Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno is in a difficult position when it comes to abortion, and he appears to be trying to hedge.

To win a close race against Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, he needs an important part of the Republican coalition — abortion opponents— to show up to the polls. 

But while Ohioans have mostly elected Republicans in recent decades, most voters clearly disagree with abortion foes. A sweeping abortion-rights measure sailed through last November by a 14-point margin.

That leaves Moreno, a Cleveland businessman, the choice of alienating a key part of his coalition or a huge swath of voters in the middle. These days, he seems to be using semantics to avoid stating his position on that pivotal issue. That’s after he criticized others for waffling.

Moreno’s campaign didn’t respond to questions for this story, but Moreno has made numerous public statements on the matter.

When he was running in Republican primaries, Moreno made several versions of the statement he made on Jan. 13, 2022 on Cincinnati’s 55WKRC radio when asked for his position on abortion.

“Absolute pro-life, no exceptions,” Moreno said at the 7:43 mark on this recording. That sounds a lot like support for an abortion ban — possibly without exceptions.

Then earlier this year in the midst of another GOP Senate primary, Moreno was seeking to distinguish himself from Ohio Sen. Matt Dolan, R-Chagrin Falls, who was also seeking the nomination. Speaking to a group of Dayton Republicans on March 10, Moreno noted that Dolan in 2019 “voted against the heartbeat bill. Right. So this is a guy who’s not on our side.”

The “heartbeat bill” is Senate Bill 23, which banned the great majority of abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy — a point at which many women don’t know they’re pregnant. It included no exceptions for rape or incest. Supporters called it the “heartbeat bill” because, with very few exceptions, it bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected.

Doctors who specialize in reproductive health say the exceptions it does make for the mother’s health are vague and confusing for professionals who have to deal with quickly deteriorating patients. They were left to interpret it anyway on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court terminated abortion-rights protections under Roe v Wade and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost rushed to court to give SB 23 the immediate force of law.

In the months that ensued, many women and girls learned to their horror that for them, the “heartbeat bill” was an abortion ban.

They include a 10-year-old rape victim whose existence Yost questioned. They also include other minors who were rape victims, cancer patients, women with doomed pregnancies and others who threatened suicide if they had to continue their pregnancies.

They and their doctors might have believed they needed abortions, but while the Ohio law was in effect, for them the procedure was banned.

Ohio voters last November demonstrated strong disagreement with the “heartbeat” law by overwhelmingly approving a constitutional amendment overturning it. In an op-ed last week, Moreno’s opponent, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, said Ohioans’ position on abortion was clear: “A woman’s health care decisions should be between her and her doctor – not politicians.”

Moreno might not be saying that. But he is answering questions about abortion by saying he doesn’t use the word “ban.”

“I have never said the word ‘ban,’ I don’t look at that at all that way,” Moreno told Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler on March 1 when she asked him whether he supported a proposal for a 15-week national abortion ban. “What I say is that abortion is mostly up to the states and the states make those decisions.” 

By July, Moreno was saying that all the talk of abortion bans was a construct of the media and the Democratic Party. He said that even though the Supreme Court had given the states power to ban abortion without exception and he had supported an Ohio law that banned it after six weeks in the vast majority of cases.

“I’ve never used the term ‘ban,’” Moreno told CNN on July 16. “That’s a term the Democrats and the media like to use.”

The semantic distinctions might seem ironic in light of the fact that in March 2023 Moreno slammed other politicians for waffling on their commitment to fighting abortion. He was asked by a member of a group of Batavia Republicans, “What are you going to do when you run to stand out against the other candidates (to show) you are truly the 100% pro-life candidate?”

Moreno was definite.

“I think you need to insist that candidates say the following words: ‘I am unapologetically pro-life,’” he said in a video clip of the event provided to the Capital Journal. “What happens a lot of times is that they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m pro-life.’ But then they all of a sudden pivot as the media likes to call it. And then they go off the rails there.” 

Moreno then said, “My perspective is pretty simple,” and listed positions politicians might have on things like taxes. “None of that really matters if you can’t say that you advocate for the most foundational thing in our Declaration of Independence, which is the right you have to life.” 

Lauren Beene is a pediatrician who co-founded Ohio Physicians for Reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the sudden enforcement of SB 23. She said Moreno can’t have it both ways.

“A ban is a ban,” Beene said in an email Wednesday. “SB 23 bans abortion based on the presence of fetal heart cell electrical impulses being detectable on ultrasound. This happens about two weeks after a woman’s missed period (or six weeks since their most recent period). This is before most people know they are pregnant so they have no option to get an abortion at that point. It doesn’t matter if Bernie Moreno prefers to not use the word ‘ban’ to describe SB 23, because banning abortion for almost all Ohioans who may need one is what SB 23 effectively does.”