COLUMBUS, Ohio – A Statehouse rally opposing Ohio laws that limit access to abortions and other women’s health care is drawing participants from around the state and country.
Members of more than 50 women’s groups, labor unions and others are expected at today’s event. The “We Won’t Go Back” rally takes issue with funding cuts to Planned Parenthood as well as abortion-related restrictions placed on Ohio’s publicly funded hospitals and on counselors at taxpayer-funded rape crisis centers.
Among the speakers will be Feminist Majority Foundation president Ellie Smeal who says she hopes the rally will show the Republican-dominated state legislature that Ohio women don’t want clinics to close that provide inexpensive services including pap smears, birth control, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and abortions.
Abortion opponents are urging Ohio legislators to impose more stringent abortion restrictions.
The state Department of Health, meanwhile, says the number of abortions in Ohio increased last year for the first time in more than a decade. The state says 25,473 abortions were reported in Ohio in 2012, about about 700 more than in 2011, when the number hit its lowest level since the data-tracking started in 1976. The number had decreased annually between 2000 and 2011.