In 2011, longtime Religious Right activist Janet Porter returned to her roots in Ohio and launched a campaign to convince the state legislature to pass a piece of legislation she had named “The Heartbeat Bill.” The immediate purpose of the bill was to ban abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which Porter openly bragged would outlaw abortion “before the mother even knows she’s pregnant,” while the longer term goal was for the legislation to be “the foot in the door” to eventually outlawing abortion completely.

For years, Porter’s bill was killed each time it came before the Ohio legislature, but she remained committed to seeing it passed. She was eventually able to overcome the opposition from state legislators and some local anti-choice organizations whose leaders worried that the bill was too radical and would not survive the inevitable court challenges. But even after Porter managed to get the Ohio legislature to pass her Heartbeat Bill, it was twice vetoed by then Gov. John Kasich.

When Mike DeWine was elected governor in 2018, he pledged to sign the Heartbeat Bill and did so last week … but Porter was conspicuously absent:

One of the nation’s fiercest advocates for banning abortions at the first detectable heartbeat was missing when Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into Ohio law. Legislative leaders, bill sponsors, pastors, pregnancy center operators and members of Ohio Right to Life — the state’s leading anti-abortion group — attended Thursday’s bill signing. Absent was anti-abortion activist Janet Folger Porter, founder and president of Faith2Action, the group she used to originate and champion the heartbeat legislation for a decade. “Being disinvited to the bill signing by the governor, it stung. But I’m keeping my eye on the big picture,” Porter said. “And the whole point of the last 10 years of my life was to bring the killing to an end.” DeWine invited nearly 30 others into the room for the signing — and used and handed out nearly as many souvenir pens. At a distance from what should have been her crowning moment, Porter declared “VICTORY!” in one of her signature hyperbolic emails. DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney declined to directly address why Porter wasn’t there.

The DeWine administration’s decision not to invite Porter to attend the signing ceremony was presumably part of an effort to downplay the radical nature of the legislation and to distance itself from the extremism of the right-wing activist most responsible for it winding up on his desk: