Ohio parents face a deceptive leftist effort to strip them of their voting rights.

Activists in Ohio Fight for Parental Rights

Activists in Ohio filed more than 700,000 signatures on Wednesday in an attempt to add a proposed constitutional amendment enshrining several anti-parent policies into law to the November ballot.

The ballot language, penned by the ACLU and promoted by nearly a dozen pro-abortion and LGBT groups, claims that “every individual has a right” to ending life in the womb and other “reproductive decisions” regardless of age or trimester.

Those keen on bringing abortion through birth into the state and removing parental consent laws for minors seeking irreversible gender experiments celebrated the hundreds of thousands of signatures as a win for their agenda.

Questionable Signature Collection Methods

The means by which those signatures were obtained, however, were not fully above board.

Roughly 413,000 of the signatures collected must be deemed valid by state officials but footage shows petitioners knowingly soliciting endorsement from bystanders who are not qualified to sign a petition in Ohio.

“She did say she wasn’t registered to vote in Ohio,” a man tells one of the men garnering information.

“So when these get notarized, her signature gets disqualified and doesn’t count. But from a manager point of view, the signature counts for me as a signature for today. That’s how we get paid,” the petitioner said.

Deceptive Language and Radical Implications

Signatures aren’t the only thing activists twisted to advance their agenda. They also work to keep the amendment’s language vague in an attempt to disguise some of its radical implications.

Groups like Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom — a coalition of eight pro-abortion and LGBT groups — and Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, with help from fake “fact-checkers,” insist that the amendment “says nothing about transgender or parental rights.”

Even out-of-state petitioners hired by Planned Parenthood, who originally tried to claim that the amendment will simply move current laws from “six weeks to 12 weeks” confirmed there was “no age limit” to abortions and that a “child can go have an abortion without her parents knowing.”

“It’s for everybody’s reproductive rights,” one canvasser said.

Implications for Parental Consent Laws

An attorney for ACLU of Ohio, one of the biggest backers of this specific proposal, similarly confessed in February that, if the constitutional amendment passes, laws requiring parents to sign off on abortions and mutilation for their teen daughter would not necessarily be enforced.

“When you pass a constitutional amendment, it doesn’t just automatically erase everything and start over. But it would mean that laws that conflict with it cannot be enforced, should not be enforced,” Jessie Hill said.

Other proponents of the ballot measure such as Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, a proud supporter of “sex-positive, gender-expansive, and abortion positive” policies, openly oppose parental consent legislation.

Media Bias and Opposition

Corporate media and Democrats smear opposition to the proposal and Republican attempts to tighten constitutional amendment rules as unpopular and undemocratic.

In reality, GOP legislators and pro-life organizations in Ohio are trying to protect their state from the abortion shills who, with the help of out-of-state donors and outside groups, deceived Kansas voters in 2022 into rejecting a proposal that would have declared there is no constitutional right in Kansas to abortion, taxpayer-funded or otherwise.

“Parents want to and should partner with their children in their healthcare education and decisions. We should not allow for the isolating of children from their parents as they walk through life-impacting medical decisions, while third parties-including abusers and traffickers-are protected and encouraged as is being demonstrated when such amendments are being utilized in other states,” Vivina Napier, a Columbus-based OB/GYN said in a statement. “This ballot initiative would permit gruesome late-term abortions in our state as well as exclude parents from participating in their children’s life-altering healthcare decisions. This amendment endangers the safety, health and well-being of children in Ohio, as well as the rights of parents.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.