(LifeSiteNews) – Overall, abortions rose in Ohio by 15% last year after the overturn of the state’s pro-life laws, with the share committed on out-of-staters rising to a fifth of the total, according to the latest numbers from the Ohio Department of Health.
Statehouse News Bureau reported that the agency’s 2025 data found 25,135 abortions, over 3,300 more than 2024. Non-residents sought 20.9% of them. Nearly 75% were within the first nine weeks, and more than half (59.3%) were done via pills. The abortion industry has heavily emphasized abortion pills since the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“It’s a tragedy, and it’s almost a historic tragedy,” Ohio Right to Life chairman Mike Gonidakis responded. “We just hope that we can hit the pause button here for a second so we can see what, if any, value or benefit we are doing to help women with these numbers and it’s just disheartening at best.”
Becoming a destination for abortion seekers from pro-life states is a consequence of Ohio voters rendering all the state’s pro-life laws effectively unenforceable in 2023, when they voted to add the so-called “Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety Amendment” to the Ohio Constitution. It asserts a “right” to make “personal reproductive” decisions, “including but not limited to decisions on contraception, (so-called) fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” which the state “shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against.”
Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost had warned that the amendment would go far beyond even Roe and block prohibitions on partial-birth and dismemberment abortions, allow abortionists to target disabled babies, and end parental consent requirements for abortion as well as minors’ contraception, sterilization, and “gender transition” decisions.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions, but the abortion lobby continues to work feverishly preserve “access” through a variety of means, most prominently deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, enabling the abortion industry to shift much of their business focus from surgical abortions to mailing abortion pills into states where abortion is illegal, to be taken in the privacy of one’s home with no medical oversight.
Pro-abortion state constitutional amendments have been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tactics to preserve abortion “access” without Roe v. Wade. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public.
After 2020, pro-lifers also either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, and Kansas, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.
