The Republican US Senate candidate from Ohio, Bernie Moreno, finds himself in a difficult position on the abortion issue and is apparently trying to cover his own ground.
To win a close race against Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, a key part of the Republican coalition – anti-abortion activists – must go to the polls.
But even though Ohioans have overwhelmingly voted Republican for the past few decades, most voters clearly disagree with anti-abortion groups. Last November, a comprehensive abortion law passed by a margin of 14 percentage points.
That leaves Moreno, a Cleveland businessman, with a choice between alienating a key part of his coalition or alienating a large section of centrist voters. Lately, he seems to have resorted to semantic means to avoid having to explain his position on this key issue – and this after criticizing others for their waffling.
Moreno’s campaign team did not respond to questions for this article, but Moreno has made numerous public statements on the matter.
As Moreno entered the Republican primary, he repeated several versions of the statement he made on January 13, 2022, on Cincinnati radio station 55WKRC when asked about his stance on abortion.
“Absolutely pro-life, with no exceptions,” Moreno said at 7:43 on this recording. That sounds very much like support for a ban on abortion – possibly with no exceptions.
Then earlier this year, in the midst of another Republican Senate primary, Moreno sought to distinguish himself from Republican Sen. Matt Dolan of Ohio (Chagrin Falls), who was also vying for the nomination. In a speech to a group of Dayton Republicans on March 10, Moreno noted that in 2019, Dolan “voted against the heartbeat bill. Right. So that’s a guy who’s not on our side.”
The Heartbeat Bill is Senate Bill 23, which banned the vast majority of abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy – a time when many women do not know they are pregnant. There were no exceptions for rape or incest. Supporters called it the Heartbeat Bill because, with very few exceptions, it bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected.
Doctors who specialize in reproductive health say the exceptions it makes for the mother’s health are vague and confusing for professionals dealing with rapidly deteriorating patients. They had to interpret it anyway on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down abortion rights protections under Roe v. Wade and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost rushed to court to give SB 23 immediate force of law.
In the months that followed, many women and girls were horrified to discover that the Heartbeat Bill amounted to a ban on abortion.
They include a 10-year-old rape victim whose existence Yost questioned. They also include other underage rape victims, cancer patients, women with doomed pregnancies and others who threatened suicide if they had to continue their pregnancies.
She and her doctors may have believed that an abortion was necessary, but as long as Ohio law was in place, they were prohibited from performing the procedure.
Ohio voters showed their strong opposition to the “heartbeat” law last November by overwhelmingly approving a constitutional amendment repealing it. In an opinion piece last week, Moreno’s opponent, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, said Ohioans’ stance on abortion was clear: “Decisions about a woman’s health care should be between her and her doctor – not politicians.”
Moreno may not say that. But he responds to questions about abortion by saying he does not use the word “ban.”
“I never mentioned the word ‘ban.’ I don’t see it that way at all,” Moreno told Karen Kasler of the Statehouse News Bureau on March 1 when she asked him if he supported a proposal for a national ban on abortion beginning at 15 weeks of pregnancy. “I’m saying that abortion is largely a state matter and that states make those decisions.”
In July, Moreno said all the talk about abortion bans was a construct of the media and the Democratic Party, even though the Supreme Court has given states the power to ban abortions without exception and even though he supported a law in Ohio that banned them after six weeks in the vast majority of cases.
“I have never used the term ‘ban,'” Moreno told CNN on July 16. “It’s a term that Democrats and the media like to use.”
The semantic differences may seem ironic considering that in March 2023, Moreno criticized other politicians for being hesitant about their commitment to the fight against abortion. A member of a group of Batavia Republicans asked him, “What are you going to do when you run to differentiate yourself from the other candidates (to show) that you really are the candidate who is 100% pro-life?”
Moreno was sure.
“I think you have to insist that the candidates say the following words: ‘I am uncompromisingly pro-life,'” he said in a video clip of the event, which was made available to the Ohio Capital Journal. “What often happens is that they say, ‘Oh, I’m pro-life.’ But then they suddenly make a ‘turnaround,’ as the media likes to call it. And then they go off track.”
Moreno then said, “My perspective is pretty simple,” and listed the positions politicians might have on issues like taxes. “None of that really matters if you can’t say you’re standing up for the most fundamental thing in our Declaration of Independence, which is the right to life.”
Lauren Beene is a pediatrician and co-founder of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the sudden passage of SB 23. She says Moreno can’t have it both ways.
“A ban is a ban,” Beene said in an email Wednesday. “SB 23 bans abortions when electrical impulses from the fetus’ heart cells can be detected on ultrasound. This occurs about two weeks after a woman misses her period (or six weeks after her last period). So most women don’t yet know they’re pregnant and have no option to have an abortion at that point. It doesn’t matter if Bernie Moreno prefers not to use the word ‘ban’ to describe SB 23, because SB 23 bans abortions for almost all Ohioans who might need one.”
This story was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and is republished here with permission.
