Dave Yost. Amy Acton got death threats,” John chimed in. “That’s a big difference.”

    Christy Williams came to the protest with her daughter, and she argued that banning abortions won’t reduce the number that occur, it will just make them more dangerous. Like the McKeels, she believed their right to protest should take precedence.

    “This is a civil right,” she said. “You can do this.”

    The Statehouse

    Sunday morning thousands of people turned up at the Statehouse for a rally put on by the Ohio Democratic Party. Notably, although not surprisingly, many of the groups spanned generations. Mothers with daughters and even granddaughters showed up together waving handmade signs. Picking up on that, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown noted up he was there with his wife, his daughters and grandkids. Brown told the crowd “we need a plan,” and argued for electing two new Democratic U.S. Senators and maintaining the Democratic majority in the House.

    “If we can carry out this plan, by this time next year the Senate and the House of Representatives will have codified Roe v. Wade,” Brown argued.

    The problem is, picking up Senate seats while keeping the House is a pretty tall order for a midterm election amid persistent inflation. The court’s decision to overturn Roe surely changes the political calculus, but it’s unclear how much.

    The other issue, as people like Nina Turner have pointed out, is that Democrats already have control of all the levers of power they need to codify abortion protections — they simply haven’t acted because some Democratic senators oppose ending the filibuster.

    Speaking afterward, Brown acknowledged some members of his caucus are “not in the right place” when it comes to the filibuster, but he insisted with two new members the party would act.

    “If we have two more Democrats, we will change the filibuster rules, so that a majority can speak,” Brown said. “All we’re asking for is majority rule.”

    One candidate looking to flip a Senate seat in Brown’s plan spoke to the crowd as well. Ohio Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Tim Ryan described the whiplash of marching to the Supreme Court building on Friday to protest with his 18-year-old daughter, in D.C. for an internship, alongside fellow congresswomen who were part of the fight that led to Roe in the first place.

    “This is a struggle,” Ryan said. “This is a struggle for this election, and the next election, and the next election in the decades to come because we’re gonna turn this around, and we’re gonna make sure that this never happens again.”

     Tim Ryan addressing the crowd outside the statehouse. (Photo by Nick Evans, OCJ.)

    Ryan acknowledged afterward that some voters might feel pessimistic in light of Democrats’ unwillingness to roll back the filibuster and take action to protect abortion access at the federal level. But he urged them not to check out.

    “So I would say you have a chance now,” Ryan said. “We are where we are. You have a chance to actually make that difference right here in Ohio.”

    While Ryan and Brown made the case for federal action, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley made a more immediate, explicit argument.

    “Ohio is ground zero for this fight,” Whaley insisted. “We are one of the largest states in the country where abortion is on the ballot.

    Whaley called Gov. Mike DeWine the “most anti-choice governor in the country” and chastised him for urging people to be civil in the wake of the decision. What’s civil about taking away rights, forcing women to maintain a pregnancy or risk dying on an operating table she asked.

    Like Brown and Ryan she drew a bright line from the court decision to the ballot box.

    “This is not a drill. This is not a hypothetical,” Whaley told the crowd. “Our lives and our children’s lives are on the line. I refuse to go back and I know I am not alone.”