TALLAHASSEE (LifeSiteNews) — The far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has lost a legal bid to get the DeSantis administration to stop informing the public of inconvenient details about a pending ballot initiative to embed abortion-on-demand in the Florida Constitution.
Amendment 4, the so-called “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion,” states that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” If enacted, it would require abortion to be allowed for any reason before fetal “viability” and render post-“viability” bans effectively meaningless by exempting any abortion that an abortionist claims is for “health” reasons. If successful, it would overturn Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
Abortion – the destruction of an innocent unborn baby – is always gravely immoral and never needed nor justifiable for alleged “health” reasons.
The amendment ostensibly says that it “does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.” But many, such as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, have warned that “there’s a difference between consent,” which is what current law requires, “and notification. Notification is after the fact. The consent is obviously a condition precedent. They did that because they know going after parents’ rights is a vulnerability.”
DeSantis has worked against the amendment on a variety of fronts, including a website by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) laying out comprehensive information about Florida’s current abortion law, services available to pregnant women, and a thorough analysis of Amendment 4’s harms, including how its effects differ from how its supporters present it.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit to stop AHCA from speaking out against the measure, but on September 30 the Second Judicial Circuit Court rebuked the organization, Liberty Counsel reports.
“In an election campaign under these circumstances the political power reserved to the people in Article I, Section 1 of the Florida Constitution means that it is not for the courts to intervene in this referendum campaign to decide what the people will be permitted to consider,” Judge Jonathan Stafford ruled. “The constitution does not suggest a basis for the courts to intervene in the campaign by deciding which arguments for and against the proposal are meritorious or misleading.”
Stafford further found “no evidence” of the state misleading voters. “More damage would likely be done to the public interest were the courts to intervene, unfettered by meaningful evidence, in the final weeks of a contentious election on matters of great public interest and controversy,” he wrote. “The judiciary must trust the people to decide what information is important to them.”
The abortion lobby has had great success using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public, most visibly in the area of state constitutional amendments declaring “rights” to abortion immune from future legislation.
Pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box, as well as a debate among Republicans over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Constitutional amendments require 60% of the vote in Florida (as opposed to the simple-majority threshold in states such as Michigan and Ohio), and polls have disagreed as to whether the amendment can reach it.
The outcome may come down to how well pro-lifers can disseminate the actual fact of what Amendment 4 does. Polling by public opinion firm NextGen Polling found that while 57% supported the amendment overall, 64% of Republican respondents, 34% of Democrats, and 43% of Independents were less likely to support it when informed it could relax standards of who actually commits the procedure to non-physicians.
DeSantis has also taken multiple steps to work against the amendment, including the aforementioned AHCA information campaign, the launch of a political committee dedicated to defeating it, lobbying other Florida Republicans to speak up, investigating potential fraudulent petition signatures used to advance it, and a recent statewide day of prayer for Florida’s pro-life protections.
Between that and the GOP’s unprecedented million-count voter registration advantage in the Sunshine State, both sides are deeply invested in the outcome of Florida’s abortion battle this fall, which will either continue or break that trend.