HB 347 passed: Ohio lawmakers trampling Ohioans’ right to access abortion

Press Release | March 25, 2026

COLUMBUS — Today, 64 members of the Ohio House violated their oaths of office, passing House Bill 347. The bill is attempting to restore a 24-hour waiting period on abortion care, a restriction which was just blocked in courts just last year. This is just one of eleven bills under consideration in the Ohio General Assembly that violate the constitutional rights of Ohioans, remove access to medical care, and push misinformation and abortion stigma.

Abortion Forward Executive Director Kellie Copeland said: “When someone goes to the doctor, they want clear, accurate medical information. They don’t want to be told to come back tomorrow. They don’t want lies pushed by government. They don’t want misinformation distributed in schools. Patients don’t want that, medical professionals don’t want that, and voters have made it clear they don’t want that either. Politicians should never put themselves between patients and their health care providers. Today’s vote is a clear attempt to trample on the rights of Ohioans in a cynical attempt to ward off primary election challengers.”

Abortion Forward opposes the following bills currently pending in the Ohio General Assembly:

• House Bill 87: Gives legal rights for fetuses via “conceived child” tax credits
• House Bill 324: Mandates misinformation on medication abortion
• House Bill 347: Restores unconstitutional 24-waiting period on abortion
• House Bill 370: Creates constitutional rights for embryos and fetuses
• House Bill 410: Defunds Planned Parenthood
• House Bill 485: Orders schools to push propaganda via “Meet Baby Olivia” video
• House Bill 754: Orders the creation of a pregnancy registry and death certificates for pregnancies that don’t end in a live birth
• House Bill 783: Forces doctors to push fraudulent and harmful “abortion reversal” myth on patients
• Senate Bill 156: Mandates so-called Success Sequence views in schools, including abstinence-only programming
• Senate Bill 309: Promotes misinformation about and additional liabilities for medication abortion
• Senate Bill 310: Forces schools to teach propaganda via fetal development education requirement

Following the committee vote on House Bill 347, Abortion Forward Deputy Director Jaime Miracle said: “A state mandated 24-hour waiting period will harm patients by creating additional barriers to care and increasing costs of the procedure. For anti-abortion members of this legislature, this is a feature not a flaw. The goal of this legislation is not to ensure informed consent. It is to make it harder for people to access the care they need.”

House Bill 347 violates the Ohio Constitution in a multitude of ways.

• It’s burdensome and interferes with rights. House Bill 347 directly burdens and interferes with an individual’s voluntary exercise of the right to abortion by mandating a state-imposed 24-hour waiting period.
• It’s discriminatory against patients and providers. By imposing this 24-hour waiting period and mandatory misinformation requirement only on individuals seeking abortion care and the medical professionals providing that care and not on other medical procedures or medications, House Bill 347 discriminates against both individuals exercising their voluntary right to abortion and medical professionals assisting the individual in exercising their rights.
• It fails to meet the “least restrictive” standard in the constitution. By imposing a restriction on abortion using medically inaccurate and thoroughly debunked “research,” and having failed to prove how this restriction will advance the health of individuals, House Bill 347 does not use “the least restrictive means to advance the individual’s health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.”

Research from the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network has shown that 24 hour waiting period laws “make it harder for patients to experience timely, safe, and routine health care and result in distressing challenges for abortion seekers.” Since the passage of the Ohio Reproductive Freedom Amendment, some of these barriers have begun to be dismantled.  

For nearly 20 years, Ohioans endured harmful restrictions like the 24-hour waiting period that delayed or denied abortion care altogether. The previous restriction was blocked through a lawsuit filed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas by ACLU of Ohio on behalf of Preterm-Cleveland, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region, Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, Women’s Med Group Professional Corporation, Northeast Ohio Women’s Center, and Dr. Catherine Romanos.