The Florida Supreme Court on April 1 upheld the state’s 15-week abortion ban in a ruling that means a subsequently passed six-week ban can soon take effect.
A six-week ban passed in the 2023 legislative session was written so that it would not take effect until a month after the 2022 law was upheld.
The “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion” would make abortions before “fetal viability,” or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, a “constitutional right.”
The initiative’s text states, “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.”
“This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion,” it continues.
While there is no universal consensus on the timeline behind “fetal viability,” many consider it to be roughly 23 to 24 weeks after the point of conception.
Ballot initiatives for proposed constitutional amendments must receive at least 60 percent of the vote to pass, according to Florida state laws.
The group sponsoring the 2024 ballot initiative is Floridians Protecting Freedom, a “statewide campaign of allied organizations and concerned citizens working together to protect Floridians’ access to reproductive health care and defend the right to bodily autonomy.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Floridians Protecting Freedom for comment but did not receive a response prior to publication.
The group opposing the abortion-access initiative is Florida Voice for the Unborn, which describes itself as a “grassroots lobbying group guided by faith in God’s only Son, Jesus Christ,” and previously led a “decline-to-sign” campaign throughout 2023 to encourage Floridians to vote “no” if the citizen initiative was approved for 2024 ballot access.
“Florida Voice for the Unborn is profoundly disappointed in the Florida Supreme Court for deciding today to compromise with the abortion industry by allowing its misleadingly proposed constitutional amendment on this November’s General Election ballot, while taking way too long to finally issue, contemporaneously, its long-awaited decision to uphold 2022’s legislatively-enacted 15-Week Abortion Ban,” founder Andrew Shirvell said in a statement on April 1.
Mr. Shirvell previously said in August 2023 that having both ballot initiatives for abortion access and recreational marijuana—which was also approved by the state Supreme Court on April 1—would have wide-reaching impacts on Republican candidates down ballot.
“This is dangerous because it will motivate the pro-abortion side to come out,” Mr. Shirvell told The Epoch Times.
The ballot initiative appears to have majority approval among Floridians as well. A poll released by the University of North Florida in November 2023 found that 62 percent of voters polled said they would vote “yes” for the amendment, while 29 percent said “no” and 9 percent said they “don’t know” or “refuse” to answer.
Among Republicans polled, 53 percent said they would vote “yes” to enshrine abortion access in Florida’s state constitution, while 39 percent said they would vote “no.”
By contrast, 77 percent of Democrats polled expressed approval of the ballot initiative compared to 17 percent who expressed disapproval.
While Gov. Ron DeSantis said in January that he expected the state Supreme Court to approve the ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana, the governor never weighed in on the abortion-access initiative.
Mr. Shirvell said in 2023 that he believed Democrats were pushing both amendments on the same ballot to drive voters to the polls, and according to Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried, that was their strategy.
“Having the ballot measures fundamentally shifts the demographics of who is targeted for turnout and who turns out. This is going to be the tactic. We’re going to run on these issues that voters care about,” she said earlier this year.
Regardless, Republicans have a significant 800,000-person voter registration advantage over Democrats in Florida, a number that has steadily risen since the GOP out-paced Democratic voter registration efforts in 2021 for the first time since the state started logging registration data in 1972.
