Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio bought the Women's Med Center in Dayton in 2024 and filed the ownership paperwork with the state right away. Eighteen months later, the Ohio Department of Health still has not processed it. The clinic is open and seeing patients. On paper, it is still licensed to a man who sold it a year and a half ago.
That gap is now a lawsuit. On July 8, Planned Parenthood asked the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas to hold the health department in contempt, arguing the delay violates a 2022 court order that bars the state from revoking or refusing to renew the provider's license. "We purchased Women's Med Center in Dayton more than 18 months ago and promptly filed our change of ownership documentation," CEO Nan Whaley said, per Spectrum News. "They've been sitting on that paperwork ever since."
The fight left the ballot box
Ohioans settled the loud version of this question in November 2023. Issue 1 wrote reproductive freedom into the state constitution by roughly a 14-point margin. That vote is done. It is not being relitigated at the polls.
What the Dayton case shows is that a right can be affirmed by a landslide and still get narrowed one administrative decision at a time. Nobody voted on whether the health department should approve a change-of-ownership form. There is no ballot line for it. It is the kind of routine paperwork the state processes for hospitals and clinics all the time, and it is exactly the kind of thing a determined agency can leave in a drawer.
What a stalled form actually does
The practical effect is that Dr. Martin Haskell, the previous owner, has had to keep his own license active so the clinic can keep operating while the state does nothing. Planned Parenthood says it has been forced to rely on his willingness to stay attached to a business he no longer runs. That is a fragile arrangement for the day-to-day care of patients, and it exists only because the paperwork that would end it has not moved.
This is the mechanism worth watching. Abortion in Ohio is now regulated less through outright bans, which the constitution blocks, and more through the licensing, inspection, and administrative machinery that decides whether a clinic can lawfully keep its doors open. A form that sits unprocessed for 18 months does what a ban can no longer do: it puts a legal cloud over a working clinic without anyone in state government ever having to cast a recorded vote.
The 30 percent who went without
The stakes are not abstract. According to the Urban Institute's 2024–2025 Reproductive Health survey, reported by the Ohio Capital Journal on July 1, roughly 30 percent of surveyed Ohioans said they needed but did not get one or more types of reproductive care over that period. Young people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ respondents reported the hardest time. Those are gaps in a state where the constitution supposedly guarantees access.
A constitutional right is a promise about what the law allows. Whether care is actually available depends on whether clinics exist, stay licensed, and can operate without a year-and-a-half hang. The Dayton dispute sits right on that seam. So does the legislature's continued effort to add friction: bills moving through the Statehouse this year would layer new provider-liability language and waiting periods onto abortion care, testing how much the amendment will tolerate.
The office that runs the health department
This is where it becomes an election story. The Ohio Department of Health is run by a director the governor appoints, and the agency's posture toward a clinic's paperwork, cooperative or obstructive, flows from that office. No Ohioan casts a ballot on a change-of-ownership form. They cast one for the governor who staffs the department that decides whether to process it.
A court may well order the state to process the Dayton transfer, and that would be a win for the clinic. It would not change who controls the machinery next time. The 2023 vote decided that Ohioans have the right. What is still being decided, in courtrooms and unopened case files rather than at the ballot box, is whether the agencies an election puts in place will let that right function. When the next clinic files a form and waits, this is the fight it will have come from.