Ohio abortion ban: Inspired by 'God's agenda,' written in Texas, defended by Trump lawyer
LEBANON, Ohio – When Lebanon City Council members met in early May, their agenda included a long list of goals for the coming year.
It was the kind of list that could’ve appeared on any council agenda in any American city. Fix potholes and pave roads. Install some new parking meters. Build a public restroom .
But as City Council focused on the mundane necessities of local governance, Councilman Doug Shope was quietly working toward a more ambitious goal, one that would push his city and its 21,000 residents to the front lines of the nation’s culture wars.
Shope wanted to ban abortions in Lebanon. And he’d come up with a plan to do it.
It didn’t matter to him that no one in Lebanon performed abortions or was seeking permission to perform them. It also didn’t matter that an outright ban on abortions seemed to defy almost five decades of legal precedent.
What mattered to Shope, a devout Christian with a theology degree, was that banning abortions in Lebanon is what God would want him to do.
It was impossible for Shope to separate his faith from his work in government. The Ohio Revised Code had its place, but he’d been taught since he was a kid growing up in the countryside around Morrow, Ohio, that the Bible contained the rules that matter most.
“I believe that the word of God is the truth. It is inerrant,” Shope said last week. “I will make my decisions based on that.”
Some would call him a religious zealot or a publicity hound for pursuing the abortion ban, and some would try to fight the measure. Even in a conservative city that gave 65% of its vote to former President Donald Trump in November, there would be resistance.
So for several weeks this spring, from the genesis of the idea in late April until the ban came up for a vote in City Council on May 25, Shope searched for allies who could help him achieve his goal.
Related story: Gov. Greg Abbott signs 'fetal heartbeat' bill banning most abortions in Texas
He found them in a young man who believed the abortion ban was inspired by God, a radio host who urged Christians to “defend their faith in the public square,” a Texas group that volunteered to write the law behind the ban, a former Trump attorney who promised to defend the ban in court and a Republican-dominated City Council that wasn’t shy about jumping into debates over guns, civil rights and mask mandates.
Together, they would succeed in pushing through one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation and the first such law in Ohio.
As they celebrated and protested after the council’s vote last week, supporters and opponents marveled at how quickly it all happened.
“It was, ‘Boom, here it is,’ ” said Krista Wyatt, who had been City Council’s only Democrat before resigning in protest before the vote. “I had no clue of the level of seriousness or how far it had gotten.”
Pursuing 'God's agenda' with abortion ban
Shope’s level of seriousness about abortion is undeniable. His beliefs, forged in the pastoral ministry and as a theology student at Ohio’s Mount Vernon Nazarene University, are absolute: Abortion is murder and is always wrong.
“While I feel great compassion for the woman carrying the child, there is no circumstance so bad that it can be remedied by killing an innocent person,” he said.
An abortion ban fit neatly into his worldview.
But how could he do it? Anti-abortion activists had been trying for decades to erode the right to an abortion established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973. They’d succeeded on multiple fronts, from statehouses to courthouses, with laws imposing waiting periods, ultrasound tests, zoning restrictions, licensing requirements and a host of other measures that limited access to abortion.
Still, the goal of banning abortion once and for all had eluded them. The sticking point was the Supreme Court standard that no law could impose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions.
The courts might allow activists to chip away at abortion rights, but they wouldn’t allow an outright ban.
In late April, however, Shope and a like-minded friend, 19-year-old Joshua Beckmann, got to talking about how local governments might find another way. Earnest and articulate, Beckmann had been born into poverty in India, adopted by an American family and raised in Lebanon.
He abhorred abortion and peppered his conversations about it with phrases like, “What if Mahatma Gandhi had been aborted?”
He told Shope he had an idea. “What about a sanctuary city for the unborn?”
At the time, Beckmann said, he didn’t know a Texas group, Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, already had helped 28 cities in Texas and Nebraska write laws banning abortions within city limits.
“This came from nowhere but God,” Beckmann said of his idea. “This is God’s agenda. It’s been God who’s really leading this.”
Shope was intrigued. He did some reading and talked to another friend and activist, Lori Viars, who suggested he contact Mark Harrington, a Columbus-based radio show and podcast host known for his anti-abortion activism.
Harrington, whose website describes abortion as “the greatest human rights injustice of our time,” set up a conference call with Shope and the leaders of the Sanctuary Cities group.
More: Abortion rights groups sue Indiana over law regarding 'abortion reversal' drug
Shope liked what they had to say. They told him they’d written abortion ban laws for other cities and would do the same for Lebanon, with a few tweaks to align with Ohio law. And if the city got sued, which seemed likely, they’d help defend the ban in court.
“We are going to make the city of Lebanon the most life-affirming place on Earth,” Shope said. “This is one step in doing that.”
A law with teeth?
Not long after that call, sometime in early May, Shope met with Councilman Adam Mathews to talk about the ban. Mathews is a lawyer and the chairman of a network of “pro-life women’s clinics” in Southwest Ohio.
Shope showed him some sample ordinances from Sanctuary Cities and asked him what he thought. Mathews had wanted the council to take a stand on abortion for some time, but he wasn’t sure how much local governments could do.
