MIAMI – Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, advocates have turned their eyes toward Florida as a potential foothold for abortion rights in the Southeast.
The state bans most abortions after 15 weeks, but this fall, a Florida Supreme Court decision is expected to approve a six-week ban passed by the Republican-led state legislature that was passed earlier this year.
If approved by voters, the amendment would block state law from prohibiting abortions before viability or when it is necessary to protect a patient’s health.
Florida currently has a law in effect banning abortions after 15 weeks. However, the Florida Supreme Court is currently deciding whether that law violates Florida’s Constitution regarding a right to privacy. Should the court’s ruling favor the amendment, that would trigger an even stricter abortion ban to go into effect — a six-week abortion ban, which was passed earlier this year.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is asking the court to reject the abortion initiative that will allow abortion advocates to try to broaden the amendment’s meaning in the future.
After the United States Supreme Court stripped American women of a long-held federal constitutional right to abortion access, the abortion rights fight pivoted to the states.
A similar effort to add an abortion rights ballot amendment is underway in Florida.
A group called Floridians Protecting Freedom has gathered over 491,000 of the 891,523 voter signatures needed ahead of a Feb. 1 deadline for signatures to put the proposal on the 2024 ballot. (Sign the petition by clicking here.)
The state Supreme Court would be tasked with ensuring the ballot language isn’t misleading and applies to a single subject if it goes before voters.
“We have folks out in the field who are actively collecting petitions,” said Mone Holder, an executive committee member with Florida Protecting Freedom and Senior Director of Advocacy and Programs at Florida Rising. “We will be putting decisions back in the hands of Floridians and out of those of politicians.”
The proposed amendment would allow abortions to remain legal until the fetus is viable. But Moody argued that abortion rights proponents and opponents have differing interpretations as to what viability means. Those differences along with the failure to define “health” and “health-care provider,” she said, are enough to deceive voters and potentially open a box of legal questions in the future.
“The ballot summary here is part of a design to lay ticking time bombs that will enable abortion proponents later to argue that the amendment has a much broader meaning than voters would ever have thought,” she argued in a 50-page brief.
Members of Floridians Protecting Freedom are working for the opportunity to allow Floridians to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 that reads in part:
“No law shall prohibit, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”
“I think one thing we have seen in the past with ballot initiatives from marijuana to minimum wage that in Florida they transcend partisanship,” said Holder. “Medical marijuana got 71% here in Florida and minimum wage in 2020 got well over 61%, so with this issue we know we will get the numbers that we need for it to pass.”
“We definitely see a path forward from the recent win in Ohio and we are confident that Floridians will overwhelming support his initiative because we know they do not want to have government interference in their personal medical decisions,” she added.
The group is also monitoring a recently filed briefing after Moody argued points pertaining to ballot summary semantics and is asking the Supreme Court to strike the proposed initiative from the ballot, the court decision is pending.
Floridians Protecting Freedom described her filing as an effort to silence voters.
In the 50-page document, Moody writes that the “ballot summary does not explain whether ‘viability’ refers to a baby heath enough to come to term or to a baby able to survive outside the womb” and that in her opinion “the ballot summary vastly understates the potentially sweeping scope of the amendment, by failing to explain what ‘viability’, ‘health’, or ‘healthcare provider’ means, and by not disclosing that a ‘healthcare provider’ might have power to determine when a baby is viable.”
Moody’s office did not respond to a request for a statement to share with voters about their efforts to prevent voters from voting on this issue should the proposed abortion rights constitutional amendment qualify for the 2024 ballot.
Click here to read to the Attorney General’s briefing and the case docket by clicking here.
You can also read through the ballot’s initiative language and views about abortion among adults in Florida by clicking here.