Lawyers with a reproductive rights initiative are asking the Ohio Supreme Court to intervene in a dispute against the Ohio Department of Health, in which they say the agency is withholding records related to the licensure of a clinic providing abortions.
Members of the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve University joined with the ACLU of Ohio in a lawsuit filed Dec. 3 with the state’s highest court.
The groups said the Department of Health should be required to release public records related to the Toledo Women’s Center, after the agency “unreasonably delayed … granting their Jan. 2025 application to provide procedural abortions in addition to medication abortions,” the groups said in a press release.
“Transparency between citizens and government institutions remains a cornerstone of our democratic processes,” said Katie Corwin, legal fellow with the initiative. “Without it, we run the risk of losing trust and accountability.”
The center is regulated by the Ohio Department of Health as an ambulatory surgical facility. According to the department’s database, a license for the center was issued on June 24 of this year and expires in June 2026. The center’s website notes a new service added: surgical abortions from five weeks to 17 weeks gestation.
The facility provides medication abortions up to 12 weeks, according to the center.
Corwin is listed as the plaintiff in the new complaint, in which she tells the court about nine public records requests made starting in May of this year, asking for any emails and communications “sent or received that mention or refer to the Toledo Women’s Center,” starting at the beginning of 2025.
The requests were made to the department’s chief of health care compliance, the bureau chief for the agency and its bureau of regulatory operations, according to court documents.
She claims the Ohio Department of Health responded in June to the requests with “groundless objections” that the requests were “overly broad,” that Corwin requested “information rather than specific records” and that records were protected under attorney-client privilege.
One such rejection letter, dated June 5, said the request “does not identify specific records being sought with reasonable clarity and is too voluminous, vague, or indefinite to be properly acted on.”
“All of (the agency’s) objections are legally untenable,” Corwin said in her official complaint to the Ohio Supreme Court.
She asked the court to order that the agency provide her the records under Ohio’s Public Records Act. Following the June denial, the attorney asked to meet with the department’s legal counsel and submitted three “updated” requests.
In July, records were released to Corwin by the department from a previous records request, and the meeting was cancelled.
That same month, the Ohio Department of Health reiterated its objections to certain records requests, but legal counsel provided several email records “in the interest of transparency,” records that the legal counsel said the department “was able to identify based on the current wording of your request,” according to court documents.
After further back and forth between the agency, Corwin and another attorney from the initiative, the department’s legal counsel “declined to produce further emails … stating only that in ODH’s view (the requests) were ‘legally insufficient.’”
Corwin told the state supreme court that the Ohio Department of Health “has a clear legal duty” to provide the records under the public records law, and because the Toledo Women’s Center is regulated and licensed by the department.
Because of that oversight duty, the requests relate to the department of health’s “‘functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations or other activities of the office’ and are therefore unquestionably public records.”
The Ohio Department of Health has 21 days to file a response to the complaint before the supreme court decides whether to take up the case.
If taken up by the court, the case would likely move into 2026 before further developments.
The last oral arguments of the year are scheduled for Dec. 9 and Dec. 10, and the court already has arguments scheduled through Jan. 8.
This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.