Mother Jones. Dark Shad/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma
When the United States Supreme Court Although the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned the federal right to abortion, one of the justices’ arguments was that abortion is not banned nationwide, but rather that states and their voters regulate abortion procedures. It was about giving them an opportunity. Since then, seven states have voted on local abortion laws through ballot measures. All seven states voted to protect abortion, from liberal havens like Vermont and California to red states like Ohio and Kansas. In November, 10 more states are introducing ballot measures to address the topic.
That includes Florida. The state allowed abortions up to the third trimester of pregnancy until 2022. But since Dobbs, the state first enacted a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, followed by a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which went into effect in May.
Floridians Defending Freedom (FPF) is trying to change that with Amendment 4, which the reproductive rights group has added to Florida’s November ballot with more than 900,000 signatures. . If enough Floridians vote “yes” on the ballot measure (official summary below), the referendum could theoretically allow the fetus to live for the rest of its life (usually around 23 to 24 weeks). The right to access abortion will be enshrined in the Florida Constitution. The referendum stated:
No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the health of the patient in accordance with the judgment of the patient’s health care provider. This amendment does not change Congress’ constitutional authority to require parents or guardians to be notified before a minor obtains an abortion.
More than half of Florida voters support expanding abortion rights, according to polls from Florida Atlantic University and Hill-Emerson College. But whether this support ultimately changes the state’s abortion landscape is another question.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is using the power of his administration to threaten the initiative. He has appointed members of the Fiscal Impact Assessment Council, a committee charged with estimating the potential costs of ballot measures, which will assess whether access to abortion could cost taxpayers money. It is required that the proposed amendment be accompanied by language stating without evidence that there is a State law enforcement was also dispatched to question Floridians who signed petitions to put the Fourth Amendment on the ballot. He asked state officials to create a misleading website about abortion in Florida. A local television station that runs ads supporting the Fourth Amendment is also suspected of violating the Florida Sanitary Nuisance Act, which is generally enforced to combat health risks such as human waste and improper disposal of animal carcasses. and is under threat of prosecution.
On Friday, DeSantis released a 348-page document alleging that FPF may have engaged in “extensive petition fraud” to achieve the 891,000 signatures required by Florida law to advance the ballot measure. The State Department released a preliminary report, further escalating the intimidation campaign. FPF said in a statement that its campaign “has been conducted squarely and in accordance with state law at every turn.” Additionally, the deadline for the state to challenge the amended signature has already passed.
Anna Hochkamer, executive director of the Florida Women’s Liberation Coalition, said the administration is “using the state’s resources to suppress the purest form of democracy, which in this case consists of elected officials. This is necessary because an unrepresentative cabal is refusing to legislate.” In accordance with the overwhelming preferences of our people…nevertheless, we will not bow and we will not give in. ”
“A deeply unrepresentative cabal of elected officials refuses to legislate in line with the overwhelming will of the people…Yet, we will not yield. There is no.”
But the report could, and already appears to, provide the basis for a new, albeit disingenuous, legal argument against the voting system. On Wednesday, anti-abortion advocates filed a lawsuit citing the state’s official text, arguing that “excluding from consideration all fictitious, forged, illegally obtained, or otherwise invalid signatures violates the Fourth Amendment. “This means that the number of signatures required by the Constitution on the ballot has not been reached.” Placement. ” Therefore, the lawsuit against FPF states that “the invalid petition must be disposed of and the Fourth Amendment must be removed from the 2024 general election.”
Mr. DeSantis did not personally file the lawsuit, but he did so on behalf of the petitioners who did. Such tactics are not surprising. Other Republican leaders, including Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and a Missouri congressman, have tried to block similar efforts through politically motivated lawsuits, cost exaggeration, and disinformation.
This is particularly worrying, as my colleague Ari Berman points out in a recent magazine article. Because ballot measures are the only way that a plurality of state citizens can replace the minority rule of increasingly disproportionately powerful Republican state legislators. They redrawn electoral districts to benefit them in order to stay in power.
In highly gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and appeal directly to the people. This strategy has taken on new urgency in the wake of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions stripping away fundamental rights, from the repeal of the Voting Rights Act to the reversal of Roe v. Wade. These efforts can garner support across party lines in a way that is not possible in a highly partisan political climate.
The Supreme Court specifically noted that, in the majority opinion, abortion access solutions are not protected by the U.S. Constitution. Instead, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion, the 2022 Dobbs decision “properly returns the court to a neutral position and restores the people’s authority to address abortion issues through a process of democratic self-government.” It is what you do.”
In other words, the court said that abortion is an issue that should be regulated through voting, either for political candidates whose ideas about reproductive rights align with those of voters, or more directly as a voting measure.
This is also, in theory, a partisan of the Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump emphasized this point during his presidential campaign. “Everything is about states, it’s about states’ rights. States’ rights,” Trump told Time magazine in April. “Each state will make its own decision.”
Even if Mr. DeSantis does not actually voice his opinion, Florida already has a high hurdle to passing a referendum. As of 2006, 60% of voters called for an amendment to the state constitution. None of the conservative states that voted in favor of abortion ballot measures, including Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, needed to achieve such a high score. (Kansas was closest at 59%).
Fourth Amendment organizers say they believe Florida could be the first state to do so, but the DeSantis administration has engaged in what Hochkammer called “bastard politics.” This becomes a more difficult task if the emphasis is on “power and attitude toward good policy.”
For example, both supporters and opponents of the Fourth Amendment are running television ads in Florida. Ad supporting the Fourth Amendment depicts a woman explaining how a pre-ban abortion saved her life when she discovered she had a brain tumor while pregnant with her second child . “The doctors knew that if I didn’t terminate the pregnancy, I would lose the baby. I would lose my life. And my daughter would lose her mother,” the mother said. He said in a 30-second clip. “Florida currently prohibits abortion, even in cases like mine.”
The Florida Department of Health called the ad false in a cease-and-desist letter, citing Florida’s “exception” to save the mother’s life. But many doctors, who risk fines and prison terms, argue that life-or-death scenarios are too complex to often fall under the vague language of the abortion ban’s exceptions.
In the case of a woman with a brain tumor, her diagnosis was terminal. The woman did not meet the requirements for the exception because the abortion would only “prolong” her life, not save it, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court by Floridian Advocates. There are also post-ban examples.
In another case, a woman who was 15 weeks pregnant leaked amniotic fluid for an hour in the waiting room of a hospital in Broward County, Florida. Her ultrasound showed no amniotic fluid around the fetus. This is a condition that can quickly lead to serious infection and death. She was discharged from the hospital and miscarried later that day in a public bathroom, at which point she was rushed to another hospital and placed on a ventilator. She was hospitalized for 6 days.
“Women are losing their lives because they don’t want to talk about the fact that their state bans abortion, forcing rape victims to travel out of state for care,” FPF Campaign director Lauren Brenzel recently told Mother Jones. , “They create distractions because they don’t want to talk about the harmful policies they’ve put in place,” she added. “It’s not shocking. It’s a national strategy.”
