Another City Is About To Declare Itself A Sanctuary City For The Unborn

A city in Southwest Ohio will most likely declare itself a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and outlaw abortion within municipal limits Tuesday evening, multiple pro-life organizations said.

Lebanon’s ordinance is sponsored by six out of seven members of the city’s council, including its mayor, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, and if passed, the ordinance would make the municipality the first town outside of Texas and Nebraska to outlaw abortion.

“We’re hoping Lebanon is the first of many cities (in Ohio) to follow,” Meg DeBlase, executive director of Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, told the publication. “They’re really an approach to protect a city from an abortionist opening a business, from coming and selling abortion pills there.”

“Cities must be prepared,” Mark Lee Dickson, Founder of Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, said in a statement. “The future of the abortion industry is not necessarily brick and mortar but abortion by mail or abortion by vending machine at a school or outside of a grocery store.”

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio called the proposed ordinance “blatantly unconstitutional” and “just another political power play to scare people and cause confusion.”

The city is located in Ohio’s Warren County, where about 65% of residents voted Republican in both the 2020 and 2016 elections, Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn’s website noted, highlighting that this largely pro-GOP community opposes the progressive pro-abortion policies of President Joe Biden’s administration.

A number of cities in  Texas and Nebraska, and one in Utah, have already declared themselves sanctuary cities for the unborn, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to file a lawsuit in February 2020 challenging Texas ordinances on behalf of the Lilith Fund and Texas Equal Access Fund (TEA Fund).

The Waskom City Council started the trend in June 2019, outlawing abortion within the city and declaring Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups “criminal organizations.”

At least 27 municipalities in both Texas and Nebraska have declared themselves sanctuary cities for the unborn to date, according to the Enquirer.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.