Opinion | Abortion Rights and Democracy Are Being Put to the Test in Ohio

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : Similarly, Republican lawmakers in Missouri, North Dakota and Mississippi have gone to great lengths to try to twist and reshape the rules around state voter initiatives, in each instance apparently to limit voters' ability to directly register their preferences on abortion and reproductive rights.
40% : Instead, the long-term goal is to prohibit abortion as widely and as completely as possible.
39% : In the Dobbs majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the conclusion in Roe that the Constitution protected the right to abortion had stripped the American people of "the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance."
38% : Supporters of reproductive freedom across the country must continue to flock to the polls to defeat efforts to throttle democratic processes where they are being used to limit democratic deliberation on abortion.
34% : In that time, more than a dozen states have banned abortion, through the enforcement of pre-Roe abortion bans or the enactment of new ones.
34% : That's especially true at this moment, with grossly gerrymandered legislatures passing draconian bans that endanger women's health and freedom -- and with threats to democracy extending well beyond the topic of abortion.
33% : On this logic, the Dobbs decision merely corrected an egregious error, returning the power to regulate abortion "to the people and their elected representatives."
32% : Since the fall of Roe, every time Americans have gone to the polls to vote directly on matters of abortion, they have voted to protect reproductive rights, expanding protections for abortion access and rejecting efforts to roll back access to abortion.
31% :Viewed together, these efforts paint a disturbing portrait of Republican officials who are afraid of their constituents when it comes to abortion and who are taking increasingly aggressive steps to prevent voters from making their voices heard.
29% : But the episode should serve as a reminder that despite the Supreme Court's claim that Dobbs merely returned the question of abortion to the states, for opponents of abortion, allowing the residents of each state to decide this issue for themselves was never the goal, at least not in the long term.

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