Top Republican candidates for statewide office took the stage in the rain for one of the state’s largest gatherings of anti-abortion advocates each year. Hundreds braved the rain to hold signs at the Statehouse rally before the Ohio March for Life, which assembled at the Statehouse and proceeded along High Street in downtown Columbus.
U.S. Sen. Jon Husted was among the featured speakers, telling the crowd that he is alive because of his birth mother‘s choice.
“She had a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half year old, and she somehow lost her husband in Vietnam, and she became pregnant with another man,” Husted said. “And as it was told to me, he did not want her to have that baby, that he would take care of her as long as she didn't have that baby. And that that baby was me. While he wanted her to have an abortion, she chose an adoption.”
Husted also said U.S. Senators are considering how to regulate abortion-inducing drugs: “We need to make sure that those prescriptions are done in person and not in the mail, so that we are not endangering the lives of women across this country.”
McColley also spoke to the crowd, along with Center for Christian Virtue president Aaron Baer.
A handful of abortion rights protestors stood near the crowd, holding up a sign that read "Abortion Is Health Care".
Abortion Forward Deputy Director Jaime Miracle, who wasn't at the event, said the abortion inducing drugs are safe.
“What anti-abortion groups and legislators are trying to do is to say that they don't want it, and therefore it is unsafe. And that is just not the case,” Miracle said in an interview.
Miracle said Ohio's reproductive rights amendment approved by voters in 2023 protects the use of those drugs. But she said lawmakers who want to weaken it pose a threat.
“Voters really this year have a choice between protecting what's in our constitution or seeing it just be a meaningless piece of paper,” said Miracle. And everyone needs to vote, just like they did in ‘23, to make sure that amendment sees its full potential."
But Miracle and the speakers at the rally had a similar message: that the candidates voters choose this fall will play an important role in the future of abortion in Ohio and the nation.