“Normally, we’d think our hands are tied,” Mathews said.
After spending a few hours researching the ordinances, though, Mathews decided it might work. Because the ban only would apply to Lebanon, and because Lebanon didn’t currently have an abortion clinic, one could argue the ban wasn’t an undue burden on women seeking abortions.
Abortion rights advocates would later call that argument absurd, noting that abortion bans, by definition, cannot coexist with legalized abortion. It was an end-run around Roe, they would say, an attempt to do at the local level what the Supreme Court had so far refused to do at the national level.
But Mathews saw an opportunity for City Council to get involved. He emailed Shope with his answer.
“I’m in,” he wrote.
Shope and Mathews figured the rest of City Council wouldn’t need much convincing, either. With one exception.
Wyatt, the council’s lone Democrat, thought the idea was nuts. A retired firefighter and lifelong resident, Wyatt ran for council in 2017 in part because she was concerned the city’s leaders needed to pay more attention to local issues and less to the big ideological fights raging in Washington.
So when Shope mentioned the possibility of an abortion ban for the first time during a council work session on May 4, Wyatt said she rolled her eyes and told him City Council should stay out of it.
She was getting used to this sort of thing. As the nation’s political divisions worsened amid the pandemic, social justice protests and the presidential election in 2020, Wyatt increasingly was at odds with her more conservative colleagues.
A gun owner who watched the city’s budget as closely as her own, Wyatt never considered herself a liberal, let alone a radical leftist. “This is Lebanon,” she said. “The majority of people I know are Republican.”
But on this council, she was an outlier.
Her fellow council members complained about mask mandates, resisted her efforts to create a human rights commission to address discrimination in the city and rescinded a city law barring concealed weapons in the municipal building.
To Wyatt, talk of the abortion ban was more of the same: symbolic posturing that would divide the community and accomplish nothing.
“I’m not pro-abortion,” Wyatt said. “But it’s not my job to tell other women what to do with their body. That’s not my role. We have a charter that tells us what our jobs are. We oversee the budget. We hire a city manager. That is our job.
“I didn’t join council to do all this side stuff.”
A quick vote
Wyatt said she didn’t know it at the time, but work on the law was coming along fast behind the scenes.
In the weeks that followed their first call with Sanctuary Cities in early May, Shope and a handful of other city officials were in regular contact with the Texas group and its leader, Mark Lee Dickson.
'Hell was unleashed':: Biden urges reckoning on race at Tulsa massacre anniversary, taps Harris to lead on voting
Dickson said he helped pass the first municipal abortion ban in Texas in 2019 and has since watched the movement take on “a life of its own.”
In Lebanon’s case, Dickson said, he acted as a point man between city officials and his group’s legal team, which he said is led by Jonathan F. Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department and worked as a volunteer attorney for Trump’s campaign.
Mitchell declined an on-the-record interview, but Dickson described him as crucial to the movement. He said Mitchell is the lawyer who volunteered to represent cities for free against lawsuits that might arise from the abortion bans.
Shope said Sanctuary Cities provided the template for the law and spent weeks going back and forth with city officials to make sure the ban would reflect local values.
They agreed the law would describe abortion as “a murderous act of violence” and would declare all abortion-inducing drugs, such as the morning-after pill, to be “contraband.” Anyone who performed an abortion or helped a woman obtain one in the city would be considered “a criminal and a felon” who could be jailed for up to a year.
Cases of rape or incest would not be exempt, but the criminal penalty would not apply to the woman seeking an abortion or if the woman’s life was in danger.
Shope, who touted his Christian and anti-abortion views while campaigning for office, saw the creation of the law as a kind of truth in advertising. He’d told people what he stood for. Now he was doing something about it.
“Our hope is that it serves as a deterrent and a message of hope,” Shope said of the law.
Usually, a piece of legislation appears on City Council’s agenda for several weeks before coming up for a vote, allowing council members and the public to comment and suggest changes.
That didn’t happen this time. The abortion ban didn’t show up on a council agenda until the agenda for the May 25 meeting came out a few days before the vote. The ban was listed as an “emergency” measure that required immediate action by the council.
No one explained why. But to Beckmann, the young man who had suggested the ban to Shope weeks earlier, the reason was obvious.
“This is an emergency,” he said. “Saving the unborn is an emergency.”
Wyatt was furious. She said she learned the abortion ban was up for a vote the same way everyone else in Lebanon did: She saw it on the agenda. No one told her it was coming, and no one shared the legislation with her.
She quit in protest before the meeting. “The only thing I can control is my integrity,” she said. “And I can’t be a part of this.”
Hundreds came to the meeting to speak and watch, filling council chambers and spilling onto the sidewalk and the street outside. Supporters cheered and held up “Lebanon Saves Babies” signs. Opponents jeered and chanted “My body, my choice.”
Four hours later, after listening to dozens of speakers on both sides, all six remaining council members cast their votes for the abortion ban.
Contributing: Amber Hunt and Rachel, The Enquirer.
Follow Dan Horn on Twitter: @danhornnews.