Election season is heating up, and so are the willfully ignorant and scientifically inaccurate attacks by anti-abortion groups on candidates in Ohio. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an organization dedicated to ending the right to abortion, is distributing campaign flyers loaded with intentionally false information throughout Southwest Ohio.
The flyers target Congressman Greg Landsman and former Senator Sherrod Brown for supporting abortion rights. They include misinformation about Medicaid and scare tactics regarding procedural abortion, which is safe and legal in Ohio.
The rhetoric is as tired as it is inaccurate.
Landsman and Brown have defended abortion rights
Ohioans overwhelmingly support the right to abortion. In 2023, a ballot measure to protect the right to abortion in Ohio’s constitution
passed with a 13-point margin. Support for abortion is not a liability for candidates. It is a strength.
At the federal level, Brown and Landsman have stood up for reproductive rights.
Both Brown and Landsman have worked to codify access to abortion, contraception, and other reproductive health care for all Americans. They each co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act that would enshrine abortion rights nationwide. They repeatedly voted against medically inaccurate restrictions pushed by anti-abortion groups.
In 2025, Landsman voted against President Donald Trump’s budget bill that barred patients on Medicaid from receiving cancer screenings, contraception, STI testing, and more at Planned Parenthood health centers. Federal funds do not pay for abortion, but these preventive services are critical for patients’ well-being. Landsman knows that, and he stood in solidarity with Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio when these cuts forced the closures of two health centers in our region.
When an arsonist attacked the Cincinnati Planned Parenthood health center in April of this year, Congressman Landsman was there to offer support and publicly condemn the violence against patients and health center staff.
Anti-abortion groups like SBA Pro-Life America and politicians like Senator Jon Husted were silent.
Husted is on the other side
While in office, Senator Husted has voted to slash access to Medicaid for working Ohioans. He was a “yes” vote on Trump’s budget bill that banned Medicaid patients from getting reproductive care at Planned Parenthood. Because of Senator Husted’s vote, Ohioans went without essential care.
The majority of Ohioans believe that our elected officials should not be in the business of mandating what we can do with our own bodies. Senator Husted is desperately out of touch with everyday Ohioans, moving in lockstep with the extreme anti-abortion groups distributing these intentionally inaccurate flyers. These groups continue to lie to us and hope we’ll vote our own rights away.
Ohioans see right through it.
Nan Whaley is the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio and a former mayor of Dayton, Ohio.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Anti-abortion groups can't rewrite what Ohio voters decided | Opinion
